8 Major HR and Payroll Concerns for Remote Employees

The human resources department is undoubtedly one of the most important in any organization. Ever since the coronavirus outbreak, the entire corporate world has shifted to a work from a home model, prompting the necessity for every company to have a robust HR department in place.

This pandemic has shown us how organizations work effectively, even in a virtual setup. Moreover, as per sources, certain reports show that employee productivity may also have increased in this remote work model.

With more flexibility nowadays, both employees and employers agree to the increased productivity in this new model. Therefore, this remote work model is likely to stay even after this pandemic fades away.

However, along with its benefits, this model also created a handful of issues and inefficiencies. If your business has remote employees, you must have faced some or all of these issues yourself. No matter how small or large your business is, these are some serious HR and payroll concerns across all firms.

Here, we have compiled all the major issues.

1) Employee Engagement:

Employee engagement can either make or break your business. Recent studies show that organizations with high employee engagement make twice the revenue compared to organizations with low employee engagement.

As a result, HRs have a tough time keeping remote employees engaged.

2) Communication:

For remote employees, effective communication is difficult without the appropriate technology. As a result, issues arise when emails and phone calls go unanswered.

3) Training:

Since traditional onboarding and training procedures have become outdated now, their virtual counterparts also give birth to various inconsistencies and issues.

4) Acquiring and Retaining Talent:

Nowadays, employees properly understand how much value they add to your business.

So, if your business lacks new technology, your employees will move on to another organization. Therefore, even after mitigating troubles in virtual talent acquisition, HRs face the challenge of retaining talented employees in this remote environment.

5) Cost Reduction:

In a virtual setup, proper cost reduction becomes nearly impossible without appropriate employee supervision. You may have to repeat the same process for different employees. This gives birth to process redundancies as well as additional costs.

6) Human Error:

As an employer, you already know that manually doing things invites human errors. So, without the proper technology, human errors of remote employees pose a serious challenge to the HR department. 

7) Employee-Service Provision:

Without the right technology, HRs cannot provide any effective employee self-service. It includes access to payroll, training materials, benefits, and other resources. This further leads to employee resentment.

8) Accessibility:

As an employer, you know that accessibility goes far beyond employee self-service. You may provide ESS tools via a web portal, but it still creates an issue for the HR department.

PEO’s Role in Human Resources

A Professional Employer Organization (PEO) leases employees to employers. It enters a joint-employment relationship with the employer that allows the PEO to share several employee-related responsibilities.

Likewise, this arrangement also helps employers outsource their various human resource functions, such as payroll administration, compensation, employee benefits, and employment taxes.

PEOs can take certain responsibilities from HR like:

• Payroll administration
• Benefits administration
• Recruitment
• Family and Medical Leave Act administration
• Drug testing programs
• Compliance assistance
• Workers’ compensation administration
• Unemployment administration

As per the agreement with the PEO, employers can outsource these HR functions. However, if you are a small employer, you may not have the expertise or the infrastructure for these functions. Also, you may not have the time or resources to focus on intricate procedures like HRIS and payroll.

So, if you outsource the desired services, the PEO can directly look into it. In that case, the PEO will handle the recruitment, benefits payroll administration, and all the employee queries related to them. Thereby, addressing the HR and payroll concerns mentioned above becomes much easier!

Have we piqued your interest in the perks of outsourcing PEO services?

Feel free to go through our blogs and talk to us now to appoint the best in this industry.

Reference links:

https://buildfire.com/hr-remote-employee-challenges/

https://www.flexjobs.com/employer-blog/remote-work-considerations-for-human-resources/

https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/the-5-hybrid-remote-works-models-for-your-business.html#:~:text=A%20remote%2Dfirst%20model%20usually,first%20and%20being%20remote%2Dfriendly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/business/working-from-home-productivity.html

https://laura-hansen.com/10-compelling-statistics-employee-engagement/