By Marc Holliday, Senior Product Marketing Manager

According to a recent report from Gallup, 85% of the global workforce is “not engaged or actively disengaged at work.” That is an extremely high percentage of workers and should concern business leaders. Employees who are engaged tend to produce more quality work, refer top talent to the company, achieve their goals and help others grow and develop. HR technology can play a role in helping employees engage more with self-service experiences to get answers to questions faster, being rewarded and recognized for a promotion, and automating tedious processes that sometimes get in the way of the enjoyable parts of work.

The NetSuite 2020 Release 1 introduces some great new enhancements to SuitePeople to help fast growing companies make work easier and more engaging for employees. Managers are now empowered to initiate change requests like promoting direct reports themselves. Bonuses and other variable pay types are now visible to employees and can be paid through SuitePeople U.S. Payroll, adding additional motivation. With new workforce planning capabilities, headcount needs can be modeled to support growth goals. All of these new capabilities engage employees in new ways to help them perform better and deepen their connection to the company.

Motivate and Retain Your Employees 

Bonuses can serve as a great motivator for employees but can be a challenge for HR managers to include in regular payroll processing. With the flexibility to support and process various bonus types such as spot, referral, merit or even create custom types, payroll managers can now calculate and payout bonuses through SuitePeople U.S. Payroll without using a spreadsheet. Employees can now also see bonus targets and historical payouts for additional motivation. With this added visibility, HR managers have a new way to support retention strategies.

Empower Your Managers 

With new enhancements to Manager Self Service, managers are empowered to initiate changes for their direct reports without having to rely on HR staff. These changes could include promotions, transfers and salary increases. Managers are equipped with real data to help justify the changes. Armed with salary increase percentages and experience for the job a direct report is being considered for promotion, managers can initiate the request from their desktop or mobile device, and have more confidence their request will be approved. Approvals for the requests can be defined using SuiteFlow and can be monitored by managers until they’re completed.

Planning for Growth 

One of the biggest challenges in managing growth is planning for future headcount. Often times this is done in a spreadsheet with incomplete or missing information outside of the HR solution. Information comes in from multiple sources, standardized, but version control of the spreadsheet becomes unmanageable and decisions are more difficult to make and take longer. Now, CFOs or other executives can benefit from an up-to-date unified source of employee, financial and budget data to plan workforce needs faster. With a more centralized approach to workforce planning, data entry is reduced, revisions are easier, and a more accurate forecast can be used to support deciding on future needs.

Implement Changes Faster

Importing large files of employee information can take a long time, resulting in a lot of troubleshooting and re-keying of data especially when effective dates are required. An enhancement to the CSV Import Tool now includes effective dates for past, present or future changes. Bulk changes such as reassigning a group of people to a new department or awarding an annual salary increase across the entire company can now be done much sooner and faster while reducing the need to key in effective dates.

Additional Access Controls 

Managing who has access to different types of employee information is a challenge, especially for companies with multiple office locations. HR managers are not always responsible for employees only at their location. NetSuite administrators can now define a restriction by subsidiary and location and assign it to a NetSuite role. For example, an HR manager located in a Florida office is responsible for only employees in the company’s Toronto location, and should not see sensitive employee data for individuals in their own Florida office. SuitePeople will allow organizations to control whose employee data can be seen according to company-defined policies.

Complete Employee Lifecycle Management 

Offboarding employees can slow an HR department down. Tasks can be missed. Former employees can leave with company property. Valuable information can be lost if exit interviews are not conducted. These are just some examples of what can occur if a formal offboarding process is not in place. To complement SuitePeople HR’s onboarding process, a new offboarding process is now available to help reduce the burden on HR staff and better ensure all tasks are completed before the employee’s last day. Once a separation is known, the HR representative can create an offboarding plan, notify and assign tasks to other departments such as IT and Payroll to be completed based on the termination date.

Learn More 

 For more specifics on these features for North American companies, be sure to read the Release Notes.

If you already using SuitePeople and want to take a look at these features before your account is updated, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you’ll be able to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.