Attracting and retaining top-notch talent is one of the top factors influencing success for organizations in the 21st century. As a result, HR has become your most important departments, and it’s crucial to ensure that it’s properly resourced. Unfortunately, most business can neither afford nor find a well-staffed HR department.
The fact is that most HR processes are still very manual and document-driven, and HR specialists waste too much time on administrative paperwork. By automating these processes, streamlining operations, optimizing workflows and cutting out waste, your HR employees can spend more time focusing on what they’re passionate about: people.
The good news is that with its administrative processes like employee onboarding and time tracking, HR is particularly ripe for automation. Modern drag-and-drop (aka low-code) platforms allow you to automate and streamline HR processes without using scarce IT resources or expensive software. (Full disclosure: frevvo offers a low-code platform for HR workflow automation.)
Seven Benefits Of HR Process Automation
1. Drive better employee engagement: Building a cohesive, satisfied, productive team environment starts the instant a candidate walks through the door for an interview. Investing in streamlined onboarding promotes higher employee engagement, and automation can drastically reduce the steps and time taken in that process.
2. Reduce paper: The document checklist to onboard a new employee includes I-9, W-4, medical forms, payroll forms, tax forms, disclosures, policies and on and on. Automation creates a single document repository in the cloud and enables easy, universal access. Paperless processes also help address constantly evolving compliance issues.
3. Close communication gaps: Working with HR is often perceived as slow and time-consuming. Automation helps bridge the communication gap between HR, employees and departments. Important information reaches the appropriate party in a timely manner, and each person involved can be notified of real-time progress.
4. Collaborate to enhance productivity: With HR automation, interdepartmental silos can be broadly addressed to enhance overall productivity and responsiveness. For example, onboarding a new employee impacts HR, finance, IT and other departments. An automated workflow integrated with internal and external systems reduces friction and starts new employees off on the right foot.
5. Reduce manual work: Many HR processes involve filling out lengthy forms with the same information repeatedly, and business rules must be applied manually — for example, if you answer yes to Part I, fill out Part II; otherwise skip to Part III — and forms require multiple signatures. It’s tedious, error-prone and wasteful. Dynamic electronic forms can retrieve information from HR systems, perform calculations, reduce/eliminate duplication and apply business rules to ensure information is accurate and valid.
6. Reduce email for speedier approvals: We are already burdened with excessive email. Emailing files around and tracking each one's progress just adds to the volume and time spent. Electronic signatures, mobile-ready forms and built-in reporting can simplify and accelerate routine approvals, and automation helps route each form to the appropriate recipient.
7. Increase focus on what matters — people: Employees are any organization's most important asset. HR helps find these assets and develop them into productive team members. Every minute HR spends chasing signatures, pushing paper and tracking emails is a minute not spent interacting and communicating with employees. Automation can support organizational missions, visions and goals to help build a superior workforce.
Five Tips For Effective HR Process Automation
Clearly, the benefits are enormous. Where should you start? Here are five things to consider:
1. Start now: The worst thing you can do is do nothing. Business as usual using manual processes risks losing talent and quickly being relegated to irrelevance. The best advice I can give you is to get a quick win. Don’t get bogged down in internal IT assessments, and definitely don’t worry about automating everything. Find one everyday HR process — something that’s repetitive with simple routing and that is used reasonably often — and automate it to gain a first success.
2. Prioritize user experience: Your employees are also consumers who are used to slick apps on mobile devices. However you choose to automate your HR processes, make sure the end result looks good. Otherwise, no one will use it. Make sure your solution works on mobile, provides 24/7 access and loads fast. Pay attention to sensible terminology, context-sensitive help and consistency. People can be resistant to change, so the easier you make it for them, the more likely it is that all will succeed.
3. (Over)communicate: Your solutions will impact HR people’s everyday work. They may worry that automation will drive job losses, so make sure they understand the benefit of focusing on talent rather than paperwork. Share meaningful success stories with everyone.
4. Train people: End-user training should be part of every rollout. But, that’s just the first step. After some time has passed, go back and ask if the system is actually reducing manual work and if they actually have more time to focus on talent.
5. Plan for iterative improvement: Involve a small group of stakeholders from the beginning, solicit their feedback along the way, and make sure you actually implement it. Your people will be far more invested in your solution. There’s no single recipe for choosing this group, but it is essential to take this step. Ensure there are at least a couple of cycles where you demo your solution, ask for suggestions and implement the good ones, and you’ll end up with both a group of internal champions and a solution that users actually want.
Conclusion
Attracting and retaining top-notch talent is a critical HR challenge in today's workplace. HR automation has a lot to offer, yet many organizations have been too slow to adopt it. Will your HR department in 2020 still be mired in paper-intensive, error-prone and time-consuming manual processes? Or, will you use modern, low-cost platforms to automate and free the HR department to focus on what’s important: talent?
