Top 8 Human Resource Tasks to Automate for better Employee Experience

What is HR workflow automation?

When it comes to automation in business—and in particular human resources (HR)—improving workplace productivity, providing better employee experience and reducing overall cost are three equally important areas. In today’s post, we’ll explore eight HR processes you can (and should) automate to avoid bottlenecks and maximize workplace efficiency.

The HR is responsible for a lot of different tasks, many of which depend on HRMS tool and document-driven processes to help employees get work done. Some common responsibilities HR professionals deal with include:

  • Onboarding and offboarding
  • Leave management
  • Employee benefits
  • Timesheet processing
  • Payroll

For each of the above processes, HR workflow automation software like Workativ allows you to rid yourself of paper documents and make your job easier.

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Challenges during HR workflow automation

Here are a few challenges that businesses might encounter while automating HR functions.

1. Disparate Systems

Most businesses have more than one HR software or tools that HR personnel use day to day to deliver employee services. This might include expense management software for employees like Expensify, Human Capital Management (HCM) tools like GreytHR and payroll software for employee payroll. Integrating and executing workflows with these different HR apps becomes cumbersome and time consuming for HR team. Sometimes these systems don’t support the level of desired integration and task automation.

2. Undefined /Undocumented Processes

New employee onboarding and leave request authorization processes tend to vary extensively within a business — even in the same department. As you can well imagine, these undocumented and unnecessary deviations tend to create mind-numbing complexity not just for the business but for its employees as well resulting in lower employee satisfaction scores.

3. HR staff dependent on developers to build workflows

HR software/tools in general might require developers for making them work with each other in a single workflow instead of having separate workflows for each software/application that the business owns. This leads to an increase in developer dependency and costs for the company with the company’s budget taking a toll.

4. HR workflow tools are expensive to buy and even more expensive to implement

HR workflow tools that exist in the market nowadays might be really expensive for some companies to even consider making them a part of their business. These HR workflow tools are expensive to buy as well as expensive to implement as they might require an experienced developer for which companies have to spend separately for hiring.

8 Human Resources tasks to Automate

Let’s take a look at eight important HR functions that you can automate for better employee experience.

1. Employee onboarding

The competition to get skilled and talented employees onboard continuously intensifies. Whether you have a company with multiple offices around the globe or you need to provide 24/7 customer support. You most likely need talents from different countries, regions or cities. Or simply to have access to a wider talent pool. However, no matter the reason why you’re hiring remote employees, it’s always a big challenge! Automating the onboarding process for remote employees, just as for on-site ones, makes the most sense. Why?

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average cost per hire is more than $4000. An amount that adds up when we consider that a US company turnover rate is about 22%. Therefore you must guarantee the success of a new employee onboarding. Otherwise, it will just cost you too much time and money. Using HR workflow automation to automate onboarding process will improve delivery, traceability, measurability and also reduce the time and resources you need to spend to successfully onboard remote employees and retain them.

To automate a new employee onboarding process is to streamline all the interactions and work involved in onboarding a new employee. Smoothing things out like this can help reduce tension and improve employees’ first experience. The automation of a new employee onboarding process provides a guide for the new employee. It smoothly guides them through the entire process, facilitating the transition between stages.

Using a HR workflow automation software like Workativ, you can set up an automation such that, when a new hire is added on to a HRMS application by an IT agent/HR via Workativ, Workativ uses those details to automatically add the new hire in the company’s IAM app like Okta and then add the hire as a requestor in an ITSM app like Freshservice as well and then provision a company email for the hire on outlook and then inform the hire on their slack channel and then create a ticket on an app like Freshdesk in closed status informing IT agents as well. Everything automatically.

With an automated employee onboarding process new hires know exactly what to do, when and how. The organization can make sure all aspects of a successful onboarding process are considered and add them to the standardized process; contributing to the overall employee well-being, engagement and retention.

2. Maintain Employee Personal Data

Smaller companies tend not to have much of an issue with employee data, except in cases of human error. However, as companies grow, keeping track of employees and their personal data can be nightmarishly difficult without a proper HR workflow automation system like Workativ. Thus, automating data entry work will drastically reduce human errors and the amount of HR staff you need to take on this time-consuming task.

3. Timesheets

Timesheet automation will make a huge difference to your company. When your employees are scattered at remote locations, working from client sites or from home, the ease of a centralized solution will soon be apparent. A HR workflow automation software like Workativ keeps timesheets up to date, which in turn means your team can spend their time on the projects and tasks that matter. Managers have access to the information they need to track costs and make adjustments as necessary. Overhead costs go down as payroll processing becomes more efficient. Here are some benefits of automating timesheet management.

a. Businesses that automate timesheets require much less administrative overhead related to timesheet entry and centralization. Reconciliation and reporting are significantly more efficient.

b. Timesheet management can be easily automated via Workativ’s HR workflow automation. This means that employees can just bring up Workativ on their Slack or Microsoft Teams app and ask it to update their timesheet by providing the required details and Workativ will do it for them in an instant. Employees can even tell Workativ to retrieve their timesheet so that they can check it.

c. An automated timesheet approval process saves everyone time. Managers have direct insight into how team members are spending their time including the breakdown between billable and non-billable hours. They can use the data to work with their team to ensure the most productive approach to completing projects.

4. Leave management

Depending on the size of your company, the number of leave requests flowing through management and into the HR department could be monumental. Sorting through these requests, validating them and processing them in a timely manner can be incredibly cumbersome. There’s also the serious risk of requests slipping by unnoticed, resulting in delays in approvals and a subsequently frustrating employee experience. When HR automates this process, leave requests become simple and track-able, and employee records are updated instantly.

Using an HR workflow automation software like Workativ, you can set up an automation such that, when an employee requests for a paid time off/leave on Workativ via Slack or Microsoft Teams, Workativ sends approval requests to the respective managers and gets back to the employee once the managers approve of the leave request. It’s that simple.

5. Payroll Enquiry

Employees can effortlessly check their payroll details via Workativ at the comfort of their Slack or Microsoft Teams app. When an employee asks Workativ to retrieve their payroll details, Workativ looks up the company’s HRMS software for the employees’ payroll details and displays it to the employee in the blink of an eye. It’s that easy with Workativ.

6. Employee Benefits Management

Looking up benefits is much easier using HR workflow automation software like Workativ. It can do a variety of things, but mostly, it helps the employee check on their benefits.

Using HR workflow automation software for employees to check their benefits frees up valuable employee time, so they focus on what’s important — customers.

7. Shift Management

Shift management can be a hassle when employees have to log in and out of a static portal when they start their shift and end their shift. With Workativ, employees can easily inform Workativ conversationally that they are starting their shift/ending their shift and Workativ will update this automatically on the company’s HRMS software.

8. Employee offboarding

You could offboard employees on a case by case basis. But doing so makes it harder to standardize the process. A HR workflow automation software like Workativ uses a repeatable list of actions and expectations. This saves an HR department a lot of time so they can focus on higher ROI tasks instead.

It will also maintain compliance and make it easier for HR team members to communicate and coordinate efforts for a quick and streamlined experience.

With Workativ, you can set up an automation such that, when there’s an outgoing employee, when you ask Workativ to remove that employee by providing the required details, Workativ deactivates that employee on your company’s HRMS application as well as automatically deactivates them on your IAM and ITSM apps and deprovisions their email ID and creates a ticket in closed status on an ITSM app like Zendesk informing IT agents and HR personnel alike.

Doing so makes it easier for HR team members to handle each unique situation without missing a beat.

With a workflow automation software like Workativ, you can create a high-quality process to ensure everyone’s satisfaction on their way out the door.

If you don’t have a HR workflow automation software, you run the risk of compromising sensitive information about your business, leaving loose ends unattended to, and not keeping proper and up-to-date employment records.

Delivering remote IT support for employees is more important than ever. We can help automate employee support with intelligent chatbot and workflow automation, out-of-the-box. Sign up for Workativ at workativ.com today!

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