Sage People Spring ’21 Update

Release Highlights

Along with the hints of Spring, the Sage People Spring ’21 Updates have been released. Below please find details of the release that are broken down by General Availability, Early Adopter, and Open Beta.

General Availability

1. Enhanced Objectives

Sage People has always had performance management functionality that enables colleagues to create, view, edit and delete personal objectives. Enhanced objectives have been built from the ground up to take this to another level, enabling clients to transform the effectiveness of their performance management processes, as well as the experience for employees.

This includes the following capabilities, which were released in Winter ‘21 for early adopters:

• Agile objective tracking,
• Collaboration and transparency,
• Simple and flexible configuration for HR, and
• Improved manager experience.

Flexible performance management has never been more important. With so much change going on in the world, business priorities are evolving and shifting at a faster pace than ever before. Research shows that those having regular, productive 1:1’s with managers are 2x more engaged and 3x more likely to stay with the company for the next two years.

Continuous performance management regularly tracks and reviews more immediate term objectives, iterating and improving performance on the go and tweaking objectives as necessary. With frequent feedback, it feels more authentic and drives much greater value for everyone. Encouraging transparency and having joint objectives for key project groups can have a significant impact on achieving important goals, reducing duplication of effort, ensuring alignment, and improving the quality of output.

2. Reward Planning – improved bonus calculations

Rewarding your people fairly and in a transparent manner is critical to keeping employees motivated, feeling secure, and ultimately, able to do their best work. The existing compensation planning capabilities have been made easier and more flexible to award bonus payments. You can now use specific formulas to calculate the bonus, rather than just using the current salary.

3. Self service user experience

Having listened to your feedback and requests, Sage People have made several UI improvements for the self-service WX portal. This is a first step towards delivering a much improved, modern, and consumer-grade user experience – with more to come!

The latest improvements which you can now benefit from include:

• Slicker WX tiles
• Intuitive navigation
• Better branding
• Improved accessibility

Benefits of these improvements include an intuitive user experience, improved accessibility, and the opportunity to reinforce your brand.

4. Time and attendance

Regardless of the size of your business, managing employee vacation and sickness can be time-consuming, complex, and often distracts employees from the jobs they were hired to do. Furthermore, requests for support or to resolve errors can take up a lot of HR time, causing frustration and a poor experience.

In the Winter ‘21 release, Sage People improved the process for booking absences as an Early Adopter program and are now making the intuitive process for booking absences General Availability.

Additionally, Sage People are also delivering a clearly structured accrual log, and has extended this to show all applicable types of absences.

Early Adopter

5. New Mobile app

Sage People are continuing to build out their mobile app for early adopters and since the Winter ‘21 release, have even more fantastic functionality, including:

• Syncing with i-calendar
• Native manager actions
• People management workflow

Benefits include a slicker navigation that’s designed for mobile with the enhanced ability to engage your remote workforce. Being cloud-based it is fast, secure, and reliable. The system is responsive and can be tailored through simple configuration by the HR team.

6. Time and attendance

Daily absence reporting: You can now report absences on a daily basis, making it much easier to report on and align to your pay periods. Benefits include streamlined processes, a better user experience, and reduced admin.

Open Beta

7. Payroll API

Many Sage People customers use Payflow today, which enables the transition of Sage People data to and from third-party payroll providers, through secure downloads and uploads of files. To make this process more seamless and automated for the user, Sage People are building out their Payroll API capabilities. This is currently running as an open beta, which means although the API product is available to all customers, the APIs are still under development and subject to change. The Payroll API is currently limited to sending information for a single employee per data processing, although the process can run multiple times to transfer all your staff data.

More in-depth details related to this release in addition to a webinar can be found on the Sage People website

Tugela People are here to help

If you require more details about any of the information contained in this release, or would simply like to run something by us, we're here to help.

Please  contact us on tel +44(0)1908 030360 or email: info@tugelapeople.com. Alternatively, complete the ‘Get in touch’ form and a member of our team will contact you directly and we'll respond to your specific query, arrange a phone call, or a Microsoft Teams screen share.

We pride ourselves in helping our customers to maximise their investment in Sage People:

As Sage People’s first partner with over 40 years collective experience, we have implemented over 140 Sage People solutions. With a team of expert consultants, with extensive global implementation experience, we ensure your system is configured to agreed requirements, working in full collaboration to guarantee your business is empowered.

We are accredited for Sage People training, SSO, AD, and API integrations and offer post-go live Managed Services to help companies get the most out of their Sage People investment.