Technology, like time, waits for no one. But it doesn’t move forward randomly or unexpectedly. In every case, tech’s purpose is to:
- save us time
- make our lives easier
- simplify the complicated
- allow us to focus on more important things
We see evidence of this everywhere, every day, especially after 2020. Technology already has infiltrated our lives in ways that make us wonder how we ever lived without it. In the palm of our hand, we’re able to use tech like HR software to perform tasks in seconds that used to take minutes, even hours.
But it’s not enough to just have access to tech that can make our lives more efficient and, by extension, easier. For instance, if you bought a smartwatch — complete with a step counter and an on-demand library of yoga courses — but only used it to track your water consumption, it would be hard to argue you were making the most out of the tech.
Applying this to an enterprise setting, securing HR software for just one aspect of the employee life cycle, such as payroll, only provides a limited benefit. To reap the advantages of our digital reality and beyond, your business not only needs comprehensive HR and payroll software — it needs employees to use it.
Why is comprehensive HR and payroll software important for today’s workforce?
The widespread use of internet and mobile technology has changed the way we interact, shop, run errands and generally go about our days and nights.
Grocery delivery existed before 2020, but it wasn’t widely adopted until the pandemic made it a necessity. Online grocery sales more than doubled in 2020, according to a study by eMarketer. Tens of millions of Americans became online grocery buyers for the first time. The study predicts this trial behavior will become habit for many shoppers.
As we trust tech more, we grow closer to the data we once only interacted with passively. As a result, a transaction today takes fewer steps to reach the same destination. Even better, having that direct connection to the data makes it easier to get exactly what you want because you did it yourself.
In the workplace, many tasks and processes that employees could complete themselves remain in the hands of employers — and still sometimes in an antiquated, needlessly manual form, such as by paper, text message, email or disjointed software that doesn’t offer seamless integration between employee HR data.
And according to Pew Research Center, the need for intuitive, fluid technology is high, as 96% of Generation Z and 95% of millennials use smartphones. Plus, 77% of office workers said they were frustrated with outdated workplace technology in a survey of 1,000 workers conducted by OnePoll and commissioned by Paycom.
Now that employers face a labor pool with more millennials than members of any other generation, and Gen Z joining the workforce, they have more employees who not only highly value having such technology in their jobs, but expect it — whether doing things for the company as a whole or managing their personal information through tools like employee-guided payroll.