2020 has been full of world-changing events that have taught us the importance of appreciating the little things we have in our life. As the year draws to a close, we are immensely grateful to everyone who stayed with us and helped us grow even during such unprecedented times. With your support, we were able to introduce some useful features in Zoho People, participate in events across the world, organize training programs, and work on some major initiatives designed to give you an even better HR experience.
Here’s a look back at Zoho People through 2020:
Major features
With all of your amazing feedback, our product developers were able to roll out some awesome features to make our application more useful and convenient. Here’s a quick look at the most significant features that have been added to Zoho People:
Facial recognition
This year, we introduced the facial recognition feature as part of our attendance management system. With the help of AI technology, this feature takes a picture of your employees and validates their identity when they check in or check out through the Zoho People mobile application. This way, employers can be sure of their employee’s identity, regardless of whether they work from home, a remote location, or a client’s workplace. Learn more about facial recognition in Zoho People.
Office readiness
The Office Readiness feature made its appearance in Zoho People mainly to help organizations reopen safely. With three useful forms, it helps HR professionals assign DRIs to accommodate employees, handle “work from office” requests, and manage visitors to different worksites. It’s integrated with the *employee health survey, another new feature that was introduced to help employers stay informed about their employees’ health conditions. While using the office readiness forms, HR managers can require employees to submit a health status form at least once in the 15 days before the requested “work from office” date. Learn more about Office Readiness in Zoho People.
Present by default
To make our attendance management system more useful to our customers, we introduced Present by Default, a feature that marks attendance as present automatically for a certain group of employees for a particular period. This way, employees who don’t have the means or time to mark attendance can prevent attendance regularization issues. Learn more about our Present by default feature.
Continuous performance reviews
We understand how important performance reviews are to employees. That’s why we introduced Continuous Performance Reviews, a feature that helps organizations assess their employees every month or quarter in two stages: self-review and manager review. This helps keep employees stay more focused and engaged with their goals, and it also gives them a chance to share their feedback with managers. Learn more about this feature.
Timesheet enhancements
This year, we introduced some major enhancements to our Timesheets feature to improve its functionality and allow for more of our customers’ needs to be met with it. With the enhancements, you can now:
Track time discrepancies and alert employees whenever they work less or more than their required hours
Restrict when employees are allowed to submit their timesheets to a particular day/week/month
Select the specific period for which the timesheet data has to be processed
LMS enhancements
In 2019, we introduced our Learn more about this feature. Learning Management System (LMS) with the most essential features to support employee learning and development. This year, we have added several features to make it more comprehensive and help our customers improve their corporate LMS programs. We included the LMS module in our mobile application to support mobile learning, meaning that employees can now learn from wherever they are. Online and offline test features were also introduced to help our customers conduct assessments for employees, and grades can be calculated much easier now with our new grading feature.
Exclusive administrators for major modules
A module administrator can now be assigned for our Attendance, Leave, and Timesheets modules in Zoho People. We recognize that a single employee may not be able to manage all the attendance, leave, or time entries of a large workforce. The attendance module administrator in Zoho People will be able to view and edit the attendance entries of the employees assigned to them and access their attendance reports. The leave and timesheet module administrator features work the same way.
Similarly, we introduced the Performance Administrator feature in our Performance module. With the help of this feature, individual users can be added to the appraisal cycle and their view and edit permissions can be configured based on their role in the appraisal cycle.
Learn more about everything that’s new in Zoho People!
Major initiatives
Here’s a quick recap of some of the major initiatives that we worked on this year to make people management easier for HR professionals:
The HR Community
This year, we introduced “The HR Community,” an online forum intended to help HR professionals from diverse backgrounds come together and share their knowledge on best practices in HR. With the HR Community, we hope to provide a platform that helps HR professionals support each other and grow together. We also have HR industry leaders on board to help our members stay updated on all the latest workplace trends. Learn more about our HR Community here.
Webinars with industry leaders
This year, we organized quite a few webinars with HR industry leaders, including:
Andy Spence from Workforce Futurist
Nick Holly, Director of CRF Learning at Corporate Research Forum
Jon Ingham, Author, Consultant, and Trainer at Jon Ingham Strategic HR Academy
These webinars were designed to help HR professionals navigate their teams through the pandemic. We wanted to help HR professionals understand their role in managing their workforce during such unprecedented times. We’d like to continue organizing useful webinars for 2021 as well, so stay tuned!
Employee Appreciation Day celebrations
Employees are everything to an organization. We aimed to help organizations celebrate Employee Appreciation Day by designing a host of cool badges and awards that could be downloaded and shared with employees instantly. This particular initiative of ours received a lot of love and appreciation from our community.
Remote work resources
Many organizations made a sudden switch to remote work as a precaution against COVID-19 this year. To help HR professionals succeed in remote work management, we created several useful resources in the form of videos, blogs, and infographics. These resources touch upon every essential aspect of remote work so you can make this transition without hassle!
Major awards
We’re proud to announce that Zoho People has received the following awards and recognitions during 2020:
This wouldn’t have been possible without the continuous support and feedback from our community, and we are eternally grateful for that.
Major events
During the beginning of this year, we attended some of the major HR events around the world including the HRPA Conference in Canada, SHRM Tech EMEA in Dubai, the HRD Summit in Birmingham, and the 9th Annual Regional HR Conference. We were able to showcase our product, meet and interact with industry peers, and better understand the needs of the HR industry as a whole. These efforts allow us to improve our application in line with the needs of the global HR sector.
We were also a part of Zoho Inspire 2020, which was organized online. Our partners actively participated in the event to learn more about our new offerings, discuss our different features, get their questions answered, and improve their expertise on Zoho People overall. Our team also organized a virtual classroom training for our customers to help them use our application to the fullest.
Thank you!
2020 has been a year of learning for all of us at Zoho People, and we are lucky to have been able to quickly adapt our product to meet the demand shifts this year brought. We would like to thank our entire community. You helped us grow even through these unprecedented times, and there are no words to express how grateful we are. We’ll continue to introduce many more useful features and strengthen our product to help HR professionals improve workforce management in the coming years! Wishing you all a very happy New Year!
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