What's new in Zoho People: March 2021

New month, new features and enhancements! March has been extremely productive for all of us at Zoho People, and we're happy to reveal everything we've been working on. With these new features, we strive to make HR management as seamless as possible for our customers. Here's a roundup of all the features and enhancements introduced during March:

• Maximum capacity restrictions in Office Readiness

Last year, we introduced office readiness forms in Zoho People to help organizations resume operations at their worksite and bring their employees back safely. The three forms that come with this feature allow organizations to prepare their work locations to accommodate employees and follow social distancing, receive requests from employees to work from the office, and better manage visitors. With our new enhancement, you can restrict employees from submitting work from office requests when a particular work location exceeds its maximum capacity. Requests to allow visitors can also be restricted. Learn more about this Office Readiness enhancement.

• Onboarding and LMS integration

With our new onboarding enhancement, admins can now add a list of self-paced courses to the onboarding workflow that new hires should complete. These courses can also be marked as mandatory. For instance, some organizations require new hires to complete privacy and security awareness training before they start work. This integration can be an easy way to streamline this process for both HR staff and new employees.  Learn more about onboarding with our LMS.

• Better feedback access during continuous reviews

Last year, we introduced the Continuous Review feature in our performance management system to help HR professionals adopt a continuous feedback system in their organization. Zoho People's Continuous Review feature helps employees track their progress and work more efficiently toward organizational goals. With our new enhancement, reviewers can now publish the ratings and comments they give so their reviewee can see them. This will help employees understand how their managers perceive their performance, giving them more insight into their strengths and more direction on how to improve. Learn more about the Publish Rating settings in Zoho People. 

• Customization for holiday reminder templates

As part of Zoho People's leave management system, automated reminders can be configured to let all applicable employees know about an upcoming holiday. This is mainly to help employees plan their days off well in advance. Now, you can customize the email template used for sending automated holiday reminders. For instance, if you want to remind employees about the New Year, you can include a personal message in the template from your CEO thanking every employee for their contribution towards the company's growth during that year. This can go a long way toward keeping your employees engaged. Learn how to customize holiday reminder templates in Zoho People. 

• Marking appraisals as 'completed' in PMS 

Zoho People's Performance Management System (PMS) is filled with features that work together to help organizations provide more contextual and streamlined performance reviews to their employees. As part of the appraisal feature in Zoho People's PMS, we have introduced a completion setting that allows you to manually mark an appraisal cycle as completed. This will help you ensure that no change is made to the appraisal process after a certain time. However, if you want to make any changes, there's a restart option, too. Learn how to manually mark an appraisal as completed in Zoho People's PMS. 

• File and inline text submissions in LMS

Assignments are an essential aspect of learning and development. They help employees put what they've learned to practice and allow trainers to evaluate if employees have understood the course properly. The assignments feature in Zoho People's Learning Management System (LMS) lets course instructors add assignments as part of the graded courses to make the training program more effective. With our new enhancement, the assignment feature now supports file submissions and inline text submissions. Course admins can choose to accept no submissions as well. Learn more about this assignment enhancement. 

• Semimonthly time logs in the Timesheets module

In Zoho People's Timesheet module, we have daily, weekly, and monthly time logs where employees can record the time they spend on each task. With our new enhancement, we have now added semimonthly time logs to our Timesheets module. For semimonthly logs, the first half would be from the 1st of the month to the 15th.  The second half starts on the 16th and records for the rest of the month. Learn more about semimonthly logs here. 

With this set of new features, we hope to make HR administration less stressful, add more value to your people management strategies, and help improve the employee experience at your organization. Let us know your favorite feature in the comments section below! For further questions, please feel free to email us at support@zohopeople.com.