HR managers occupy a key position in the business battlefield, where every organization fights to acquire and retain an invaluable asset—its human resources. Do they devote all their time to help their organization grow by developing existing talent? Not really.
Most HR execs waste their time in menial tasks like paper pushing, sending email chains, or writing report booklets that no one will actually read. Despite investing in an HR management solution, they are forced to carry out administrative tasks manually. Cloud HR systems streamline this haphazard administration to a considerable level, but even they fall short when it comes to control.
HR leaders often assume that there can never be a tailor-made solution that’ll fit their processes like a glove. As a result, they revise their processes, or find workarounds to get things done with HR software’s limited functionality.
The Need for HR Automation
HR automation is quite popular as a concept, but most organizations tend to be on the fence about actually taking the plunge. They feel that it would be difficult to automate complex HR processes. What they seem to ignore is that HR automation simply isn’t a ‘radically new’ concept anymore. It has become a necessity. Every organization can choose to automate its HR processes to survive cutting-edge competition, or ignore automation at its own peril.
Automating HR processes will help the HR department shift their focus from menial tasks to high-impact activities like employee management and strategic HR planning.
Still pondering the leap into automation? Here are four tell-tale signs that show your business needs HR automation.
Sign 1: Your Inbox Is Flooded
Process-heavy departments like HR need robust infrastructure to keep things moving smoothly.
Additionally, HR is filled with confidential employee information. Without a proper workflow tool, HR professionals are left juggling sensitive information and documents via paperwork or email.
The inboxes of most HR professionals tend to overflow with leave requests, new hire requests, and resignation emails. Often, they can completely miss information that was sent through email. This can have a substantial impact on productivity and employee engagement.
Letting confidential information float around your HR manager’s inbox isn’t just ineffective; it’s an actual security threat. Left unattended, your organization may just join Sony in the privacy hack list, where the people who faced the burnt of invasion were innocent employees simply using their email. Everything from confidential medical information to personal conversations was left exposed.
Automation can help organizations prevent potentially monumental damages like Sony’s. If an email arrives with a new hire request PDF, the automation tool monitoring the email will extract the document and store it securely in the document management system for further review.
Sign 2: You Fight a Lot About Whose Fault Delays Are
Since a small error can have a great impact on the organization’s bottom line, the HR process workflow is subjected to multiple checkpoints. Although this slows down decision-making, multiple validations are considered necessary to ensure that decisions are made in the best interests of the organization. Sticking to old-school HR practices will only create process/data silos and drag the decision making process even longer.
But, who’s to be blamed for these delays that take a toll on the organization’s productivity or worse, profitability? Should we blame HR staff for not streamlining HR processes?
Or, should the management be blamed for sticking to old school practices? Pointing fingers only serve to further the blame game. Automating HR process flow acts like a conveyor belt that facilitates decision making, by collecting the necessary data and delivering it to the respective stakeholder securely.
Sign 3: Everyone Knows What to Do, But No One Does It
HR processes are compliance-driven, and so workplace policies tend to be pretty rigid. Pre-defined standard procedures of operation try to bring in some sense of structure to the cluttered mess of processes. However, knowing the HR rule book cover to cover is useless if no one uses it.
Most employees don’t even know about the existence of an employee manual. The people who do know about it, prefer to ignore it. That’s everyone from the employee who forgets to drop in a formal email with necessary CC’s for a planned leave, to the top-echelon manager who sends new hire requests in emails rather than raising them via the designated form.
This inherent laziness and policy negligence on the workforce’s part stirs up trouble for HR. On the other hand, automation ensures every employee abides by pre-defined rules, and rejects requests that don’t adhere to the set guidelines.
Sign 4: Every Day Feels Like a Chaotic War Scene
Traditional HR management practices are like ticking time bombs waiting to go off.
A small misstep can make everything collapse–right from employee engagement and workforce optimization to the organization’s growth. Juggling everything manually with little to no help from technology can stress out HR staff and burn them out.
HR burnout will have more severe consequences—it can take a toll on overall employee morale, organizational productivity, and workplace culture. To prevent a disastrous HR burnout, organizations need to proactively solve pain points in HR management.
Only when they ditch their disinterest in automation and delve deeper into it will organizations truly understand its benefits. Although the migration from paper-based or manual HR environment may seem daunting, organizations need to realize that overworked HR staff, no matter how skilled, can never make a positive contribution.
Conclusion
Contrary to popular belief, automating HR process is not expensive or complex. Moving on from disconnected document management systems will help organizations battle the inefficiencies that plague HR. Investing in HR automation will improve the efficiency of their workforce, reduce administrative costs, facilitate flexible scale, and keep the organization running smoothly.
A simple, cloud-based HR workflow automation tool free from complex installations, updates and upgrades can help business users like HR managers create a tailor-made application that meets their business needs.
