Africa has the youngest and fastest-growing population globally but still posts some of the lowest employee productivity metrics.
How did that happen?
From our interactions with People leaders from across the continent, we discovered one key reason for this lack of productivity and efficiency: underdevelopment in the HR space.
Africa is expected to create more than 600 million jobs over the next 15 to 20 years. But our organizations still use traditional methods to manage employees, forcing people managers like you to shift focus from strategic initiatives to menial, repetitive tasks.
When you couple this with the fact that the core segment of current Africa’s workforce is digital natives, you see why it is important to use people management solutions that make HR actions efficient and engaging for HR personnel and employees.
It is for this reason that we are building Pade.
Pade’s People Operations software helps organizations like Dantata Holdings, TSL, and PiggyVest manage their entire employee lifecycle, from hire to exit. Our mission is to deliver African organizations from unproductivity into efficiency and profitability.
Keep reading to find out why Pade is the best People Operations solution for your organization or quickly schedule a demo with one of our product experts.
Payroll Management
7 out of 10 African organizations still use spreadsheets to manage their payroll and HR processes. Sure, spreadsheets are ubiquitous across industries but if you still depend on them to manage your company’s payroll, it means you have to:
- Manually enter employees’ salaries into the spreadsheets on a monthly basis, thereby stealing time that could have been spent on more strategic activities
- Manually calculate employees’ allowances and bonuses on a monthly basis which increases the chances of errors happening
- Batch employee payments over a couple of days due to the inability to automate payments with spreadsheets.
These tasks build up to create a bottleneck in your payroll operations that may result in poor employee experience.
Pade eliminates this bottleneck by helping you innovate your payroll processes.
What does this mean?
Let’s start here: Instead of entering your employees’ salary information into a spreadsheet on a monthly basis, with Pade’s platform, you only have to set up your organization’s information once.
This information will include your pay grades, pay schedules, employee allowances, and approval workflows. Based on this data, Pade will automatically run payroll for your organization, drastically cutting the time it takes you to close out your monthly payroll from a couple of days to only a few minutes.
That’s not all. Pade’s advanced payroll engine also lets you automate statutory deductions and create off-cycle payroll schedules for employees. By automating these menial and time-consuming payroll tasks, we ensure that you have more time on your hands to focus on more impactful activities.
Performance Management
High performance organizations are built when employees work, at the peak of their abilities, towards the same goals.
A case in point is General Electric’s (GE) transformation under Jack Welch to become the world’s most valuable company in 2000. Much of this transformation was down to Jack’s company-wide drive to eliminate unproductive work in GE’s workplace.
But in too many African companies, the performance management system is either inefficient or non-existent.
For a performance management system to be effective, it must have the following characteristics:
- Right metrics
- Right targets
- Transparency
- Relevance
- Conversations
- Consequences
Pade’s modern Performance Management module helps African companies tick all of those boxes.
You can:
- Clarify and communicate your organization’s strategic priorities using balanced scorecards.
- Set agile goals for your employees and automatically track their progress every step of the way.
- Request and give real-time feedback to your employees
- Measure your employees’ performances to gain insights that affect your talent management and pay decisions.
Bottom line: If you use Pade for performance management, you show your employees that the organization is serious about accountability and transparency.
Request Management
When we asked Ngozi Ukunenye of Reelfruit to share her experience as an HR administrator on Pade’s platform, one of the things she said was:
“Managing leave management requests has been spot-on on Pade… Pade has helped a lot and the Pade team has been fantastic.”
Like Ngozi, you know the pains of managing employees’ requests.
Take leave requests as an example. In large organizations, the most prominent way of handling leave requests is to have your employees fill out forms.
But HR professionals that use this system soon discover that employees’ leave request information, like who is eligible and how many people have requested, are usually siloed from the rest of your employees’ information.
With Pade however, you have a request management system that is connected to your employee information database.
On the platform, you can create leave policies for different pay grades–leave policies let you specify what types of leave each pay grade is eligible for. Employees just have to log in to their Pade profile and you’ll be able to accept or deny their request in real-time.
Benefits Management
In 2020, Willis Towers Watson–a global advisory and solution company– conducted a survey to look into how the new work realities impacted Africa’s employee benefits culture.
Here are some of the highlights from the survey:
- Only 17% of employers in Africa believe that their benefits strategy is effective.
- 55% of employers say that catering to the needs of multigenerational employees is a challenge they face, while 34% mention lack of engagement as a big challenge.
- 73% want to enhance core benefits beyond traditional health and retirement needs.
- And 67% want to be able to easily examine an employee’s eligibility for certain benefits.
Chances are you can relate to some of the statements above and that’s why this next data point is important:
31% of employers also singled out tools that support benefits choices and help them make informed decisions as key to improving their benefits strategy.
This is where a platform like Pade comes in.
Pade’s Benefits module lets you provide your employees with an array of benefits programs. You can create policies to specify which employees have access to certain options. And in cases where you want to deduct part of your employee’s compensation in exchange for access to certain benefits, Pade will automatically deduct the set payments from their payslips on a monthly basis.
Employee Information Management
Having an HR platform that acts as a single point of truth for your data holds major benefits for your employees’ productivity and your organization’s efficiency.
What we’ve discovered, after numerous conversations with the organizations we work with, is that they usually have employee data siloed on multiple platforms (payroll, onboarding, recruiting, talent management, timekeeping, and so on). So when it is time to reference important information, the HR team has to switch between multiple platforms and copy & paste employee details into new docs.
Organizations that use Pade, however, enjoy the benefits of having a single source of truth to store all of their employee information. All you need to do is click on an employee’s profile and you’ll find every information that has been collected up to that point.
This way you can be sure that:
- Your information is reliable.
- You don’t have to wait days to get access to the information you need urgently.
- You reduce the burden on your HR admins.
- You protect your data from unauthorized access.
Document Management
Like your employee’s data, you need to have a single point of truth for your HR documents.
The HR department is home to complex documents that usually contain sensitive information. Managing these documents effectively is as important as managing the people in the organization. You don’t want your payroll documents or disability records just lying around in a file cabinet.
Proper document management involves controlled access to documents, timely disposal of documents, and a central location for files.
Pade’s document management feature is built with these characteristics in mind.
You can create any document you need, specify who has access to it, and set up notifications for when an employee views your document. You’ll have a central place to store all documents and reduce the number of papers that are moved around the organization.
Reports
Reporting is a crucial part of most business departments, and HR is definitely not excluded. It is important that you are able to assess whether your goals have been reached or not and use patterns in your data to make informed business decisions.
Doing this assessment and finding data however becomes harder if your files are scattered on multiple platforms or in file cabinets.
This is where an HR solution like Pade comes in. Because Pade already helps you manage your employees, from hire to exit, you already have a wealth of data from which to derive insights from.
With this data, you can create reports on your organization’s payroll, statutory benefits, leave changes, agency payments, and many more.
You can also use our simple-to-use report builder to create custom reports in case you want to create special reports for your team and organization.
Conclusion
Gartner’s 2023 Future of Work Trends revealed something that you probably already feel. It says that managers will increasingly need more support as they are being squeezed by organizational goals and employee expectations.
Support in your context could mean training on managerial approaches that are suited for the current workforce.
But it also means having the right tools and systems that help you implement your organization’s strategy and create a purpose- and performance-driven workplace.
Pade’s People Operations platform is used by organizations who want to achieve those goals too. Schedule a demo with one of our Pade experts to see how Pade can transform your people operations.
