Deep Dive into D365: Human Resources
In the first of our Deep Dive into D365 series, we take a close look at Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, exploring some of its key features and their impacts on business, and finding out why our experts think this should be the go-to HR solution for organisations looking to enhance internal processes and ease the strain on HR personnel.
Main features
Self-service functionality
- As you’d expect from a HR solution, Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides a self-service portal for employees to access a wealth of information they’d otherwise have to log manually or rely on the HR team for.
- From booking and managing annual leave and accessing details on training and achievements, through to tracking assigned tasks and taking a look back at past appraisals, D365 Human Resources gives employees the chance to do all this and more.
- Not only does this simplify processes and enhance accessibility to information, it also prevents resource drain on the HR team, giving back time they’d typically spend handling employee queries.
Leave and absence tracker
- D365 Human Resources enables organisations to manage leave and absence across the company in a simple and effective manner.
- Employees’ days off are tracked and leave plans can be customised using workflows - for example, if your organisation offers a loyalty scheme rewarding employees with an extra day off for every two years of service, D365 HR allows you to create accrual, adding this leave to an employee’s account automatically.
- As well as annual leave, the software keeps a record of illness, maternity/paternity and any other leave of absence, which helps with any related annual reporting and, once again, significantly reduces the burden of admin on HR personnel.
Benefits tracker
- With many organisations offering a range of standardised employee benefits to all, it can be hard to know which are popular and whether there are any which perhaps aren’t worth investing in. With D365 HR, employees can pick and choose between the various offers in your benefits package, enrolling onto the ones they like and disregarding the rest.
- By allowing employees to take an ‘opt in’ approach, there won’t be a need to automatically enrol every employee for every benefit you offer, which in turn can help with cost saving.
Underrated feature
Journals
- This is a part of the self-service area which does what it says on the tin – it enables employees to create journal entries.
- Whether it be daily, weekly or monthly, creating journal entries can help members of your team keep track of their achievements, any notable projects they’ve worked on, additional workload they’ve committed to and anything they feel they could do with further support on.
- When the time comes for appraisals, these journal entries can help employees tackle a common challenge: remembering what it is they’d like to discuss. With an employees’ permission, line managers can also gain access to journal entries in order to help them create development plans.
Why Dynamics 365 Human Resources?
This Microsoft platform was once known as Dynamics 365 Talent; since then, it’s undergone some changes to become a true, HR-focused platform and our Senior Dynamics 365/Power Platform Consultant, Adil Aslam, thinks this can only be a sign of things to come.
“When Dynamics 365 Talent got rebranded, a couple of popular features got taken away – but not without reason. The move was made to enable Microsoft to present Dynamics 365 HR as a core HR system to compete with the likes of Sage and Dayforce.
“For me, I believe this focus on providing HR teams with the tools they need indicates that Microsoft are planning to develop their HR offering even further and plug some real investment into making D365 Human Resources the ultimate HR platform.”
In July 2020, Microsoft announced integration with the LinkedIn hub, a feature many missed when the former ‘Attract’ module was phased out - and this is exactly the type of thing Adil is predicting will only get better in the future.
No matter what lies on the horizon for D365 HR, it already has some fantastic integration features to smoothen processes. As part of the Microsoft stack, the technology knits seamlessly together with Outlook 365, which is good news for anyone on the hunt for a HR system and already using Outlook across their organisation.
Expert’s choice
“Aside from the journals, it would have to be the compensation management feature. It can take a little time to get your head around, but it’s a really useful tool for tracking employee salaries and introducing branding, indicating what an employee must do to progress and how much of a rise that would entail – and the best bit is, this can go as simple or as complex as you’d like it to.” Adil Aslam
Senior Dynamics 365/Power Platform Consultant
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We’re on hand to show you how Dynamics 365 Human Resources can transform your HR function, so feel free to get in touch if you’d like to know more.