Innovative online Social Workspaces improve employee productivity, communication and engagement.
Cezanne HR, a leading supplier of powerful yet easy to manage, online HR software for small and mid-size businesses, has announced the availability of the Summer 2013 release of Cezanne HR. The latest update allows customer to easily set up and manage online Social Workspaces where employees can securely share documents, post comments, create pages, add links and seek immediate feedback from colleagues across the business. The release, which was rolled out at the weekend, also provides even greater flexibility for customers in how they set up approval processes.
“The world of work has changed”, says Sue Lingard, Marketing Director of Cezanne HR. “Many employees are now digital natives. They expect to be able to build networks, share ideas openly and collaborate with different people at different times. Yet, most business software aimed at small and mid-sized companies is painfully out of date; focused on managing data and processes in very much the same way as a decade or more ago.”
“We’ve also become less, not more efficient in how we manage information”, she adds. “We’re all so busy that we tend to work in the way that suits us best at that particular moment. Information is fragmented across emails, text messages, company servers and personal computers with no particular coherence or context. We end up wasting hours trying piece all of the different strands together, and when someone leaves, mailboxes are shut down, online conversations lost – and a lot of valuable knowledge may go too. It’s costing businesses time and money.”
Larger organisations have had the luxury of specialist platforms tools for communication and collaboration for some time – but these come with significant costs and administrative overheads that smaller companies cannot easily justify.
Now, with the new Social Workspaces feature in Cezanne HR, companies can provide employees with secure and easily accessible work areas where they can share documents, post updates, gather ideas and get feedback. The result is an immediate improvement in the value of the information – and the productivity of the people using it.
Gianfranco D’Aurelio, Product Manager for Cezanne HR explains: “Rather than starting from the information, for example a document, spread sheet, email or link, which could be anywhere, workspaces start from the topic and gather the relevant information around it. Information becomes more powerful because it has context; more permanent because it’s stored in the Cloud; and more useable because it’s always available to everyone that’s a member of that particular workspace.”
Cezanne’s Social Workspaces can be set up and managed easily by HR or other administrators, and include the option for corporate, public and private groups, as well as automatic alerts when content is updated. HR can choose to create workspaces and delegate the management to an appropriate group member, or allow employees to set them up. Public groups allow employees to ask to join, whereas private groups are by invitation only.
“Putting employee collaboration at the heart of an HR Software system makes perfect sense,” comments Gianfranco. “It’s the one business application in the organisation that everyone is likely to use on a regular basis; whether that’s to update personal information, request holidays, log sickness or conduct performance reviews. It’s familiar, it’s accessible and, since it always has the latest employee data, there isn’t the extra overhead associated with third party social enterprise tools of setting up and managing users. That information is already in Cezanne HR.”
The latest update also includes further improvements to the HR Portal, as well as important enhancements to the options for configuring different absences approvals. For example, companies can now opt to have sickness approvals routed to HR professionals, with holiday requests going to line managers or other supervisors.
For more information, or to arrange an online demo call 020 7202 2727 or email info@cezannehr.com.