As 2024 comes to a close, this is an amazing opportunity to reflect upon the remarkable year we've had at Zoho People. This year was significant for us as we launched Zoho People 5.0, our newest and most organized version, and a true testament to our 15-year journey. With your incredible and continuous support and feedback, we were able to introduce some pretty useful new capabilities and features as part of our application to help HR teams take their HR strategies to the next level. Here's a brief update about Zoho People throughout 2024.
Major features
Here's a quick summary of all the latest features that our team introduced this year with current HR needs and trends in mind:
Compensation
Managing employee salaries is one of the most important tasks HR teams are tasked with. That's why we've introduced the Compensation module, an exclusive module that enables HR teams to manage employee salaries and benefits efficiently. HR professionals can now manage employee salary revisions, track compensation data, create unique role-based salary structures, generate salary revision letters, and perform many other compensation-related actions. Additionally, the Compensation module works closely with our Performance Management module to manage hike sanctions. Learn more about the Compensation module!
HR Process
Zoho People's HR Process feature enables HR teams to manage employee transitions across departments, locations, positions, and more. In just a few steps, HR employees can configure basic information, set up transition fields, configure permissions, and manage approvals. Employees can submit requests for such transitions easily from the My Space section. Learn more about how the HR process works!
Spaces
We've also introduced Spaces, a dedicated central hub where employees can perform a host of functions from a single space without juggling among multiple tabs. With My Space, employees can stay on top of their approvals, reminders, shift changes, schedules, performance goals, and more. Additionally, they can mark their attendance for the day, participate in surveys, view organizational announcements, apply for leave, fill out timesheets, and many more HR tasks. Furthermore, with team spaces, employees can also catch a quick look at their team-related information, including availability, announcements, leave information, and a lot more. Similarly, the organization space can help them stay up to date with organizational-level announcements, policies, employee trees, etc. Learn more about how Spaces work!
Settings and Operations
In order to provide the best possible user experience to HR teams, we've introduced separate tabs for Settings and Operations. All infrequently used or one-time use configurations are placed under the Settings tab, whereas the Operations tab provides easy access to HR tasks performed daily.
For example, configuring an organization's attendance policy—defining expected hours, methods for calculating total working hours, and permissions for overtime—is is not a regular task, so it can be found in under the Settings tab. Tasks like on-duty request approvals, regularization request approvals, and permission request approvals are integral to an HR admin's day-to-day routine and are therefore placed under the Operations tab for easy access and efficient management. Learn more about settings and operations.
Sandbox
We've already introduced Sandbox, a very useful feature that enables you to test features and enhancements in an isolated virtual environment to avoid impacting your organization's live data. This way, you can identify and address any bugs or issues that may otherwise arise from an implementation. Once a tested feature is clean with no errors, it can be pushed to your live environment. Learn more about Sandbox in Zoho People!
Data security
At Zoho People, we understand that HR teams are tasked with the important responsibility of handling sensitive employee information like healthcare details, financial records, confidential business data, and settlement agreements with utmost safety and security. That's why we have tightened data security in Zoho People with stringent access controls that ensure that only authorized personnel gain access to sensitive information. Learn more about user access controls in Zoho People!
Location tracking
Among our latest array of features is location tracking, an intuitive feature that enables organizations to track the exact locations of their employees, especially those in the field and working remotely, to ensure that they are present at their designated locations during work hours. This feature uses employees' mobile devices' global positioning systems to track their exact locations and provide data to Zoho People at specified intervals. Learn more about the steps we've taken to ensure privacy and how you can enable this feature for your organization!
Attendance-based accrual
With attendance-based accrual—one of our most-requested features—organizations can enable employees to accrue leave based on the number of days they work over a week, month, or year. In other words, the amount of leave an employee earns is directly linked to the number of days they're present at work. Learn more about how attendance-based leave accrual works in Zoho People!
Employee engagement as a user service
Employee engagement - user service is a very useful space in Zoho People that lists all the surveys created by an organization that are applicable to an employee. Through this space, your employees can participate in surveys, view the responses that they've submitted, and track the status of the surveys. Learn more about this feature!
Major initiatives
HR roundtables
To help HR professionals gain valuable insights into industry trends and best HR practices, we organized HR Roundtables across five major cities in India, including Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Bengaluru. We were super delighted to see HR professionals from different streams come together to exchange ideas and brainstorm solutions for common and persistent HR issues. Additionally, these roundtables have given us a deeper understanding of the specific needs and challenges HR professionals face, which enables us to tailor our HR software to address those pain points.
CX workshops
Every year, we at Zoho People make it a point to meet our customers regularly to help them see our product in action, use it effectively, and ask questions in real time. It also helps us gather constructive feedback on our product, understand how our customers use it, and build stronger relationships with them. This year, we were able to attend five workshops across major cities in India. We had a wonderful time interacting with our customers!
International HR Day
As part of our International HR Day celebration, we launched an awareness campaign to highlight the efforts that go behind managing employees, running day-to-day HR activities, and ensuring a safe work environment for employees. With this campaign, we aim to shine light on the essential role HR professionals play in helping organizations run smoothly.
Major events
At Zoho People, we participate in HR tradeshows regularly to understand the unique needs and preferences of the HR sector and to showcase our HR software to a larger audience. SHRM India Annual Conference and Expo, SHRM US, People Matters TechHR India, HRSE Dubai, HR Technology Conference and Exposition 2024, and WelCon 2024 are just some of the many interesting HR events that we attended in 2024.
Major partnerships
This year, we've partnered with Verified First to enable HR teams to effortlessly complete candidate background screenings. With this integration, hiring teams can now initiate background verifications right from Zoho People and sync candidate information from Zoho People to Verified First seamlessly. Learn more about this integration!
Major awards
The awards that we receive are a testament to the incredible support that our customers, partners, and employees offer. It's their valuable contributions and feedback that have helped our product reach its full potential. Thanks to these collective efforts, we've been awarded the Quality Choice Award by Crozdesk and are listed under the top 50 HR products of 2024 by G2. Additionally, Zoho People has been rated 4.6 by Software Suggest, and 4.4 by Gartner.
What our customers say about us
"Setting up all the customizations, access permissions, and approvals is straightforward in Zoho People."
- Theresa Turner, Director of HR, Articad
"I can now see all my employee information under one secure system with Zoho People."
- Jo, Director, Spaghetti Agency
Looking ahead to 2025
As we approach 2025, we'll continue to strive to keep Zoho People aligned with the needs of the evolving workspace, provide an exceptional employee experience, and empower HR teams to drive organizational success. We look forward to introducing intuitive capabilities that truly take HR operations to the next level. We wish all of you a very happy New Year 2025!
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