Industry today is growing at a breakneck speed, creating never-seen-before demand for hyperspecialized jobs. At the same time, the fast-paced market change often leaves companies, particularly HR departments breathless when it comes to maintaining processes and ensuring compliance. In such an ever-evolving work environment, the importance of HR automation cannot be emphasized enough. After all, is the scope of work in the HR department just limited to repetitive compliance work? The answer is a resounding no!
Companies need to strategically adapt to the constant market changes, be it in terms of their policies or the kind of resources needed onboard to power state-of-the-art projects. That is where reducing the time HR spends on mundane operational activities becomes crucial so that they can focus on tasks such as policy changes and employee branding, which are people-oriented, strategic problems.
In this blog, we will look at how smooth-running workflow automation can help HR departments save time on trifles and focus on the essentials.
The Impact of Repetitive HR Tasks
According to a report involving 900 companies, between 2021 and 2022 alone, the demand for HR automation had risen at a phenomenal 235%. The impressive growth figure shows that HR professionals have long been in search of a productivity-boosting solution that would enable them to engage in high-level and stimulating work. In fact, studies have shown that monotonous tasks influence one’s mental health poorly, ultimately affecting the quality of work.
Moreover, most professionals would likely attest that while repetitive tasks can be no-brainers when they come in bulk, they can add to the work pressure and cause burnout. With the volume of work shooting up, work stress increases, which in turn leads to oversights. Errors in HR tasks, especially those that include regulatory compliance can land companies in trouble.
The Payoff of HR Workflow Automation
HR Workflow Automation is increasingly becoming a must-have in today’s industry as it allows stakeholders to focus more on core HR strategy by overcoming large volume of tasks and workplace boredom. Not only does automating tasks save valuable business hours but also improves the accuracy of the work. This means perhaps all that the HR department might have to do is spend some time to quality check the tasks done by the automation tool, with minimal manual intervention. Moreover, as the automation process accounts for legal compliance and business rules, compliance tasks are performed in an error-free manner. Thus, the risk of costly penalties goes down with automated workflows and processes.
As the HR department becomes more productive, it can address the interpersonal issues in the organization faster, leading to a better employee experience. Increased efficiency in approval processes, such as travel and benefits claims, also is a major pay-off of modernizing employee management workflow.
Now that we understand the positive effect of HR Workflow Automation, let us take a deep dive into what its implementation looks like.
Key Features of Efficient HR Workflow Automation
Here are some of the essential components of HR Workflow Automation:
- Centralized employee data management: As the organization creates a single source of truth for employee data, different departments can easily access, if not all but at least partial, employee data. Imagine scenarios such as horizontal employee migration or a cross-departmental collaboration. In this case, a centralized employee data repository helps decision-makers recognize the relevant talent based on their qualification, achievements, availability etc. However, making a central source of truth can be daunting if it involves constant manual updating and, in that regard, HR automation saves the day.
- Automated leave and attendance tracking: Accurate attendance processing is vital for compensation calculation, which includes accounting for paid leaves, overtime, etc. At the same time, HR teams also have to remind employees to regularize attendance, leading them to compose a lot of reminder e-mails. An automated attendance tracking system frees the HR professionals of follow-up e-mails, manual compensation and overtime calculations, etc.
- Performance management automation: Manual KRA and appraisal processes can be prolonged, taking more than required business hours. Instead, performance management automation can digitize the entire process, including the decision around the hike percentage, if the company has preset the metrics for the appraisal amount.
- Onboarding and employee separation processes: When an employee joins or leaves an organization, the HR team is required to process hordes of documents. The job can be even more challenging with an ongoing bulk hiring process. With easy document upload and asset requisition options, among other automated processes, onboarding and employee separation can be hassle-free.
- Customizable workflows to fit organizational needs: Most Human Resource Management tools can automate recurring tasks. Still, one-size-fits-all solutions may require manual intervention as every business has its unique business rules. This is why bespoke workflows are a vital part of HR Workflow Automation.
Choosing the Right HR Workflow Automation Solution
Looking for an HR Workflow Automation solution? It is important to find a scalable tool that supports automation in performance management, attendance tracking, workforce management and talent acquisition, among other key workflows. Also ensure that the solution is customizable to your unique business workflow and centralizes employee data, giving a snapshot of the workforce without any hitch. Worth noting that customizability in workflow means that templatized components of your existing HR system can be easily implemented.
Steps of Implementing HR Workflow Automation
Implementation of an automated HR workflow can be challenging. To help companies go through an easy transition from legacy HR systems to state-of-the-art tools, here are a few tips:
- Identify the areas of improvement in terms of Human Resource Management in your company
- Select the tool that meets your needs
- Check if the tool works well and integrates with your existing systems.
- Provide training and support to employees to ensure smooth adoption
Future Trends in HR Workflow Automation
HR Workflow Automation will entail more and more advanced technologies as the realm of technology expands itself. Here are some possible future trends to look out for:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): Integrating AI and ML in HR Analytics, HRs can crunch data on employee productivity for predictive analytics. This would help the company forecast employee turnover, recognize high-potential candidates, plan appraisal sums, and project future workforce requirements.
- Evolving UI/ UX Designs: As more and more intuitive user interfaces are made, using HR tools will become progressively easier.
Now that we understand the importance of HR automation and its future, let’s look at how leading HR tech companies such as EmployWise are serving the market in this regard.
EmployWise: A HR Workflow Automation Solution
To ensure that companies run at optimum levels of efficiency, EmployWise automates repetitive HR tasks, saving business hours that can be better used for improving HR strategy and interpersonal issues in the company. Our HR Operations and Payroll solution strives to promote HR Workflow Automation by centralizing employee data, automating leave tracking, and digitizing performance management. One of the prime focuses of the solution is to simplify employee onboarding and separation processes while also supporting customized workflows that satisfy the diverse needs of the organizations.
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