Human Capital Management Blog

In a 2015 Harris Poll, 74% of respondents said that their company needed to be more data-driven (ie. fact-based) in workforce decision-making. Not a surprising statistic, considering only 27% of C-suite executives found their HR team able to provide them with actionable analytics to improve their decision-making. There are useless Human Capital Management (HCM) analytics—then there are HCM analytics that drive business decisions. As far as business leaders go, leave the “useless HCM Analytics” to the academics. What good is it to tell me that my turnover rate has dropped 3% on key employees when reducing key-position turnover has a negligible impact on bottom-line performance? So how do you start quantifying HCM analytics that can have a measurable impact on business performance?

Putting the right people in the most pivotal roles as quickly as possible—that’s the new competitive advantage. Most of us remember firsthand or recall from film the Miracle on Ice—the story of the USA hockey team that upset the world-champion Soviets in the 1980 Winter Olympics. When questioned about his strategy and player selection coach Herb Brooks in the Disney telling of the event responds, “I’m not looking for the best players, I’m looking for the right ones.” Want another sports movie analogy—try Moneyball. It captures the true story of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and how he used human capital data to build a leading team on the league’s smallest budget that won a record-breaking 20 games in a row.

Given the release of the final regulations for NY Paid Family Leave (PFL), and the optional deduction period starting on July 1, 2017, there’s been an uptick in chatter about the new benefit. New regulations mean new policies, admin responsibilities, and reporting requirements…and new stress. The number one question from employers: “What do I have to do?” In talking with various legal counsel and reading up on the regulations, the honest answer at present is, “We don’t fully know.” However, there appear to be a few concrete responsibilities that are falling on employers, especially those with self-insured disability insurance. Here’s what we’re finding so far.

For employers processing payroll across one or more collectively bargained union contracts, maintaining an accurate payroll week-to-week can be a laborious task. With different pay rates, shift differentials, deductions, and overtime rules, payroll and HR departments can become inundated with collateral spreadsheets and scratch-note calculations. For employers seeking a more audit-proof and scalable solution to process payroll across their collectively bargained employees, here are some helpful technology features to investigate.

We aim to keep our blog focused on healthcare compliance news and developing trends in health benefit products and HR technology, but once in a blue moon we like to step into the spotlight to share some of our own developments. In April of 2017, Benetech began statewide promotion of its Municipal Workforce Management Package. The HR tech package targets the needs of those towns, villages, and cities that still perform much of their personnel administration though antiquated paper-based and manual tracking processes.

Alongside the advancements in HR technologies over the last decade has come a new cluster of terms: HRIS: Human Resource Information Systems HCM: Human Capital Management (Have also heard this term used synonymously with Human Resources Management Systems, or HRMS) While at face value they seem to be describing the same thing, there are definitely some differences. In this short blog, we've highlighted some of the essential differences between HRIS and HCM technology.

Considering a new payroll provider? Here are our top 10 reasons why employers are biting the bullet and shifting payroll companies.

Assuming the market conditions are right, the internal requirements for business growth are unchanging—scalability of resources, profitability for capital reinvestment, and the right team makeup and vision to propel you to the next level. That being said, while the recipe for growth hasn’t changed, the ingredients are becoming scarcer. In today’s workplace, mid-market employers encounter ever-increasing regulatory burdens, high talent-acquisition costs, and bolting healthcare prices. It’s difficult to recruit top-talent and be scalable when health coverage is more expensive to offer and regulatory burdens tie up HR and executive staff with transactional work. In other words, rising healthcare costs and regulatory requirements are eroding effective staff utilization, killing scalability and recruitment, and depleting profitability for capital reinvestment. When growth happens, at best, it’s at a slow pace. What’s the solution?