Paychex, Inc. issued the following announcement on Jan. 14.

With 59 percent1 of employers finding it increasingly difficult to find and hire quality candidates in today's tight labor market, HR professionals need tools to drive efficiency, reduce administrative overhead, and deliver actionable insights. That's why Paychex, Inc., a leading provider of integrated human capital management solutions for payroll, benefits, human resources, and insurance services, invested in making significant enhancements to its Paychex Flex® HR solutions, designed to simplify the complexity of HR administration for any business.

The latest Paychex Flex HR enhancements bring performance management, workflow approvals, real-time analytics, and a configurable events calendar to the platform – all backed by self-service capabilities that empower employees and administrators to complete tasks from any location and on any device. These new features and functions are in addition to an already-deployed learning management system (LMS), which the company unveiled at the 2018 HR Technology Conference and Expo in September.

"The goal of this release is to help our customers simplify the complexities of finding and retaining the right talent, optimizing employee performance, and maximizing organizational productivity," said Tom Hammond, Paychex VP of corporate strategy and product management. "The features and functions now being made available to our customers are designed to give them a competitive edge when it comes to meeting the HR and talent management requirements of today's demanding business environment."

The following features and functions are now live in Paychex Flex HR:

• Performance Management: The right approach to performance management can help facilitate meaningful conversations and growth opportunities in a tight labor market. The Paychex performance management solution allows employers to choose the employee review cadence that works for them – such as quarterly or monthly – and offers review templates as an option for those customers looking to easily start a performance management program or eliminate existing paper-driven processes. When coupled with online training from a learning management tool, HR professionals can have frequent conversations on performance and provide meaningful opportunities for employees to enhance their skills with hundreds of libraries full of an array of training courses.
• Workflow Approvals: When self-service meets an automated workflow approval process, efficiency and oversight of all changes within an application are delivered. Paychex Flex users can initiate more than 25 self-service actions today, and the platform's new workflow approval process helps put the right checks and balances in place so that HR administrators can confidently maintain the integrity of their data while continuing to empower managers and employees with self-service tools. Such workflow and approval guardrails are particularly important in ensuring the proper checks and balances occur when it comes to automating highly sensitive activities like making compensation changes.
• Real-time Analytics: In addition to the robust analytics capabilities Paychex Flex already offers, Paychex has released several new features to its Live Reports, which give users the ability to interact with and drill into reports for more detailed analysis. Like other analytics throughout the Paychex Flex platform, Live Reports appear in-context and eliminate the need for users to navigate away from the screen they're currently viewing to access applicable data. The newest Live Reports include hiring and turnover, which allow users to see turnover trends that can be broken down to uncover areas of the organization that are contributing most to turnover. December's release also includes benchmarking, which enables customers to compare their metrics to those of other like organizations by region, company size, and industry. Comparative data is aggregated securely and anonymously from more than 600,000 Paychex customers.
• Events Calendar: Paychex Flex introduced administrators to an events calendar in December, which allows them to keep track of key dates. Events like employee anniversaries and birthdays may also be captured and shared with appropriate audience(s). Events like merit increases may also remain administrator-facing only, if desired. In the case of merit increases, with a simple click on the event in the calendar, administrators are taken directly to the compensation screen where they can make the change and kick off the approval workflow process described above.

"We're excited about the revitalization of Paychex Flex HR and feel that the newest features and functions will drive organizational productivity," Hammond added. "This is the latest example of our commitment to an ongoing strategy of delivering solutions that further enables HR to stand at the forefront of organizational success and contribute to strategic business outcomes."

Original source can be found here.