Product Update May 2023

Welcome back to another edition of the Employment Hero product update, where we share all of the latest and greatest updates over the past month.

This month, you’ll learn about our brand new suite of AI enhancements, which takes all of your favourite features you know and love and makes them just that little better, as well as improvements to performance reviews, compliance reporting features and Global Teams onboarding.

A new suite of AI enhancements added to features you already know and love

We all know that staying up to date and investing in technology can help improve efficiency and productivity. That’s why we’re so excited to announce our brand new suite of artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements.

These AI enhancements can help you and your team communicate faster and more effectively, ultimately increasing confidence when communicating with co-workers. In Employment Hero, you can find your new AI helping hand in Shout Outs, Recognition, Job Descriptions, Feedback, Happiness Surveys, 1:1s, Email Templates and more.

We’ve made an AI assisted message generation button, a sparkle “” and is available for our Platinum customers to help generate well-crafted messages at the push of a button.

Think of this improvement as your new wordsmith best friend – it’ll give you a helping hand to create thoughtful and meaningful expressions.

Take a look at the full list of AI enhancements. 

An easier way to onboard Global Teams employees directly from the ATS

Giving your new starters a seamless onboarding experience sets the tone of what their experience will be like. For your employees hired through our Global Teams service, you’ll be able to give them a five star onboarding experience by choosing to onboard directly, or through Global Teams.

You can easily create a Global Teams onboarding request for your “hired” candidates from the ATS, taking out the admin that was previously required. This means you no longer need to re-enter personal data, as the Global Teams onboarding request is pre-populated based on the ATS job listing and candidate details.

Integrate Goals into Performance Reviews

We all know that performance review time can be admin-heavy. Rattling your brain to document achievements, goals reached and performance throughout the year into one place can take hours on end, which is why we’re excited to announce the integration of Goals into Performance Reviews.

By integrating the employee’s Goals in their Performance Reviews, you can easily refer to employee goals during the review process. This improves the ease and efficiency for the employee and manager to review the employee’s goals progress in the review period, and can assist conversations around successes/achievements, and areas of focus.

Learn about setting up Performance Reviews.

You can now upload documents into Performance Reviews

Having all documents on hand at review time makes the entire process a whole lot easier. That’s why we’ve added the functionality to upload and edit documents in performance review periods.

Now you can easily access all important and relevant documents for a well-rounded performance review without the hassle of ad-hoc files.

Improvements to compliance reporting features

When it comes to compliance, accessing information when you need it (like audits) is critical. That’s why we’ve expanded the filter options of the compliance reports to include Team, Location & Employing Entity to save time when running Audit reports.

We’ve also made compliance reporting easier by adding new details to the printable and downloadable versions of finalised HR documents. This includes who and when they signed the document – all in-platform and digital.

A more comprehensive way to monitor items in the asset register

Keeping track of which employee owns what can be time-consuming. However, with the asset register, you can quickly do just this.

We’ve now made this even better by adding the ability for Admins to add files to their assets in the Asset Register to keep records of receipts, images of assets and more. Users can add files when adding a new asset or when editing an existing asset, and uploaded files will also now show when viewing Asset Details.

Learn more about the Asset Register.

Introducing the Workplace Eligibility Report

The Work Eligibility Reporting feature allows you to check your employees’ work eligibility and make sure there is no one in your business with an expired visa. You can also use this feature to download a CSV file of the data shown in your report, enabling you to load the report into a CSV-supported program like Microsoft Excel.

Learn more about the workplace eligibility report. 

Employees can now see projected and accrued annual holiday leave

Managing annual leave can be a headache for both employees and employers – which is why we’re so excited to release this feature.

Now employees in New Zealand have the ability to view their projected Annual Holiday leave accrual when making leave requests, as well as allowing managers to view employee’s leave balance holistically when approving.

Employees who work irregular hours can request leave in hours and days

When an employees’ work hours/days differ from one week to the next, it makes it difficult to determine what a week is regarding accruing/taking annual leave. To help our users, we have made a range of changes to employee leave.

We’ve added a review period to the business settings and the employees’ settings for the platform to calculate their average hours over that given period, immediately before they take leave.

We’ve also opened up the leave application to allow employees to apply for leave in hours, days or weeks when they take leave to remove the need for calculating what part of a week they are applying for within the leave request.

Lastly, we’ve increased the advanced work pattern limit from two weeks up to eight weeks to handle the common four-on four off work pattern in New Zealand.

Learn more about irregular hours employees.

Employment Hero now integrates with Akahu

We’re excited to share that we now integrate with Akahu Payments!

The Akahu integration allows you to connect to multiple bank accounts so that you can select which bank account you would like to use for different pay schedules.

You can generate pay runs and instantly bulk pay employees, as well as IRD. You simply need to set up a free Akahu account, connect as many bank accounts as you like to it and then connect payroll to Akahu via the integrations page.

You can sign up to Akahu here.

Note: there is a $5 per business per month charge to send payment files via Akahu to your bank.

Learn more about the Akahu payments integration.

Follow along every month for the latest and greatest product updates

We want our customers to get the most out of our platform. Whether it’s HR, payroll or benefits, you can expect to find new updates here – all designed to make your world at work easier. If you’d like to stay up to date with all of our content, you can visit our resource hub or follow us on LinkedIn.