Programs that Reflect the Importance of Employee Benefits 

The first thing that likely comes to mind when reading “programs that benefit employees” is a health and wellness program. Plenty of companies provide employees with stipends to cover health equipment or gym memberships. However, programs often reach beyond company culture and into the way a company operates. Take, for example, a vehicle program.

A vehicle program is essential to its business. It exists to ensure customer needs are met, deliveries are made, clients receive vital services. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fleet or car allowance, a cents-per-mile reimbursement or FAVR program. Whatever the company has in place is essential to the business’s performance. This program can, and should, also benefit employees.

Vehicle Programs as Employee Benefits  

Plenty of companies already use vehicle programs as a hiring bonus. Businesses with company-provided vehicle programs may offer new hires a fleet vehicle. Companies may offer top talent a large car allowance as a bonus. These may seem like benefits to employees, but they aren’t without their downsides. Here we’ll explore each vehicle program and how a company might use it as an employee benefit. 

Company-Provided Vehicle 

The benefit of this program is in the name. Employees whose job role includes driving for work receive a company-owned fleet vehicle. And what benefit could beat a company-provided vehicle? Maybe a vehicle an employee chooses? Employees are more interested in vehicles that support their personal lives, not whatever company-branded vehicle a business may provide them with. 

Car Allowance 

The average car allowance in 2021 was $575. And, depending on the amount an employee drives, that sounds pretty good, right? Only, car allowances are not compensation. In fact, they’re taxable, which means employees would only see $393 of that amount. Finally, if an employee is higher mileage, that amount may not be enough to cover their business mileage. Given that the car allowance is not tied to the costs of vehicle ownership, a car allowance program is hardly a benefit to employees. 

Mileage Reimbursement 

With a mileage reimbursement program, employees receive a cents-per-mile rate for the business use of their personal vehicles. Companies often use the IRS mileage rate, as that ensures the reimbursement will remain untaxed. And, while this vehicle program is tied directly to the miles an employee drives, it might not account for geographic costs specific to each employee. For some companies, it’s the perfect program. For other companies, it can mean create winners and losers.

Fixed and Variable Rate (FAVR) Reimbursement  

The fixed and variable rate reimbursement is named so because it accounts for both the fixed costs—insurance and registration—and variable costs—fuel, tires, maintenance—of vehicle ownership. What’s more, the right platform can calculate these costs specific to each employee’s location. This tax free and IRS-compliant method benefits both employers and their employees.  

Further, the FAVR program allows companies flexibility. While fleets are stuck with their vehicles and mileage reimbursements sit at the same rate, FAVR programs can be scaled to the economic climate. 

Company Programs Should Benefit Employees 

Employers can’t afford to miss the importance of employee benefits. Vehicle programs are only one example of the ways employees can benefit. Think about other programs vital to your company. Can they be adapted in ways that benefit employees? Consider what changes you can make to improve employee’s lives before buying a ping pong table.

The post The Importance of Employee Benefits: Going Beyond Traditional Compensation Packages  appeared first on Motus.

Increasing Interdepartmental Efficiencies: Collaboration Between HR and Finance Leaders

One giant opportunity for efficiencies comes from interdepartmental collaboration. Let’s start by looking at the relationship between HR and Finance leaders. Without trust, they fail to collaborate in decision-making processes. They create silos and disconnect in how the business is run. Let’s consider the following scenario where your business is implementing a new expense management system.

Finance will likely play a major role in determining the cost, ROI, and overall benefit of the new system. HR’s role should be to create a solid change management plan that considers budget, timelines, communications, implications from an individual and organizational perspective, training, necessary resources, technology and documentation. In this scenario, there’s a tremendous opportunity for HR leaders to provide expertise and guidance that will have substantial impact on the success of the change.

Increasing Interdepartmental Efficiencies: Collaborating with IT for Enhanced Cybersecurity

Another opportunity for efficiency exists in HR leaders connections with IT. The company needs technology solutions that empower employees to be more productive.  IT is essential to helping them realize their true potential and accommodate their day-to-day in the workplace. For example, HR teams need an effective HRIS. Sales teams need a robust CRM system. Marketing teams needs a fully-functional tech-stack and Customer Services teams need cloud-based communications solutions.

But perhaps equally important, IT needs to provide all employees with the right accommodations, whether in office or remote. Those include secure devices, a strong internet connection, etc. At the end of the day, how can a company recruit top talent if it doesn’t have a workplace that keeps up? With so many other companies adapting and advancing with the latest trends, it’s mandatory.

As the modern workplace evolves, HR and IT teams deal with new challenges. They must make sure employees know they’re fully committed to keeping a pulse on cyber security and privacy. That should translate to time spent educating employees about policies and best practices.

Companies Benefits When HR Leaders Leverage Automation

HR software and tools are a critical market for new opportunities to transform the workplace as we know it. HR leaders can leverage automation. The technology already exists in the marketplace to automate processes and boost productivity across their organization.

With increased pressure on HR professionals to create efficiencies across their business, automation tools offer increased productivity. Here are two areas where HR leaders can use automation for these purposes:

• Evaluate and implement a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) to streamline processes for HR and create operational efficiencies within the organization.
• Offer automation tools to your mobile employees to boost productivity and ensure compliance.

What is an HRIS system?

What exactly is a HRIS system? As defined by The Balance, an HRIS is “a software or online solution for data entry, data tracking, and data information needs of a company’s HR, payroll, management and accounting functions.” Best-in-class HRIS systems typically house the management of all employee information, company-related documents, benefits administration, applicant tracking, performance development plans and more. These systems serve as comprehensive databases, housing a broad range of different information and data for an organization’s HR department.

How HRIS Systems Create Efficiencies

At Motus, our HR team uses ADP – which automates many processes that would otherwise be manual. In my day-to-day role, I like to consider ADP a one-stop-shop for all things Motus HR. Those include reporting, policy and document tracking, payroll processing, compensation analysis and benefits administration.

Using ADP for our HRIS system allows me to create reports and presentations in addition to holding all our information surrounding HR initiatives. Those might include listing job applicants, electronic copies of employee paperwork such as W-2 and I-9 forms. I can also run compensation reports for our annual budget or performance reports for employees. All these pieces are housed in one single database! This robust reporting structure saves me a considerable amount of time each day, month and quarter.

For administering and maintaining employee benefits, ADP once again saves the day. When we hire a candidate, they can log in to ADP and complete open enrollment, right from their computer. It’s that simple. What’s particularly important for this self-service type of benefits enrollment? It can be updated at any time at the employee’s discretion. This provides employees the freedom to independently modify or improve their benefits with Motus. It only takes a few simple clicks of a mouse.

Leveraging Automation for HR Reporting and Metrics

Gaining insight into your company’s mobile workforce is a serious game changer. Whatever your reimbursement program needs, gaining insights into employee activity enables administrators to analyze and improve mobile worker operations. At Motus, the key HR reporting metrics are a direct result of the company culture we strive to uphold. They’re the nature of our business and industry. Our People team focuses on metrics that fall under the umbrella of attracting and retaining employees. We’re enabling them to perform at their utmost potential, namely: recruiting, turnover, performance management and employee engagement.

Recruiting

Our team is always trying to find the next best crop of talent — whether recruiting for an entry-level position or searching for a Senior Vice President, the process remains the same. These metrics include number of applications submitted, number of interviews conducted, and time required to close an open role. It’s important to note that these will depend on the size and scope of your business.

Turnover

To uncover reasons why an employee decides to leave the business, it’s crucial to measure voluntary versus involuntary turnover. Consider questions like how many employees left the company during a certain time period? Did these employees leave the company by choice? Did they leave for other personal interests? Or were they simply not performing up to par? Retaining human capital is critically important to the business. These data points are important for all HR leaders to showcase they have an understanding of employee motivations. 

Performance Management

This one may seem a bit obvious but it’s very significant. Your business likely already measures employee promotions over a given quarter. Or how many roles were filled during a specific period of time. This metric is a strong indicator of how well your employees fit within their given roles. It also allows managers within your business to provide feedback around areas for improvement.

Employee Engagement

According to a study by Harvard Business Review: Analytic Services, an overwhelming 71% of respondents rank employee engagement as very important to achieving overall organizational success. A few ways to measure employee engagement include:

1. What is the attendance rate at company-hosted events? Do employees attend these events at a consistent rate?
2. Do employees attend professional development seminars and workshops? Do these workshops produce actionable results?

If your employees are motivated to come to work each day, this breeds a winning culture. That helps your business thrive and grow in the long-run.

Best Practices for Implementing Collaboration and Automation

While one company’s business objectives may be vastly different from another’s, HR leaders ultimately want to optimize efficiency. As shared earlier, collaboration across departments is essential. That always begins with communicating, getting on the same page about common goals to work toward together.

Another essential is have the right reporting metrics in place. This guarantees your business is in the best possible position to thrive and grow in its respective industry. As a team, we believe a strong company culture is extremely valuable. Most of the metrics we report on (recruiting, turnover, performance management and employee engagement) are a byproduct of our people. If you’ve fostered a work environment that allows your employees to learn, grow and advance each day, you’re setting your business up for continued success.

The HR Hangout is a recurring series on the Motus blog featuring advice from Jessica Chronchio, Director of People Operations at Motus. A proven Human Resources leader, Jessica has her Master’s Degree in Human Resources Management and is an active member of SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). The topics covered range from empowering HR in the boardroom, best practices around people management, insights on industry trends, and advice for today’s HR leader.

The post How HR Leaders Enhance Efficiency Leveraging Automation and Collaboration appeared first on Motus.

What is an employee benefit? 

An employee benefit is anything the company provides its workers with in addition to their typical wages or salary. Companies can consider many things a “benefit” to their employees: a water bottle with the company logo on it, a chance at tickets to a game, etc. However, most potential employees won’t take a job without some very basic benefits. 

Basic Benefits Offered to Employees 

There are several basic benefits a large number of companies offer their employees. Those include: 

• Health Insurance: Being sick is expensive. According to a 2021 survey, almost 155 million Americans are covered by employer-sponsored insurance. 

• Disability: Being injured or disabled is also expensive. Companies may also provide their employees with short term disability, long term disability or both. 
• Safety Programs: This is more than fire drills and CPR. Employees who drive are at much greater risk of accident on the roads. Employers can help prevent this with comprehensive safety programs. 
• Paid Time Off: Work may take up a lot of the day, but it shouldn’t be a person’s entire life. PTO is both a basic and essential benefit. 
• Professional Development: A clear career path can mean a lot to employees. This might look like company-covered online or in-person courses and workshops, conventions or even higher education. 
• Retirement Benefits: Planning for the future is important. A large number of employers offer their employees 401k programs with a match option. 

This list is by no means exhaustive, but, across regions and industries, these are the main benefits offered to employees. And they’ve been around for quite some time. So why is it that all of a sudden these benefits are not enough? 

The Future of Work 

Before 2019, these basic benefits worked for employees all across the country. Then the pandemic struck. Supply chains froze. Demand slowed way down. Many people lost their jobs. And, at the same time, everyone who could work from home had to work from home. And as maddening as it was to be stuck in the same place day in and day out, often sharing internet and home office spaces with family, employees learned something important. It wasn’t under ideal circumstances, but they could do their job remotely. And they liked the flexibility working from home afforded them. 

Fast forward to the present day. Some employers have a completely remote workforce. Others offer a hybrid option, and some have decided to call all their employees back into the office. You can guess which companies are seeing the highest turnover rates during the Great Resignation. And that’s where the secret to the best benefits offered to employees is: flexibility. Employees want more control over their days. So what benefits can a company offer its employees that maximize flexibility? 

Flexibility Through Vehicle Programs 

An employee is more than their life at work. More often than not, the vehicle they own is suited to that life. Employers providing a fleet vehicle are paying more to put their driving employees in a vehicle they don’t want. Other vehicle programs may reimburse employees for the business use of their personal vehicles, but inaccurately. Car allowance and mileage reimbursement programs are common, and flawed, approaches to this. 

With a fixed and variable rate (FAVR) program, employees receive reimbursements for both the fixed and variable costs of vehicle ownership. That allows them the flexibility of a life with the vehicle of their choice and guarantees accuracy of the reimbursement amount they receive. While it may not look like a benefit in the conventional sense, what matters is how your employees receive it and how it works for your company. 

Flexibility Through Device Programs 

You’d be hard pressed to find an employee without a smart phone. And for a large portion of the workforce, a smart phone is essential to their role. Many companies provide employees with a device. That company-provided device can be a sticking point. But not all device programs require that employees receive company phones. In fact, it’s another area where businesses can offer employees flexibility.   

With a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, companies enable employees to use their personal devices for business purposes. No more carrying two phones, no learning a new operating system. With the right program, employers simply reimburse their employees for the business use of their device.  

Flexibility Through Remote Work 

As we said above, employees know they can perform the duties of their job remotely. That makes a return to the office much harder to stomach. When employees work from home, they have the flexibility to get work done without sacrificing certain aspects of their life outside of work. For many companies, an entirely remote workforce may not seem possible. And for many employees, returning to the office seems similarly inconceivable. Fortunately, there’s another option.  

With a hybrid remote program, employees work in the office for a set amount of days and work the rest of their week remotely. Using this method, they can set their schedule with their department or team to capitalize on projects that benefit from being in-person. With the right program, employers reimburse employees for the business use of their home internet and other assets while working from home. 

The New Wave of Benefits Offered to Employees 

The workforce has changed a great deal since 2019. Basic benefits may not have shifted, but employees now know the value of flexibility, a flexibility they didn’t have before the pandemic. As the talent pool grows and experienced employees begin to feel constrained, benefits can make all the difference. Employers may not have as many options as employees do, but they do have options. Reach out to us to find out how you can provide benefits that offer flexibility to your employees today. 

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The post Benefits Offered to Employees: Focusing on Flexibility  appeared first on Motus.

What Employees Want 

In a previous post, we outlined how companies can shape policies to benefit employees. We also encouraged companies to ask their workforce what they were looking for. If you didn’t send out surveys or find actionable answers to questions around employee satisfaction, don’t worry, we have some insights to share. According to a Mercer study, 44% of employees want to continue working remotely full-time. Further, 95% of respondents to a survey from Future Forum voiced a desire for flexible hours, while 78% wanted location flexibility as well. These insights and the following answers align with what we’ve seen in our own workforce and many of the companies we work with. 

Flexibility 

Before the pandemic, office hours were clearly defined. Most people built their lives around when they had to be at work and when they would be leaving. Following the pandemic and an extended remote work environment, employees know that they can do their work and fit other elements of their lives into their daily schedule. Whether that’s doing a load of laundry in between a morning of meetings or taking off early on Thursday to join play bar league softball, employees know they can balance their work and personal lives. Employers pressing for a return to rigid schedules are going to be met with resistance and higher turnover.  

Personal Ownership 

There’s a fairly large subset of the working public that require mobile phones or other devices to do their work. And lots of companies will that requirement with a company-provided device. Most employees aren’t a fan of this for a few reasons.  

The first is, they just don’t want to have to carry around a second phone. They already have one, and it’s big enough. The second one is another thing to take care of. And the phones of today are far larger than the phones of even five years ago. 

The second is, they don’t want to learn a new operating system. Whether they’re an android user switching to apple or apple learning android, it’s one more thing to do for a phone the ultimately don’t want. 

How can Employers Deliver? 

What employees want and what employers can deliver can be conceptualized as a Venn diagram. Depending on the company, the circles could be practically overlapping, and the circles could be barely touching. Fortunately for employers, delivering on flexibility and personal ownership is fairly easy.  

Remote and Hybrid Programs 

In the environment of today, and with fingers crossed against new COVID variants, employers are demanding their employees come back to work in the office. Generally, this means returning to rigid work hours, something most employees are opposed to. Employers putting employee satisfaction above the traditions of offices past can avoid this mistake in two ways.  

The first is offering remote work to those employees who wish to continue working from home. As we learned during the height of the pandemic, many roles do not require an employee to be in person. If the majority of the company decides to continue working from home, your business can save money on office space and channel it into another area of your business. 

The second option is a hybrid remote program. Departments can communicate with employees to decide on which days they’d like to spend in the office and which days they’d like to remain remote. This seems to be a best of both worlds approach. Teams that need to collaborate can meet to talk things out in a group, while they can maintain flexibility on the days they remain remote.   

Bring Your Own Device Programs 

What’s better than providing employees with a company device? Enabling them to use their current device for business purposes. By implementing a bring your own device (BYOD) program, employers empower their mobile workforce to conduct business calls, answer emails, chats and anything else applicable from their own phone. No juggling two devices. No learning new operating systems. Just doing business. 

While BYOD may meet employee satisfaction standards, companies may worry about security risk. A personal phone could be an unprotected end-point, an open door to cyber-criminals. Fortunately, with the right provider, employers can simultaneously enable personal devices for business use and protect them from cyber-attacks with mobile device management (MDM) programs. 

Employee Satisfaction 

Change is rarely easy. We often step outside of our comfort zones when adapting to new things. But, just like people, companies are capable of change. Businesses around the world made the most of their situations during COVID. Following a global pandemic, making changes to meet employee satisfaction and prevent turnover in the workforce is a logical next step.  

The post Employee Satisfaction: Preventing Turnover By Delivering What Workers Want appeared first on Motus.

What is the Great Resignation? 

The Great Resignation is the name attached to a large trend of employees leaving their jobs. This first showed signs in April of 2021 when 4 million quit their jobs. That number rose to 4.4 million in September, dipped to 4.2 million in October and jumped to a new height of 4.5 million in November. According to the Department of Labor, that means 3% of workers voluntarily left their positions.  

As of December, unemployment has fallen to 3.9 percent, from 4.2 in November. Economists believe this indicates a shortage of labor supply, not a lack of demand. So why are people quitting? Let’s take a look at the industries impacted.   

What industries have been impacted the most? 

We can gain some insights looking at which industries have experienced the most exits. Restaurants and hotels have experienced the largest amount of job loss and worker shortage, followed by education and health services, then trade transportation and utilities. Professional and business services have also seen their share of exits.  

While one might expect employees leaving service industry and hospitality jobs due to poor wages and difficult schedules, the exits from other industries cannot be explained so easily. So if it isn’t specifically wages or difficult schedules, what’s the real reason everyone is quitting their jobs right now? Perhaps it has more to do with the specific demographic. 

Who is quitting their job right now? 

According to the Harvard Business Review, mid-level employees between the ages of 30 and 45 left their positions at a higher rate than previous years. In fact, the increase was over 20% between 2020 and 2021. Workers more likely to resign, those ranging from 20 to 25, left at a lower rate than typical. While this information may point to employees jumping from one job to another in a time of demand, this blanket assumption doesn’t cover the whole of the great resignation. 

An analysis of Glassdoor reviews by a workforce intelligence company revealed company culture to be 12.4 times more likely to impact employee resignation than compensation. The analysis of over 1.4 million reviews for companies across almost 40 industries indicates that a toxic workplace will influence an employee to leave, whether they’re bussing tables or working spreadsheets. In other words, rather than deal with toxicity in the workplace, employees are quitting. Now the question becomes: what can my company do? 

What can businesses do during the Great Resignation? 

Now is not a time to tell your employees what you think they want to hear. Now is the time to listen to what they have to say. Depending on how you do it, a companywide survey may cost money, but that money is nothing compared to the cost of hiring and training new hires as more and more employees leave. If you want to focus on recruitment and retention, you need to know what employees want, and you need to be willing to find a way to provide it.  

One example is health and wellness. A three year study recently found that employees more engaged with a company’s health and wellness programs had better relationships with co-workers, long-term wellbeing and general job satisfaction. Have a look at your company culture. Is it doing enough for the company’s employees?  

Dig into more talent-related content by checking out the HR Hangout.

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The post The Great Resignation: The Real Reason Everyone Is Quitting Their Jobs Right Now  appeared first on Motus.

Our team began actively following the evolving COVID-19 situation in January. In February, we told our team members to be prepared to make the switch to 100% remote working if community spread became a risk in the United States. The health and safety of our team members is always our top priority, so this was an easy decision to make. Because our team was already enabled to work from home, the transition to a fully remote workforce in early March was relatively seamless. Our leadership team established weekly all-company meetings to share business updates. Individual departments established standing social hours over video chat, and our rock star team members kept operations running smoothly.

As it became clear it would not be safe to return to an office environment for quite some time, the leadership team began to think about what remote working would look like in the longer term. Not just through a pre-COVID vaccine period, but also what the future of work would look like in a post-COVID world.

Learning More From the Workforce

First, our team reached out to the rest of the company with a survey. We asked everyone what their thoughts were on working from home and what level of interest they had in continued remote work. Once we compiled those results, we held interviews with team members that already worked remotely. Through these case studies we received good insight on how each individual made working remotely work.

Then we set up a number of focus groups. In these, we asked a co-workers for their thoughts on how their work lives had changed and whether they saw the move as a benefit. Following an overwhelmingly positive response to remote work, we decided to continue with our WorkAnywhere initiative by making it a pillar of our company. That initiative consists of several different opportunities.

Employee Safety

In the near term, this was the most important reason for making the WorkAnywhere decision. Our team members range in age, location and disposition. Even as states and cities around the nation see drops in new cases, exposure increases greatly in public spaces. Enabling our team members to work from mobile means they can continue working without fear of exposure at their place of employment.

Employee Flexibility

More and more, the workforce is looking for opportunities to work in ways that break from the traditional office setting. Dress codes and cubicles don’t appeal to everyone, and they shouldn’t have to. Bringing comfort to the process of work can result in boosts in productivity and employee satisfaction. Our company is uniquely positioned, from work enablement and security perspectives, to make that a reality.

Of course, how an individual works and how their team works can be different things. And those must overlap at several points. Enabling team members to connect via video chat and, when comfortable, in person, keeps them in tune with their coworkers and engaged in their mutual goals. Helping team members find their own balance is equally important. Whether they start the day earlier or stay on later, block meetings one day each week or take a midday exercise break, team members should feel comfortable communicating and doing them.

Open Talent Market

The benefit of employee flexibility also extends to future team members. In the hiring process, the ability to work remotely opens the talent pool to people beyond our previous physical locations. That means hiring people across the country, even the world, and enabling those people to work where they’d prefer.

Re-Investment

Removing the cost of office real-estate from the budget is another opportunity. An opportunity for Motus to reinvest in what’s important to our team members. And our culture remains as important to us as it does to them. They may no longer have the water cooler conversations they enjoyed in the office. But we hope to give team members social interaction that connects them in meaningful, purposeful ways. Perhaps that’s meeting at a catered, company-sponsored monthly group social at any number of nearby event spaces in a safer future.

Teams no longer have conference rooms to book for quarterly reviews and team-building exercises. But they can take a week-long company sponsored group bonding session at a location of their choosing. These, and several other options, are only a few of the ways the company can reinvest previous expenses to benefit and celebrate its work force.

Concerns around change?

Employees might find remote work challenging. The lack of day to day connection with their coworkers in a shared space may give them pause. Distractions in the home may make work life more difficult. Separating work and personal may prove challenging. These are all risks of a WorkAnywhere company. But each of these can be answered with initiatives that help employees. For example, our team built intentional plans for addressing challenges that might arise.

Managers that know their employees are having a difficult time transitioning from traditional office setting aren’t helpless. They can work with them to build plans to keep them on track and prioritized. That connection can be supplemented with pop-up co-working spaces in various locations. Companies can also supply their employees with the necessary material to bolster the “office” in home office, making distractions easier to overcome.

Why WorkAnywhere Might Be Right For Your Company

How has your company performed during the pandemic? Have you maintained unexpectedly high productivity? Are your employees enjoying working remotely? Not every company can feasibly shift to a WorkAnywhere option. But, for those that can, consider your employees’ safety and happiness. If their output is sustained, or even improved by, remote work, think about how the move away from physical space can further benefit your company.

The post Why WorkAnywhere Was the Right Choice for Motus appeared first on Motus.

Set Clear Goals

You can’t measure remote workforce performance without clear goals. And it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. When it comes to setting up the right performance management system, it will depend on your company culture. First and foremost, you’ll need to identify and understand the goals that make sense for your culture and organization. Then, you’ll be able to come up with a program that supports your goals.

Next, you’ll need to have a process in place for setting goals and objectives at the company, department and individual level. With these in place, you’ll be able to set measurable objectives for each team member that tie back to the overarching company goals. This will make it easier for team members to build out quarterly 90-day plans and connect their work to larger company initiatives.

Communicate Regularly

It’s also critical to provide opportunities for team members to give and receive feedback on a regular basis. This goes beyond the traditional feedback provided by a manager to a team member. It starts with developing a culture that embraces delivering and receiving constructive feedback. A few tactics HR leaders can put in place to help aid the sharing of feedback include quarterly self-assessments, peer and upward feedback surveys and regular 1:1s between managers and their team members.

Focus on providing the right tools to facilitate regular communication. HR specifically can help foster a culture where support, feedback and communication are welcomed. But, HR can’t do it alone. Those values also have to come from leadership and people across the company. Team members have to want to share and receive feedback.

HR teams should make sure there are ways to give developmental feedback in a remote environment. For example, HR can provide guidance to managers on how and when to share certain types of feedback, i.e. this is appropriate over email vs. this requires a conversation over the phone or video.

Focus On Results

At Motus, we’ve developed a performance management program that ensures team members receive regular feedback and professional development opportunities while also recognizing top performers. To be honest, not a lot changed with our performance management program when Motus moved to working remotely full-time. It’s part of the culture we had in place before the pandemic and we’ve proven it can be successful in the office or remote.

The key to our success is that we’ve always been focused on outcomes and results. That’s why we can have things like unlimited PTO and flex time policies. With a focus on outcomes, you’re able to determine if a team member met expectations and if not, what they need to do to be successful. We’ve found that it’s helpful to have templates and processes in place to help team members understand the expectations. At Motus, we achieve this through individual 90-day plans and quarterly self-assessments supported by manager feedback.

Providing visibility into measures is also important in this process. Technology can help you track and report on metrics and KPIs, for example, with something like real-time dashboards in your CRM tool. This gives employees the ability to check in on performance relative to the objectives and goals. By setting objectives and completing assessments each quarter, team members receive feedback all year long, as opposed to only on an annual basis.

Getting Started with Remote Workforce Performance Measures

Hopefully these best practices will help you get started. Ultimately, building a performance management program will depend on your company culture. That makes focusing on your culture another great place to start. Remember to facilitate regular communication,  focus on results and provide templates and documented processes. These will help your team succeed in a remote work environment.

If you’re interested in learning more about remote work best practices, you can find more blog posts here.

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The post How to Measure Performance and Drive Productivity with a Remote Workforce appeared first on Motus.

At Motus, our mission is to make work-life better for mobile workers and their managers. And because we’re so focused on making work-life better for our users, it’s especially important to us that we promote an excellent work-life at Motus for our team members. We do this in a myriad of ways – but one unique perk we offer is unlimited paid time off. So, what exactly does that mean for our company? And how does Motus make it work?

Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO)

As the term implies, we do not limit the number of days a team member can take off. Instead, we encourage everyone to take time off when they need or want it. Feeling sick? Take the time you need to feel better without worrying about an arbitrary number of sick days in your bank. Ahead on your work and want to take a long weekend? Awesome! Check with your manager and take next Friday off – without worrying about the impact to your holiday plans.

How Unlimited PTO Started at Motus

At Motus, one of our cultural tenants is Work Smart. This is about giving our team members the tools, resources, and flexibility to work in the way that is most effective for them. A key component of this is managing to results – and not the time someone spends at their desk. Our unlimited PTO policy was a natural extension of this.

When we rolled out the new policy five years ago, we were met with some initial skepticism. Some managers were concerned their team members would abuse the privilege and take an excessive number of days off. Some team members were concerned that without accrued time, they’d be discouraged from taking time off. In reality – none of these concerns proved true. The rollout was smooth, people enjoyed not to have to nickel and dime their vacation time, and job candidates and new hires were thrilled to learn about this unique perk.

Unlimited PTO and Working Healthy

Another one of our core cultural tenants is Work Healthy. This is all about promoting the health and wellbeing of our team members. Our team members can take sick time whenever they need it – but sometimes people are busy and hesitate to call out sick because they have a key meeting or a project that they’re excited to wrap up.

On top of unlimited PTO, Motus has a flexible working environment that supports working from home. So even if someone doesn’t want to take a sick day, they can still take it easy, work in their sweats, and avoid getting anyone else sick. We also do other things – like annual flu shot clinics, healthy snacks in our café and a gym/health class subscription – to promote a healthy lifestyle.

Problems with Unlimited PTO?

There have only been a few instances where we’ve had to discuss attendance over the years. We generally see people take 3-4 weeks off per year with the unlimited vacation policy. Some people take less, and some people take more, but the underlying message with time-off is simple. As long as you are delivering results and doing your job well, you can take as much or as little time-off as you want.

We try to bring it back to ownership and accountability. Individuals work with their managers to ensure they’re making decisions about whether to take or not to take time-off that fits best with their team’s interests and the needs of the business. Also, we often find that if a team’s leaders take time-off, it encourages the people on their team to take time-off.

Unlimited PTO and Work-Life Balance

At Motus, we care deeply about promoting a healthy work-life balance. It’s a central part of our culture. Yet we recognize that everyone is different, and we don’t expect everyone’s approach to work-life balance to be the same. Our unlimited PTO policy gives the freedom back to our teams to manage their time and results – and continues to be a valued perk and tenant of our culture.

Interested in reading more of our HR content? You can find it here!

Take me to the HR Hangout

The HR Hangout is a recurring series on the Motus blog featuring advice from Jessica Chronchio, Director of People Operations at Motus. A proven Human Resources leader, Jessica has her master’s degree in Human Resources Management and is an active member of SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). The topics covered range from empowering HR in the boardroom, best practices around people management, insights on industry trends, and advice for today’s HR leader.

The post Unlimited Paid Time Off: Essential to Realizing Work Life Balance? appeared first on Motus.

In the latest HR Hangout post, I interviewed Motus Director of Infrastructure Technology, Sudeep Unhale to explore how technology can continuously improve the employee onboarding experience. We collectively found that if employees have an ideal onboarding experience, specifically with the help of technology, then they’re more likely to succeed and help grow your business. But this idea transcends much further beyond just technology. At the end of the day, a positive employee onboarding experience, as a whole, is critically important for both your employees and your business.

To delve a bit deeper into this idea, I figured it would be a great opportunity to have a Q&A discussion with Caroline Manghan, People Operations Coordinator at Motus. Caroline is one of the newest members of the People Team here at Motus. In her day-to-day, she’s responsible for coordinating our recruiting efforts, benefits administration and the onboarding process for new hires. Here are the key takeaways from our conversation:

Jessica: Why do you think a great employee experience is so important?

Caroline: Onboarding is an employee’s first introduction as a Motus team member. So we want it to be a great one! We want our newest team members to be psyched about the work they’ll do and the team they’re joining. We’ve designed the onboarding experience to set our employees up for success in their time at Motus. By the end of the process, the new hire will have met people across the organization and have a deeper understanding of our product.

Jessica: Agreed! Building off of those thoughts, what would you say are the top three benefits of a positive employee onboarding experience?

Caroline:  First and foremost, meeting everyone on the team is huge for our new hires. At Motus, we encourage team members to break out of their shell and meet as many people as possible! As part of our onboarding process, we introduce the new hires to team members in all departments and at all different levels of the organization. Our teams all work very closely in everything we do, so we want to develop cross-functional relationships.

Secondly, learning the company from the ground-up is beneficial for new hires. We want our newest employees to have a holistic understanding of our company and product, so every new hire will have an orientation to each team with a key stakeholder in that area. Whether the new hire is in sales, technology, or customer success, they’ll learn a little about every team.

Finally, having a positive employee onboarding experience is important for talent retention. We’re excited about every new hire that joins the team, and we want to make a great first impression. We want our new hires to engage in our culture from their very first day and to quickly ramp up in their roles. We’re lucky to have so many experts in our field here at Motus, and we hope onboarding sets a positive tone for a long career with us. 

Jessica: Does a positive employee onboarding experience lead to company-wide and team success?

Caroline: I’d say so, absolutely. A positive employee experience is essential for the success of the employee and the company. Onboarding gears a new employee up to hit the ground running and excel in their new role. Typically, we find our new hires are able to jump right in and start leading exciting and innovative projects.

Jessica: Since you’ve joined our team, how have you helped contribute to a positive employee onboarding experience in your role?

Caroline: Since joining the team, I’ve helped ensure the onboarding process is well organized and runs smoothly. Starting a new job can be overwhelming, so we try to make the process as seamless as possible. I’m currently working to leverage technology to make this process even easier and provide an enhanced experience for new hires. 

Jessica: And what have you learned in the process?

Caroline: I’ve learned the importance of staying as organized as possible before the new hire’s start date, but to also expect last minute schedule changes. I always have a contingency plan, so that any changes don’t affect the new hire experience. 

This blog post only scratches the surface when it comes to how beneficial a tried and true employee onboarding experience is for your business as a whole. If you already have an employee onboarding experience that works, think of the ways you can continue to hone it. If you don’t, there’s no better time than the present to implement one!

To get more tips for today’s HR leaders, stay tuned for the next installment of the HR Hangout!

Take me to the HR Hangout

The HR Hangout is a recurring series on the Motus blog featuring advice from Jessica Chronchio, Director of People Operations at Motus. A proven Human Resources leader, Jessica has her master’s degree in Human Resources Management and is an active member of SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). The topics covered range from empowering HR in the boardroom, best practices around people management, insights on industry trends, and advice for today’s HR leader.

The post 3 Benefits of a Positive Employee Onboarding Experience appeared first on Motus.