The 2021 Personnel Today Awards HR Technology Provider of the Year was judged to be Bright HR which moved at high speed to support employers with a full suite of software as the Covid pandemic swept in. We review the winning submission and those of the runners-up in a tightly contested category.
WINNER
Bright HR
HR software company Bright HR enables organisations to manage HR in one place either on mobile or desktop. Last year, when the pandemic hit and the government’s Job Retention Scheme was announced, Bright HR responded quickly to deliver a full suite of software to support employers through the new rules, regulations and processes.
This included a Furlough Navigator to help employers plan wage claims, which has logged more than 116,000 furlough records to date. Another tool is the Back to Work Navigator, which helps employers with every element of bringing staff back to the office safely, such as a rota planner to set up staggered shifts and cloud-based storage for furlough documents. Thanks to a national TV and audio campaign the Back to Work Navigator has now been used over 69,400 times.
BrightSafe is a new health and safety platform that can be used to create risk assessments, including more than 55,000 e-learning courses and an “on the go” app where employers can manage health and safety from their mobile. VaccTrak Lite supports organisations to keep track of which employees have been vaccinated against coronavirus, including the ability to store and access a digital vaccination pass. In the financial year 20/21, these innovations helped Bright HR increase its revenue by 51% year on year.
RUNNERS-UP
87%
One in four suffer from a mental health problem each year, yet only between 2% and 10% seek treatment, according to EAP industry figures. 87% wanted to help people find “healthy emotion regulation” and “mental fitness” to deal with life’s challenges, particularly in light of the pandemic.
The company has created a digital workplace platform that empowers people to lead happier and more fulfilled lives. An algorithm measures mental fitness, returning detailed data to the individual. There are daily check-ins, advice, exercises, life coaching and coping strategies available, as well as professional support. Employers receive data on an anonymous, aggregated basis to provide insights on the health of the organisation and to identify trends.
The platform has been successful with a number of 87%’s clients. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has a bespoke platform specific to the needs of frontline workers which helped wellbeing scores to rise by as much as 20% over a three month period. VIVID, a provider of affordable homes, saw average sick days decrease drastically after the introduction of the platform, generating as much as nine times the return on its original investment.
Ceridian
Ceridian is a human capital management software company with a flagship platform called Dayforce. It has developed Dayforce Mobile to meet the increasing demands of an on-demand world, available on both iOS and Android devices. It gives employees control over their work-life balance by allowing them to update their availability, manage their time, check schedules and view their earnings.
In real time, employees can view and edit timesheets, trade shifts with colleagues, manage their annual leave, preview their monthly earnings and keep up to date with performance goals and conversations. Dayforce Assistant allows them to complete day-to-day tasks through voice and chat. Managers can approve requests on the move and perform other tasks such as reviewing open job requisitions, communicating with their team and managing performance goals.
Dayforce is used by more than 5,000 customers and they can all access Dayforce Mobile for their workforce free of charge. This equates to more than 5 million employees live on the platform. Since the onset of the pandemic, there have been 1.4 million active users every month, 75 million separate sessions in the first quarter of 2021, and the number of shifts edited has doubled in the course of a year. One satisfied customer is Costa Coffee, which uses Dayforce Mobile to send messages to employees in stores and to help them navigate frequently asked questions.
Culture Amp
One of the biggest challenges organisations face is driving behaviours behind an engaged and productive culture, particularly as we move towards a hybrid and remote environment. More than 4,000 businesses globally use Culture Amp to gain insights into how people feel about work and the success of specific initiatives.
The tool covers employee engagement, performance management and employee development. Managers can receive customisable reports that highlight where to invest time and how to empower individuals, while science-backed tools help them to achieve change through techniques grounded in behavioural science.
So far the company has amassed what it believes to be the world’s biggest collection of employee insights, with over 70,500 surveys launched, asking 594.3 million questions, generating 13 million responses. One example is TMF Group, which wanted to reduce staff attrition. Insights from Culture Amp have helped it reduce voluntary attrition by 29% in 2020 and increase engagement by 14%. Dairy company Dale Farm enjoyed engagement levels of 72% during 2020 compared with an industry average of 68%.
Elevatus
Elevatus is an artificial intelligence-based hiring solution that can rapidly screen CVs and automate time-consuming tasks in the recruitment process. EVA-REC covers the entire hiring cycle, centralising data, shortlisting candidates, filtering applications, screening recruits and helping to create a memorable applicant experience.
Recruiters can use the tool to identify bottlenecks in the hiring process, keeping candidates in the loop and boosting their experience by 70%. Business metrics reports help them to fine-tune the process and improve the quality of their decisions, as well as allocate investment appropriately. This enables HR and recruitment professionals to spend more quality time on high value candidate interaction, even remotely.
The company believes organisations can benefit in the following ways: reducing manual tasks by 80%; improving outcome efficiency by 90%; supporting seven different languages; boosting team collaboration; centralising databases and data-driven insights. It believes customers will get seven times their investment in return. The platform is GDPR compliant and is built completely in-house.
Talos360
HR teams faced a variety of challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as communicating to employees about furlough and adapting to ever-changing regulations. Hiring needed to move to a remote model and assessment days became virtual. Video interviews often happened via a third-party tool such as Zoom, making it difficult to keep a digital audit trail with applicant tracking systems and HR software.
Talos360 responded to this by increasing the size of its development team to create a hybrid recruitment platform. By April 2020, it could offer a brand new screening and video interviewing feature. This means customers can attract, screen, contact, manage and hire in an end-to-end process. It can also offer an engaging onboarding platform so that candidates can get all the information they need about their new role.
The company also offers Worklife, an employee engagement platform where candidates can give feedback about their experience, as well as a balanced scorecard function which allows for more inclusive hiring processes by reducing unconscious bias. Customers have conducted more than 4,440 hours of remote interviews, and have given the company an average Net Promoter Score of 9.1. Customer retention is at 98%.
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Unicarriers cut agency costs by £60,000 in six months of using the software and HSL Chairs saved approximately 1,300 hours a year. Other customers have described working with Talos360 as “a better experience than any other system I have encountered” and “the best customer service I have received from a HR supplier”.
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