HR departments in small and large companies are responsible for completing a plethora of tasks. Today, many companies rely on enterprise content management software to help HR managers reduce the time spent on various tasks. Since HR tasks are document and form-based, HR managers are increasingly relying on a combination of enterprise HCM software and HR automation to make their departments more efficient and save money.
What is HR automation?
Enterprise HCM software is used by HR management professionals to do the following:
- Importing documents into digital repositories
- Organising imported documents so that they are searchable and retrievable
- Storing files in standard formats for sharing across multiple devices
- Archive documents
- Simplify audits by making it easier to gather information.
HR automation helps with these processes by taking over critical administrative tasks that are otherwise time-consuming. HR automation can harness the power of an organisation’s workflows. By automating repetitive tasks, HR professionals can collect, create and update data and provide different workflows for different users, depending on their position and tasks. This can help make businesses much more efficient, rule-driven and streamlined. Another area that can be greatly streamlined with HR automation is a company’s communication system. When HR management automates the handling of alerts, it can help staff understand which alerts are really important so that they can be escalated to the appropriate personnel. HR automation allows staff to manage their company by exception, so they can easily identify and deal with deviations from the company norm.
Why HR automation?
When HR management automates HR, the workload of HR staff is reduced, allowing them to attend to their duties with greater efficiency. Processing payroll is a good example of how an HR employee’s time can be used more efficiently. Traditionally, payroll staff spend hours or days entering payroll data. With automation, employees can take a few simple steps to complete the process. This can help them focus on other useful tasks, such as working on strategies to help the business grow stronger.
When HR management starts implementing HR automation, companies see improvements in profits and productivity almost immediately. When HR employees can get more done through automation, they also become more motivated. Employees who feel they are achieving their goals have better morale. Companies also get more work done for the same amount of money. Automation also helps with more precise management of human capital.
Increased precision in HR processes also helps to simplify jobs. When HR processes are automated, the review and management of information such as leave days or benefits can be completed with a quick search. This eliminates the need to pull files or send requests to HR. When information is easily accessible to anyone who might need it, the workflow is greatly simplified.
The most important benefit of HR automation is security. When HR managers automate HR, they can secure the company’s data on online servers. This helps prevent years of data from being lost in the event of a fire, theft or equipment failure. Automation also helps avoid unnecessary expenses, legal hassles and tax problems caused by HR errors. The error rate drops significantly with automation.
How do you know when it’s time for HR automation?
Regardless of their size, all companies can benefit from automation. It is especially important for companies to consider when they find that the error rate is increasing. Companies that have unsustainable operational costs can also benefit from the savings that automation can offer. Inadequate reporting should also prompt HR management to implement an HR automation strategy. And as a company grows and expands, automation can greatly ease the work involved in tracking hundreds of employees.
Read More… Guide to Automated Employee Onboarding for the Best Onboarding Experience.
What should you automate?
Almost any repetitive work task can be automated. In HR departments, there are 10 areas that most HR managers believe are the most obvious processes for HR automation.
- Request for hiring a new employee & onboarding.
Hiring new employees incurs a high cost per hour, and hiring is a perpetual process. Hiring request automation eliminates miscommunication between recruiters and managers and provides a real-time overview of the hiring process.
Onboarding can involve significant paperwork, signing contracts, completing benefits paperwork and other necessary tasks. When onboarding new employees, automation greatly improves the workflow and the onboarding process itself. The turnaround time for all the different documents needed in the onboarding process can be reduced to a few hours instead of a week. It can also ensure that newly hired employees receive all the devices and system access permissions they need in a timely manner. - Personal data of employees
When a company is very small, it is not too difficult to manage employees’ personal data. However, when a company adds new employees, tracking and updating all the employees’ personal data can be a nightmare for the HR department. Updating employee data helps HR management with HCM. The likelihood of data loss and manual entry errors is greatly reduced. - Timesheets
Reviewing and tracking timesheets can be a very inefficient and time-consuming task. When the timesheet approval process is automated, data entry and validation of information is much faster. It also saves staff from having to manually update an employee’s records. - Performance appraisal process
The vast majority of HR managers simply do not have the time required to update employee performance records. Not getting feedback from managers and not having good metrics leads to inaccuracies. When automation is used, performance evaluation helps ensure that records are systematically updated and allows companies to easily see how their employees are performing. - Offboarding
Offboarding employees can be tricky. When an employee is terminated, termination documents need to be collected and processed, equipment return needs to be monitored, and steps need to be taken to ensure terminated employees no longer receive pay and benefits. Automating the offboarding process can make it much easier to complete all of these tasks and help avoid issues that could open a company up to legal problems. - Leave requests
Employees request leave for many different reasons. If many leave requests are submitted, it can be time-consuming to process them all. This can make it difficult for HR management and employees to approve leave requests in a timely manner. Automating leave requests through HR can help ensure that approvals are granted much more quickly, while also allowing the employee’s absence details to be updated instantly. This can help organisations track, manage and approve employee absence much more efficiently. - Expense reports
Before automation, expense management was a particularly tedious task. Staff had to dig through stacks of documents and numerous Excel spreadsheets. This took many staff hours to manage all the information. Despite the amount of work involved, expense reports could still be costly, outdated and inaccurate. The manual process for expense reports usually started with an employee filling out an expense report on paper or in an Excel spreadsheet. He or she would then forward it to his or her manager along with invoices and receipts. The manager would then review the submitted document and invoices, approve the expense report and send it to the accounting department. There, employees would process each expense item in the company’s system before it could be submitted. The entire process would have to be done for every expense report, no matter how small. If this is repeated over and over again in a large company, it can quickly become an ongoing and frustrating process. Automating the process of expense reporting through HR is helpful. Eliminating the manual processes reduces both the stress on employees and the likelihood of billing errors. - Training requirements
When HR introduces automation, employees can manage their own training requests. Employees can sign up for specific training in the HR system. HR departments can create workflows so that details of the training are added to the employee’s file when they have completed it. - Safety hazards/accidents
When an accident happens at work and someone is injured, reports must be filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Workers’ Compensation systems and others. Automating the accident reporting process can make this process much easier. Information can be quickly transferred from form to form and forwarded to the appropriate agencies. - Benefits
When employees are newly hired, they are often not eligible for benefits until their probationary period is over. By automating the benefits process, HR staff can know immediately when employees are eligible for benefits. The information can also be automatically updated in the person’s payroll and records.
Summary
It’s easy to see why HR automation can greatly improve the efficiency of HR departments, as well as the business as a whole. Reducing error rates, increasing productivity and motivation can help companies improve their bottom line and retain good employees. HR automation means better HR management.
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