HR Automation Tips Part 3: What Happens When You Automate HR Processes

Most human resources professionals got into the field because they enjoy working with people and helping companies grow through talent acquisition. And yet, many spend their days processing paper forms, sending emails about timesheet approvals and performance reviews, or writing reports. HR automation can get the HR department back to the type of work it should be doing.

Because HR processes are often complex and unique to each organization, businesses tend to assume it would be difficult to automate them effectively. Plus, if your business is already growing, why not maintain the status quo with your workflows?

The truth is that HR automation can transform your HR department into an entirely new kind of team—one with the time to focus on the things that matter and that grow your business, not menial administrative tasks. Here are the top six changes you can expect:

1. Onboarding Processes are Quick and Easy

Your company is growing and new talent is joining all the time—how exciting! What’s not exciting is the manual work that goes into getting each new employee set up.

When you automate HR, the number of steps involved in onboarding (and offboarding) employees is drastically reduced. Forms can be filled out digitally with certain fields enforced to ensure the form is completed correctly. Instead of filling out repetitive information on every form (like employee name), it can be easily synced across all documents.  

Your new employees need to get up and running on a variety of applications, potentially with different permissions settings for each new hire. Let automated user provisioning take care of that for you. Your business process automation software can automatically create a support ticket, correctly provision the new user on Active Directory, VMWare, and other applications, notify the employee’s new manager, and close the ticket without any manual intervention.

Finally, forget about all those emails you’re exchanging to keep the process on track. After your automation solution handles the onboarding process, it will notify you and other stakeholders automatically. 

2. You’re Not Drowning in Paper

Onboarding checklists, I-9s, W-4s, employee evaluation forms, payroll increase forms… HR can feel like it revolves around paper, and it’s hard to keep track of it all. The right HR automation solution will provide your HR department with a single digital repository. All existing documents can be digitized and new documents can stay electronic throughout the entire process, making it easier to manage and reference documents as needed.

3. The Right Information Goes to the Right People

HR typically receives a variety of documents or requests by email or fax every day. The right business process automation solution can read information from these PDFs, Excel documents, websites, and even images, and manipulate that data as needed.

Here’s why that matters for HR: Say an email arrives with a PDF attachment that includes requests for three different staff members. Your automation software can monitor for the email arriving, automatically extract the data from the attachment to create three smaller documents for each request, and put the documents into a queue in your document management system for an HR employee to review.

HR documents often include sensitive information like social security numbers, and it’s important that only authorized employees have access to them. The right software solutions help your organization stay secure and compliant by ensuring that information is secured on a folder-by-folder basis. Users have unique permissions controlling which documents—and which automated workflows—they can see or edit.

4. Collaboration with Other Departments Improves

The HR department doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it needs to communicate and share information with every department in the company. HR automation is key to improving this collaboration and communication. By implementing your business process automation and document management solutions enterprise-wide, you can seamlessly integrate all your automated processes.

A robust HR automation solution will be able to integrate with any application critical to your business success. For example, many companies use SharePoint to facilitate teamwork. Business process automation software can automatically upload your documents for collaboration on SharePoint and then check any changes back into your document management system.

5. HR is in Control

As an HR staff member, you know your own processes. You know when they need to be completed, when there are exceptions to the workflow, and when it’s time to change the process.

A concern that HR and other business departments often have about implementing automation is that it will force them to rely too heavily on IT for configuring any new processes or workflow exceptions. This may have been true with traditional IT automation, but modern business process automation solutions use simple, drag-and-drop interfaces that are as intuitive for an HR manager as they are for a technical expert. After the initial implementation of your HR automation solution, the power will be in the business user’s hands.

6. You Have More Time for What Matters—The People

A people-oriented human resources department is critical to your organization’s success. Employees are any company’s greatest asset, and it’s HR that finds those employees and helps them become successful and happy members of the team. If the HR department is bogged down pushing paper, sending emails, and coordinating complex processes, they don’t have time to effectively support the goals of the business.

When you automate human resources, your HR department is able to put all its effort into building and maintaining a superior workforce for your organization.