In any organization, Human resource (HR) professionals play a big role in ensuring smooth workflow operations. HR professionals handle various tasks such as recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, compensation & benefits, offboarding, etc. HR professionals are also responsible for ensuring that their company operates in compliance with employment-related laws and regulations, including labor laws.
Here are some of the common tasks and responsibilities of an HR professional:
- Managing the recruitment and hiring process of new employees
- Managing employee benefits and compensation
- Ensuring compliance with laws and regulations
- Developing HR policies and programs
- Conducting performance evaluations and delivering feedback both to management and employees
- Managing employee relations including conflict resolution and or grievance handling
- Providing training and development opportunities for employees
HR professionals are responsible for a range of tasks; they can be categorized as manual and people-centered activities. However, much of their time is spent on manual processes. With the rise in AI and other automation tools, HR professionals now have access to solutions that can assist them in their work, freeing up time for more strategic, people-centric tasks.
What is HR Automation?
HR automation involves the use of software technology, to streamline and automate HR processes, particularly manual and repetitive tasks. These may include recruitment, onboarding, payroll, attendance monitoring, and various other data management functions that benefit the company. By implementing HR automation software, HR professionals can increase productivity and focus more on the strategic thinking side and people-oriented tasks. Also, it helps them to improve accuracy and reduce repetitive manual workload.
If your company is still relying on manual processes and has not yet incorporated automation, it may be time to consider making the switch. While implementing HR automation may require some effort to restructure processes across the entire organization and train the existing staff. Considering the long-term benefits in terms of cost and time savings, investing in HR automation is worthwhile. Implementing HR automation can benefit not only HR professionals but also contribute to the growth of the company.
Benefits of HR process automation:
A frictionless organization
HR automation facilitates smooth workflows in day-to-day tasks between HR professionals and other teams. As a result, the organization can function more smoothly and efficiently, with fewer barriers to progress.
Increased productivity
HR automation tools free HR professionals from manual and monotonous workloads allowing them to spend more time on their strategic tasks.
Cutting down dependencies through self-service
In most organizations, the main problem is the workflow barrier due to the dependencies. HR automation tools like chatbot integration, timely reminders, and automated emails, enable employees can carry out the process without depending on the availability of HR professionals.
Data-driven decision-making
By driving out the whole HR process through automation, periodic data can be easily generated which can be used for analysis and decision-making. This data-driven approach can save time and money by taking strategic decisions based on reflective analysis.
Reduction in processing costs
Most HR tasks involve manual paper records that need to be documented in the right structure. Automation tools allow for easy storage and retrieval of documents in the cloud, reducing the need for paper-based systems and manual processing. This can lead to significant cost savings in operational savings.
Improved collaboration
HR automation fosters collaboration by involving necessary team members from the beginning and communicating their responsibilities and expectations through automated chatbots. This approach positively impacts communication and collaboration between the team members in various HR processes, like training, recruiting, etc.
Hassle-free experience for candidates and recruiters
Recruitment processes involve multiple touch points between recruiters and candidates. It can be challenging for HR professionals to provide a seamless experience to all candidates. Recruitment automation tools can streamline these touchpoints and deliver a positive experience to both sides.
Reduction in human errors
Automated systems can help reduce errors in data entry and processing, leading to more accurate data and reporting.
Improved compliance
Automated HR systems can help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and company policies, reducing the risk of policy violations and potential legal issues..
Enhanced employee experience
HR automation systems can provide employees with faster and more accurate responses to their queries and access to self-service portals to manage their HR-related tasks. This in turn can help to create better employee engagement across the organization.
Scalability
HR automation tools enable HR teams to efficiently manage growth and scale operations for both growing companies and larger companies by automating tasks such as onboarding, training, and offboarding.
12 HR automation examples that you can implement in your organization:
Recruitment
As everyone knows, recruitment is a tedious process and takes a lot of time, and involves multiple tasks to acquire top talent. With the power of automation, the following tasks can be easy with just a few simple steps.
Example:
- Extracting key information from resumes by automatically parsing through attributes and keywords.
- Generating complete job descriptions from templates by simply specifying the role and required skillsets.
- Automating outreach messaging to multiple candidates on social media platforms.
- Seamless sourcing from various platforms with a single click.
Talent CRM platforms like Humbird AI provides various features and integrations to help you automate the end-to-end recruitment process.
Employee onboarding
Onboarding new employees is a crucial step in ensuring employee retention and a positive experience. Usually, onboarding new hires involves a lot of paperwork and direct interactions.
However, with the advent of automation, many steps in the process can be easily automated with improved efficiency and experience for employees. The impact can be easily measured through a quick survey with new employees.
Example:
- Collection of necessary documents, form signing, device allocation, and other procedures for fast processing of new hires to their Day one work.
Offboarding
Offboarding process may seem like a simple process. But similar to onboarding, a well-structured offboarding completion is crucial for organizations to leave a positive impression on their departing employees and safeguard their reputation among the talent crowd.
Example:
- Scheduling exit interview
- Devices handover
- Collection of important tools and credential access
- Paycheck procedures
- Feedback collection
- Collecting records and managing them for future purposes
Time tracking
Gone are the days when tracking employees’ working hours through manual paper sheets with signatures. With automated timesheets, every employee’s daily time spent can be easily tracked with attendance records and breaks taken. This makes the process more accurate and seamless for every organization.
Leave management
Leave management can be a cumbersome process for HR teams to manage manually. However, an automated platform that includes a holiday calendar for the financial year allows employees to easily track their available paid leave and the entire process can be streamlined.
By automating steps like checking leave balance, asking for the request, intimating the reason, and tracking the total leaves taken in a month/year, the process becomes more accurate and efficient.
Employees’ claims
Managing employee expense claims can be a time-consuming and error-prone task for HR departments. Research indicates that as many as 1 in 5 manual expense reports contain errors due to human mistakes. Moreover, manually submitting expense claims can be a frustrating experience for employees and adversely impact their job satisfaction. However, with HR automation, these challenges can be mitigated.
An automated system can enable employees to easily upload required documents and receipts through a self-service portal, while the system can automatically extract necessary data. This streamlined process saves time for both HR and employees while reducing the risk of errors in expense reports.
Payroll management
Payroll management is a critical HR function that requires high accuracy and attention to detail. However, relying on manual processes such as using excel sheets for maintaining payroll records and compensation numbers, can increase the risk of errors and chaos across the organization. A single human error can lead to chaos across the organization. Also, employees may lack transparency on how their compensations are being calculated, including deductions for paid leave and taxes.
Incorporating automation tools can simplify the payroll management process through automatic tracking and accurate calculations. With automation, HR teams can ensure accurate and timely payroll processing, and employees can easily access their pay stubs and other related information.
Tax management
Managing tax compliances can be a challenging task for HR professionals, as tax laws are area dynamic and often change frequently based on factors such as location and company size. However, HR automation tools can simplify the process by providing automated payroll taxes and forms that comply with the current laws and regulations. This can save HR professionals a significant amount of time and make the tax filing process smoother and faster.
Performance management
Effective Performance tracking is a crucial aspect of HR management as it impacts employees’ retention and their relationship with the organization. It involves tracking and measuring the employee against business objectives and goals.
Timely reminders
Most HR process requires reminding people at the right time and ensuring that tasks are completed on schedule. You can integrate HR automation chatbots with existing communication channels like Slack or Microsoft teams and schedule key messages and enable smooth process flow. Chatbots can also automate the process of answering employee questions related to HR policies, benefits, and procedures providing quick and accurate responses to common questions, freeing up HR staff to focus on more complex issues.
Monthly & quarterly reports
Preparing monthly and quarterly reports for meetings with the management team can be a time-consuming task for HR professionals. HR automation can help by delivering automated reports on a periodic basis, providing highly accurate data points that can be used as the main report or as a supplement to enhance your preparation.
Learning management system (LMS) for training
The use of a Learning Management System (LMS) can be a powerful tool for training newly onboarded employees. With an LMS, HR professionals can easily automate the induction process by sharing the relevant course materials and video content with new employees. The LMS system can also be used to track progress and provide assessments to ensure that employees have a solid understanding of the material covered.
From Onboarding to Offboarding: HR Automation trends for 2023
More emphasis is now being given to positive employee experience
Unlike ever like before, employee experience is becoming a significant factor for companies, just like customer experience. As employees are the heart of the company, their happiness and retention matter a lot for the company's sustainable growth.
Although the company aims to deliver a positive experience to all its employees, it's hard to do so by relying on manual HR processes. The latest HR automation tools like a chatbot, surveys, timely support & reminders, enhanced LMS, and various other self-servicing portals enable HR professionals to engage with an employee at various touch points and deliver seamless experiences.
Seamless remote & hybrid operations
As remote work becomes the new norm after the pandemic, HR processes must adapt and maintain the same level of efficiency as in a physical office setting. However remote work presents certain challenges. Fortunately, automation can help overcome these obstacles by offering increased scalability, flexibility, and accessibility enabling employees to smoothly follow the HR process from anywhere in the world.
Time tracking, attendance, and performance management are no longer dependent on physical office settings, it can be enabled in a smooth way for remote and hybrid culture companies also.
Faster recruitment with high-quality candidates
If you ask any founder, ‘what’s the toughest job handled after founding the company?’. You may expect answers like funding, product building, etc. But most of the founders' real answer is ‘hiring & team building’. Team building has always been the most important aspect before any other factors for a successful company. Such a valuable asset - a ‘Team’ can only be created with an efficient hiring process.
The ‘time to fill’ for a vacant position has increased a lot in the last few years, as there’s is high demand for top talent and due to several other negative factors like candidate ghosting. Text recruit has been a new trend prevailing now, where recruiters are seeking out potential candidates' attention with text messages on social media platforms.
To execute a faster hiring process for high-quality talent acquisition, recruitment automation platforms enable HR automation to automate many manual tasks.
Self-service is becoming a new norm
Depending on HR professionals for every single task can be tiring for both the employees and HR professionals. Whether it is a leave request, payslip request, or tax filing, it is hard to manage multiple requests by employees and repeat the same steps to complete the tasks. Using HR process automation tools like chatbots, and self-service portals, employees can easily go through the simple steps, upload or download the necessary documents and complete all tasks by themselves.
With the rise in remote and hybrid work culture, employees today can work in their comfort and in different time zones. To tackle this and provide a positive employee experience, HR automation provides 24*7 self-service portals, where anyone can sign in anytime.
Improved HR process with data-driven decisions
With HR automation, the entire HR process can be easily digitized and tracked, allowing for every action to be recorded and analyzed. By leveraging the data, HR teams can gain valuable insights into, whether the efforts are leading to a positive outcome for the organization such as improved culture, employees' happiness, and productivity.
Also, with the help of predictive analysis, a HR professional can predict the trends and behaviors related to employee retention, turnover, moonlighting, and other factors, enabling HR teams to take proactive steps to address potential issues before they escalate. Data-driven process and decisions can provide a clear picture to the whole management team, HR professionals, and employees so that there is no room for biased decisions to take place that impacts the organization's culture and health.
The bias-free process from hiring to retention
As the human resources department deals with people, there is a risk of biases affecting their decisions. It can be challenging to identify and track these biases, making it crucial to establish a bias-free culture in the organisation. From hiring to onboarding and employee engagement, it's essential to maintain a diverse and inclusive environment for a healthy bond between employees.
Automation tools can help achieve this by processing every action with data as the core, providing an opportunity to eliminate bias in the HR process and create a transparent and healthy culture between HR teams and employees.
Future of HR automation
Unlocking new experiences through various integrations
Companies are adopting new technologies and multiple tools to keep their workforce less in numbers and high in productivity. Most automation tools provide intelligent integrations and plugins between the platforms. Cross-platform integrations and IoT have huge scope and they can unlock new innovative ways to handle everyday tasks and create end-to-end processes that can provide unimaginable high-quality experiences to the HRs and employees.
Incorporating blockchain technology
The rise of blockchain technology in the crypto sector has led to its adoption in other fields as well, to improve process security and authentication. Given that HR process automation involves sensitive information, the need for security is paramount. Various products are being developed to ensure tamper-proof ways to store an organization’s sensitive data.
The adoption of blockchain technology in HR automation tools can help to increase privacy and security in data handling and transactions, making it an attractive prospect for growing organizations in the near future.
More DEI-focused HR processes across the world
Most top companies across the world have already realized the importance of DEI (Diversity, equity, inclusion) in their recruitment practices. And, now slowly startups are adopting DEI-focused HR processes.
The adoption of HR automation tools in recruitment is on the rise across companies, which naturally creates the environment for bias-free decisions in every organisation. This factor will create a great impact on diverse employees, which pushes every company in the world to include DEI as a norm in their HR process.
Supports environmental sustainability
Although, many companies across the world have adopted paperless practices, certain HR tasks still rely on paper-based documentation. With the advent of automation tools, these tasks can be digitized and paper usage can be reduced further. As more companies embrace HR automation, they contribute to creating a sustainable environment for the planet.
As we see, the pace at which things are changing is rapid, and with it, the way we approach HR automation is changing rapidly. While there is no magic solution, that’ll replace human, the goal of HR automation is to streamline processes and empower HR professionals to achieve their goals in innovative, efficient ways. While implementing HR automation may seem complex and time-consuming for new companies, it is essential to remember this quote - ‘AI won’t replace you, but aperson using AI will’. Investing in HR automation can bring tremendous benefits and should be seen as a one-time investment in the company's growth trajectory.
FAQ
What is HR process automation?
HR automation is simply implementing the software technology in the HR process, to automate, especially the manual and repetitive tasks that an hr undergoes in tasks like recruitment, onboarding, payroll, attendance monitoring, and various other data management works that benefit the company.
What is the future of HR automation?
With the power of automation software and seamless integrations, HR work is shifting more toward giving positive experiences to people (employees & candidates) and a fast execution never than before.
What can we automate in HR?
In every step of the HR process like recruitment, onboarding, payroll management, offboarding, etc. there are various manual repetitive tasks involved. Using automation, we can easily automate these mundane tasks to increase productivity.
What is the benefit of HR automation?
HR automation helps you to cut down a lot of cost, time, and effort in the HR process by automating repetitive manual tasks in the process using automation software.
Will automation replace HR?
As the HR job is highly people-oriented work, automation won't completely replace HRs. Instead, automation tools & technologies will help HRs to achieve more tasks in less time and simplify many complex processes.
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