The guide includes a short article that explains basics and 2 forms that can be used by manager and by employee.

Each form is accompanied with a sample of how manager or employee should fill it.

The guide is totally free and is available for download here.

HR managers responsible for scheduling employees understand just how complex and tedious this process can be. Scheduling too many hours leads to a decrease in the profit margin. On the other hand, scheduling insufficient hours has a negative effect on the customers.

• Download Employee Scheduler for Microsoft Excel free trial

• Buy Employee Scheduler for Microsoft Excel now

A simple and efficient solution for scheduling employees, Employee Scheduler for Microsoft Excel, helps HR managers organize hourly employees and keep track of the company’s labor costs as a percentage of sales. Employee Scheduler is an easy to use template that can be tailored for a particular business. The main benefits of this solution are:

• Producing weekly schedules for employees (plus the ability to schedule past midnight)

• Estimating employee wages on an hourly basis

• Calculating how many working hours should be scheduled, based upon the company’s profit targets

For most small businesses, managing labor costs is key to survival. Employee Scheduler is a very simple and easy way of controlling the company’s labor costs on the weekly employee schedule. It is completely customizable and is based on MS Excel or OpenOffice.

This spreadsheet solution is perfect for business owners and HR managers who have simple needs and who want an inexpensive tool to help them create schedules.

• Download Employee Shift Scheduler free trial

• Buy Employee Shift Scheduler now

Another affordable solution, Employee Shift Scheduler, provides simple templates for configuring working shifts and assigning them to a specific employee.

• For more information on HR metrics, click here.

The human capital scorecard consists of four categories, similar to traditional scorecard. Each category is devoted to one of the basic human capital management activities: HC acquiring, maintaining, developing and retaining. These categories should contain metrics that provide a thorough look at the investment and utilization levels of human capital within the organization. They should reflect the dimensions of cost, time, quantity and quality.

The scorecard base may also cover reaction factors — the reactions of managers and employees to HR programs, as well as employee satisfaction and morale measures.

Acquisition is the principle HR activity. It contains such tactics as hiring and renting (employing a person for a limited time without adding him or her to the company’s payroll). The main metrics of this category are cost per hire, number of new hires, time to fill jobs, quality of new hires and number of replacements.

Another important HR activity is Maintenance, which includes creating compensation plans, paying salaries and benefits. It can be monitored by a number of cost ratios, such as average pay per employee, total labor cost as percentage of operating expense, benefits cost as percentage of payroll and average performance score.

Development is one of the most difficult HR categories to measure. Most accounting systems do not include formal training expenditures. Typically, human capital development covers a broad range of activities, from daily coaching to external educational ventures. Some useful metrics are training cost as percentage of payroll, training hours by function, training hours by job group, average number of training hours per employee, total training hours, training ROI.

Talent retention is crucial for any organization. When people and people-related issues such as culture are ignored, the potential for failure is very high. Therefore separation rates and costs are vital and should be considered in all types of HC scorecard systems.

HC scorecard is an important element of the data-to-value cycle. It provides key measures of the human effects within tasks and processes. To get specific scorecard metrics for HR-related activities, you can use various metrics packs.

• For more information on available HR metrics, click here.

• Performance Appraisal Package is available for only $39.95. To purchase Performance Appraisal Package, click here.

Formal review of all organization’s staff on a regular basis provides crucial feedback and helps increase employee productivity. Performance Appraisal Package helps companies keep written records of its employees’ performance, set goals and objectives, and gather important information required for creating compensation plans. Even if your company already implements informal employee appraisals, you should consider starting a new program to capture all important data in writing.

Developing employee performance plan is a time-consuming and costly process. Special web-based software solutions are expensive (some cost thousands of dollars) and require special learning. On the other hand, Performance Appraisal Package provides a lot of options for selecting employee performance evaluation form that is relevant for your organization. It is fully compatible with all popular word processors, which allows you to easily customize and print the necessary form data.

Performance Appraisal process varies from organization to organization, therefore Performance Appraisal Package provides 10 different sets, including forms for comprehensive performance assessment, project reviews and self-evaluations by employees. The forms can be modified individually or combined into company-specific documents.

Performance Appraisal Package includes the following sets: General Performance Appraisal Form I-III, used for the evaluation of various objectives and attributes; 360-Degree Performance Appraisal Form I-II, for the evaluation of peers, outside suppliers and customers, as well as “upwards” feedback about managers; Manager Performance Appraisal Form, for the assessment of managerial skills, and listing future objectives; Administrative/Technical Performance Appraisal Form, for the evaluation of administrative, technical and customer service workers; Sales Performance Appraisal Form, focused on sales personnel; Project Evaluation Review Form, used for specific project management; and Employee Self-Assessment Form, allowing employees to identify accomplishments and areas for improvement.

All Performance Appraisal Forms buyers will receive a special bonus – two guides for developing an efficient performance appraisals plan: Guide to Writing Performance Appraisals and Book of Performance Appraisal Phrases.

• Performance Appraisal Package is available for only $39.95. To purchase Performance Appraisal Package, click here.

The FastStart™ Human Resources Pack is designed to help you organize your workforce more efficiently. It includes ten MS Excel-based spreadsheet solutions for a better control over human resource activities. These solutions help you get quick access to the necessary HR information and manage your staff more professionally.

For instance, the Employee Information Form is designed to track and record all the vital information on the company’s employees. The Employment Application and Interview Form are crucial for hiring new staff as well as keeping track of the company’s potential employees. The Employee Performance Appraisal spreadsheet helps HR department to monitor the effectiveness of the current staff. The Vacation Request Form is important for creating up-to-date work schedules, while the Absence Report allows you to analyze the frequency of absence of each of your employees. Finally, the I-9 Form is set to keep records of citizenship status of new employees, which is important in today’s increasingly international working environment.

In addition to the FastStart™ Human Resources Pack, the developer provides a wide range of template solutions for various business tasks. For instance, companies who need more profound approach to managing day-to-day activities may use database-driven products such as FastData or SuperForms.

The Human Resource Pack contains the following templates:

- Employment Application

- Absence Report

- Employee Disciplinary Card

- Career Data Card

- Employee Warning Form

- Employee Performance Appraisal

- Injury Claim Form

- Interview Form

- Harassment Interview Form

- Vacation Request Form

• You can purchase the FastStart™ Human Resources Pack here for $29.95.

The product requires MS Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/NT and MS Office 97/2000/XP/2003.

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is a concept that captures a broad collection of individual skills and dispositions, most often referred to as soft skills or inter and intra-personal skills, that are outside the traditional areas of specific knowledge, general intelligence, or technical and professional skills.

Emotional intelligence has been associated with transformational leadership capabilities such as inspiration, motivation, and vision. According to a number of researches, the person’s success at work is 80% dependent on emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is all about understanding yourself and how other people react to you, and then using this knowledge to your advantage and better foster relationships. The foundation of emotional intelligence is self-awareness: the knowledge of yourself helps you understand how other people see you.

Emotional intelligence is a powerful tool which helps a person build relationships, using the knowledge of different behavior types, enhance communication skills, and promote leadership capabilities. From HR perspective, emotional intelligence is a significant factor that is potentially useful in understanding and predicting employees’ individual performance at work. Although measuring EQ is a challenging task, this information could significantly increase the effectiveness of HR activities.

The Organizational Attitude Survey allows businesses to measure the gaps between employee perceptions of the organization’s reality and its desired position in several key organizational climate elements. Employee feedback helps create a framework for developing a solid action plan to address employee morale and the overall organizational effectiveness.

The survey helps organizations link HR initiatives with business results. It allows organizational management to set improvement targets for HR measures and integrate them into the balanced scorecard system.

Effective HR management is critical to the organization’s performance. Employee opinions can impact financial results by affecting customer retention, quality of work, morale, and productivity. Understanding HR drivers in the organization helps increase the engagement level of its personnel. This feedback allows organizational management to facilitate development and organizational change, increase its awareness of employee problems and internal health of the organization, and measure the effectiveness of current programs and policies. Besides, it can be used to motivate employees and improve job satisfaction.

Most organizations have various programs and systems in place focusing on the knowledge, skills and motivation of the individual performer. Organizational Attitude Surveys is an essential component of this approach. It can be used to solicit employee opinions on a variety of issues, including the organization’s success in communicating its mission to employees, as well as local issues such as quality of the working environment.

The Organizational Attitude Survey usually includes the following issues: employee satisfaction, senior management attitude, interpersonal relations, expertise, compensation, innovations, communication, teamwork, customer service, adaptability, staff development, etc. It helps enhance management/employee relations, evaluate training efficiency and current training needs, assess organizational climate and employee satisfaction. For more on HR productivity measurements, see The Top 10 Tips to Measure HR Productivity.

HR performance is one of the most difficult aspects of organizational performance to measure. One valuable tool which helps to assess the effectiveness of HR functions within an organization is HR audit. HR audit provides for the systematic verification of an organization’s recruitment and selection practices, job design and analysis, training and development, orientation and placement, performance assessment and job evaluation, employee and executive compensation, employee motivation and morale, participative management, inter-department communication, safety and health, welfare and social security, industrial relations, trade unionism, as well as disputes and their resolution.

HR audit covers a broad range of organizational functions, such as policy and regulation compliance; corporate strategies in relation to HR planning, staffing, and compensation; “HR climate” on employee morale, motivation, and job satisfaction; etc.

HR audit provides key information on the actual contribution of the HR department towards the organization. It helps improve HR personnel motivation and reduce total HR costs, as well as provides timely legal requirement. Another benefit of a systematic HR audit is the quick adoption of the changing employee mindset.

HR evaluation activities may differ depending on the purpose of HR audit. Various approaches to HR audit include: comparative and statistical approach, regulatory and policy compliance, and Management by Objectives (MBO).

HR audit represents the gaps in performance and helps create various remedial measures. It helps an organization face the challenges and increase the potentiality of its HR personnel. For more on HR performance management, see this post.

This balanced scorecard report is for presentation purposes, if one need to have more detailed report the “Advanced Balanced Scorecard Report” is available.

If your goal is to fill forms on career sites, then filling the form again and again can be a really routine. But you can always use some task automation tools, that will help you to fill in necessary data, select necessary options in check lists, finally giving you more free time for real HR job.

The tool called iTestBot was released by AKS-Labs. This application was primary designed for software engineers who going to test the application again and again, but also it is a powerful routine tasks solver. Learn more how it helps with solving routine tasks.