Human resource functions in any organization are essential for policy enforcement and administrative work. Some of the tasks involved require the regular use of emails, forms and making calls. HR staff has to repeat similar tasks when handling different requests or procedure involving several employees.
Automating some of these tasks is helpful in improving the department’s efficiency, speed and lowering the incidences of errors, improving workflow and productivity and giving them the ability to track progress. With automation, the staff members can serve employees better while ensuring all HR goals are met on time. Here are six automation ideas that the HR department can adapt to improve workflow efficiency.
1. Employee Onboarding
The process of employee onboarding involves a significant amount of paperwork and other standard procedures. The performance of these duties can be improved tremendously by automating them. Automation makes it easy for the HR department to collect employee information fast, liaise with the relevant departments with ease, make the signing of contracts easier and create a procedural approach to onboarding so that no steps are left out every time the process is repeated. Besides, the processing time required for a different document can be done in a few hours rather than several days. Some of the activities that can be automated during onboarding include the job application process, the signing of contracts and the creation of employee training manuals and work timetables.
2. Managing Employee Personal Information
Every employee accumulates some personal information for as long as they are in the organisation. For businesses small, managing employee personal information is not difficult. However, if the number goes up, it may be a nightmare to track and keep accurate information of all the employees. Automation may involve setting up HR management software to store all employee data for easy retrieval. The software also allows for employee information update in real time, thereby lowering the chances of either data loss or making errors when entering employee data manually. It also makes it easy to safeguard sensitive information from unauthorised access.
3. Document Management
The HR department is all about documentation. Most of the communication and engagement with employees will be supported by one document to the other. All or most of the documentation in human resources come in the form of forms, correspondences, certificates or manuals. The HR department can benefit from digitising the documentation process through the reduction of processing time and lowering errors in entry. The department can start digital document management by creating digital forms such as leave forms, sick leave forms and show cause documentation and so on. As for already existing documents in hard copy or documents that cannot be created in digital format, the department can scan and store the information in digital format. It is also a great backup tool to protect the information from malicious or accidental damage.
Forms and documents that are in hard copy do not have to redesigned anew. The department can scan any document into an image. They can then use the OCR to convert the image to text. The OCR is effective for the conversion of images to a mix of different content formats such as tables, text and other diagrams.
4. Meetings
Meetings can be tricky even when the number of employees involved is small. Scheduling for meetings and getting enough space to hold everyone can also be a challenge. Fortunately, the HR department can make meeting a lot easier by use of technology. There is a wide variety of tools in the market that enables video conferencing and interaction between individuals at different areas of the office.
The relevant HR staff member sends out an invite link to all the required employees who register for the meeting. At the time of the gathering, they log into the meeting software and get connected with the host and other employees. The technology allows the HR department to have meetings even with some staff members out in the field without requiring them to come to the office.
5. Performance Reviews
Most organisations do a single paper-based performance appraisal at the end of the year. Unfortunately, this process is highly ineffective as it misses out many aspects of the employee performance and external factors that may have contributed to the performance. The HR department can adopt an automated performance review across the board. The software-based performance review ensures consistency in the appraisal procedures throughout the organisation. It also comes with key appraisal touchpoints that ensure that all the relevant key performance indicators are engaged when evaluating employee performance. Reviews are also done all the time. Therefore, the HR department can tell the performance of any employee as at a given date. They can take appropriate action when necessary without waiting for scheduled performance appraisals.
6. Travel and Leave Requests Management
Travel and leave requests are paper-intensive processes. The HR department is met with a challenge to keep track of each of these requests in line with the company policy. These processes can be automated where every leave request automatically reduces the number of leave days available. As for travel requests, the software can enable coordination between different departments with ease to facilitate travelling regarding approvals, availability of funds and timing for the travel. In this case, both the application process and management is done online.
Every HR department should automate some of their procedures regardless of the size of the organisation or the number of employees. Automation makes the work easier, lowers the incidence of errors and ensures that tasks are completed on time. The HR department should adopt HR automation best practices to ensure transparency, security of information and cost-effectiveness.