With Coronavirus still dominating work in the UK, our development team have been working hard to help support you more with the current situation.

We’ve added a brand new seat-booking feature to help manage safe-working in the office for any of your team that do come in a bit. This suggestion came from one of our customers, it’s now live, and it’s definitely a good one!

We also thought we’d remind you about some existing features that you might not be using at the moment, but which can help you manage remote teams.

Seat booking feature

The Government’s official guidance is still that teams should work from home where they can. But many of you, we know, need to have some of your people work from your premises at least some of the time. But, as you have obligations as an employer to manage this safely, we’ve added a new seat booking feature in the system to ensure you never have too many people on your premises at one time.

It’s pretty easy to use once you’ve set it up. All you need to do is tell the system how many people each area of your premises can safely hold. You can name each area whatever you want to make it clear to your staff which area you mean – such as your ‘marketing office’, ‘front office’ or ‘top floor’.

Once the settings are added, your team will be able to make seat bookings in seconds and see who else is booked to come in on the same day. Admins and managers can view all bookings and edit them if required and even export lists of bookings into an excel file too!

Your remote team toolkit

With so many of us working remotely, some or all of the time, it’s often hard to communicate as much as we need to. But communication is key for happy and productive teams, so it’s important to do so regularly.

In citrus HR there are a number of tools that will help you communicate quickly and efficiently to your teams at home. Here’s a reminder of what they are and how they work:

Easy SMS messaging

Sometimes you may need to communicate something really quickly, such as a confirmed COVID case and you need people to stay at home. Or, with winter approaching, you might want to tell your team not to come into the office due to bad weather.

Our software easily lets you send texts to a team, direct reports or the whole company in seconds via the Send SMS Messages feature.

Send updated documents in seconds

With Coronavirus advice being updated frequently you may want to make staff aware of any changes made to a specific document.

The software allows you to do this with ease using the Send Letter To Multiple Staff Action. Here you can write and send an email with the updated document attached for either just your team or the whole company. You can also choose whether the system automatically saves the document you have sent to employee files, helping you to keep a record of what’s been sent out.

You can use this to email all sorts of documents from revised policies to important company updates directly from citrus HR.

Staff Surveys

We’ve spoken about this before, but if you haven’t used it yet, our Staff Survey feature is great at helping you stay connected to your staff at the moment. It’s a quick way to get an idea of how your people are feeling either generally or about specific issues. For example you might like to get their thoughts on coming back into the office when the time comes.

You can see the results in a very visual report; the ongoing Staff Satisfaction Survey also tracks changes in your staff’s morale over time. Each report lets you drill down into the reasons your staff are feeling the way they do, too.

The content of this blog is for general information only. Please don’t rely on it as legal or other professional advice as that is not what we intend.