New Employee Details to be filled Online from October: EPFO

The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) announced yesterday that employers will have to fill in the details of their new employees online October 1 onwards, says a news report .

The move will effectively halt the process of manually filing Form-9, which was a declaration by the employee taking up employment.

A senior official, sharing the development, stated that the present process of manually filing of Form-9 will no longer be available from October 1, 2017. The report states that the step was taken “in the wake of rapid computerisation in EPFO as an initiative towards Electronic Paper Free Organisation.” The physical submission of Form-9 can be done away with, as the employee master roll (containing details like name, gender, date of birth, date of joining, father’s/spouse’s name, Aadhar number and bank account details) is already available in the system, the official explained.

He further added that this step will help in settling claims electronically, will reduce employers’ burden and paperwork and is also a step towards better e-governance. EPFO plans to go completely paperless and provide all EPFO services online by next year August.

Courtesy : Peoplematters

WhatsApp may soon allow you to withdraw sent messages

Have you faced a situation when you sent a message to someone by mistake on WhatsApp and then regretted? Instant messaging services can be tricky – while they allow you to express yourself freely and instantly, they can also lead to embarrassment. Well, you need not worry anymore. A new WhatsApp feature might now let you recall an uncomfortable message. The popular messaging app is rumoured to soon roll out the much-anticipated ‘delete for everyone’ feature, for both the Android and iOS platforms.

According to tweets by WABetaInfo, a fan site that tests new WhatsApp features, the instant messaging service, which has over 1.2 billion monthly active users, is finally testing this feature and will remotely enable it soon.

What is this feature all about?

Technically, the new 'Delete for Everyone' feature will let users ‘unsend’ messages. You will have five minutes from the time when you sent the message to delete it – only if the message is not opened.

At present, WhatsApp, available in 50 languages, including 10 Indian, shows a single tick when the message is sent successfully and a double tick when it is delivered. This might change soon with this new WhatsApp feature, reportedly under testing.

Salient features

The ‘delete for everyone’ feature will help revoke or ‘unsend’ messages sent incorrectly to an individual as well as group chat.

Just like Gmail’s ‘undo send’ feature, which gives you 10 seconds to recall a message, this feature will allow you to ‘unsend’ not only texts, but also images, videos, GIFs, documents, quoted messages, and even status replies, within a five-minute window.

Limitations of this feature

The messages that have already been sent more than five minutes earlier, cannot be recalled. Also, the five-minute window does not apply if the message has been read by the receiver during this period. Another issue is that though the message will be removed, some data will still be retained, reports suggest. The receiver of the message might still get a notification reading “This message was deleted.”

According to a DailyMail report, this ‘delete for everyone’ feature, originally called 'Recall', was first seen in April in a Beta version of the app. The feature was included in the code for version 2.17.30 of the app, but WhatsApp has still to enable it.

WhatsApp is one of the largest messaging apps with. It is available in more than 50 different languages around the world and in 10 Indian languages.

Courtesy : business-standard

New Move By WhatsApp : WhatsApp for Business

WhatsApp for Business: Can it redefine organizational communication?

WhatsApp recently launched its new service, christened ‘WhatsApp for Business’, and aimed at simplifying businesses’ interactions with customers.

It has started off by giving verified green badges to select business accounts, in a bid to accentuate the credibility of the businesses on the messaging app. The feature is an offshoot of its parent company Facebook, which already has a blue badge for verified business pages. KLM is the first airline and one of the first few companies to have a verified business account.

With the help of WhatsApp’s enterprise solution, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines now offers its customers (all over the world) the facilities of booking confirmation, flight status updates, check-in notification, boarding pass, and asking questions in as many as ten different languages on WhatsApp. In India too, the roll out has started with BookMyShow sending confirmations for ticket bookings on WhatsApp, and Ola and OYO also reportedly in talks to integrate their applications with the chat platform.

While the WhatsApp for Business application may initially be used primarily for customer services, marketing, and customer communication purposes, the platform has the potential to be extensively leveraged for internal team communication as well. 

Several HR technology applications exist already in the market, which are focused on employee engagement and/or team communication. However, none of them enjoys as far-reaching and dominant a presence into the user’s lives, as WhatsApp. Virtually every employee is well conversant with the functioning of WhatsApp and uses it seamlessly to interact with dozens of people, on a daily basis. Therefore, if WhatsApp for Business can design a mechanism for reaching out to employees, gauging their happiness quotient and identifying their pain points, it could help organizations stay in touch with the pulse of their workforce, and also generate ideas for enhancing their productivity.         

WhatsApp, on its official blog has said that it wants to apply what it has learned by helping people connect with each other, to help people connect with businesses that are important to them. Drawing from the two aforementioned aspects, and viewing them from an organizational perspective, WhatsApp could be well served if it can establish a formal platform that allows businesses to connect and engage with the people that are most important to them: their employees.

Courtesy : Peoplematters

Automation to eat away one third of low skill jobs by 2022

Almost one-third of 'low-skilled' jobs, about 7 lakh, will be lost on account of automation in Indian IT by 2022 says US-based research firm HfS Research.

However, the report also predicts the number of 'medium-skilled' and 'high-skilled' jobs to go up by 1 lakh and 1.9 lakh, respectively. Worldwide, HfS Research said that by 2022, the IT industry would see a net decrease of 7.5% in headcount with countries like the US, UK and India taking a hit.

The report shows a marginal uptake of IT jobs in Philippines.

The research firm cites the aggressive uptake of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and AI as the primary reasons for the reduction in headcount. It adds that RPA is merely accelerating the elimination of rote jobs while increasing the need of high-skilled jobs by 57%.

While “companies are taking time to build the impact of RPA into service contracts ... Time is on our side to manage the transition and train staff for the future,“ the report said.“The next fives years we can manage, it's the five after that when the impact on labor becomes much more challenging.“

The firm has increased the predicted low-skilled job loss numbers from 6.4 lakh at the end of 2021 in a report published last year to 7 lakhs by 2022 in the latest report. In this scenario, the report predicts that 20% of the total workforce needs to be re-skilled to be employable.

Courtesy :CIO.ECONOMICTIMES.INDIATIMES

Johnson & Johnson India extends paternity leave to eight weeks

Johnson & Johnson India has augmented its paternity leave policy to eight weeks of paid leave during the first year of birth or adoption, as per a company release. The company has already been offering 26 weeks of maternity leaves to new mothers for the last six years, well before the latest Maternity Benefit Amendment Act kicked in.

While there is currently no provision on paternity leave for employees in the private sector as per the Indian Labour law, Johnson & Johnson India will offer eight weeks of paternity leave in accordance with the company’s new ‘Global Parental Leave’ approach.

Read more : Peoplematters