Best Practices for HR Process Automation

Your employees take care of your organization, while your HR team takes care of your employees.

For the smooth running of an organization, your HR team puts in a lot of effort, manual work, time, and other resources. What if you could take a little burden off their shoulders and automate certain HR processes to save time and effort?

Yes, with automation in HR, you can successfully ensure higher employee productivity and engagement.

Let’s understand what happens in HR automation, its benefits, and some of the best practices that you should follow.

What Is HR Automation?

HR automation is about using software solutions to streamline, digitize, and automate HR processes that are repetitive and consume a lot of time and manual effort. These HR processes include payroll calculation, employee onboarding, timekeeping, and other administrative tasks.

Automation of HR processes will help your HR team focus on strategies instead of repetitive tasks. HR automation minimizes human errors and ensures efficiency and security.

However, to facilitate HR automation in your organization, your employees should be ready to adapt to innovative technologies. Additionally, they might require certain training to learn the nuances of HR automation software. But eventually investing your time and effort will be worth it.

HR Processes that Should be Automated vs. Those That Should Not

Here are some of the HR procedures that can be automated via an automation tool.

• Onboarding: The HR automation tool can help in automating onboarding tasks like verifying employees’ docs, generating login credentials, sending guides for job responsibilities, etc.
• Timesheets: HR automation software can be used for accurately tracking and managing the employees’ timesheets.
• Leave requests: With the software, you can automatically update the leave balance, send them for approval, notify the leave approval to employees, and so on.
• Exit Interviews: By using software, you can send exit surveys to employees who are leaving the organization. The responses shared will be automatically analyzed and aggregated by the software for taking inputs to improve the organization’s work environment.
• Performance KPIs: The HR automation tool can help you in setting performance goals or KPIs to measure the employee’s performance against these metrics.
• Payroll: Payroll automation will help in automatically calculating tax, generating paychecks, sending salary slips to employees, and so on.
• Records Management: It is one of the many HR processes that can be automated and includes tasks like extracting data from other systems, maintaining employee records, updating records, etc.
• Employee Offboarding: The automation of employee offboarding includes de-provisioning user identities, collecting exit forms, issuing relieving letters, updating exit details in records, etc.

HR process automation can help businesses in automating various processes. However, there are some areas where full automation might not be possible:

• Employee engagement cannot be automated as it involves interaction with employees
• The learning and development process cannot be fully automated because human intervention is required to help employees get familiar with job technicalities.
• You cannot fully automate the employee performance and appraisal process as one-on-one discussion is required for this procedure.

Suggested Read: Adapt HR Automation Today – Increase Productivity by 50%

HR automation examples; In detail

Recruiting Process

You can automate your recruiting process for sending automated emails, scheduling interviews, adding auto-reject questions, etc. This will help you in automating the initial screening of candidates, and you can further invest your time in candidate evaluation, selection and onboarding.

Timesheet Keeping

Keeping attendance records is a tiresome task if done manually, However, you can use HR software for automatically tracking time and attendance for every employee accurately. You can calculate working days, holidays, off requests, work shifts, time offs, etc., with automated timesheets.

Payroll

When you have all the information regarding employees’ working hours and remuneration, you can process payroll easily. Payroll automation also supports helps automate tax calculation, paycheck generation, auto-credit of bonuses, etc.

Tax Filing

With cloud-based HR automation, you can ensure timely tax calculation and filing to avoid any compliance issues. You can even customize it according to your specific state tax rules. This takes up the pressure off your HR team to do taxes manually.

Recording Expenses

Apart from employee salaries, there are other office expenses that your HR team manages. These additional expenses are recorded, entered, and approved manually, which becomes a long and tedious process for everyone. However, automating these processes will allow every employee or department to add their own expenses on the self-service portal, thus making approvals quicker.

Records Management

Automating the records management process will eliminate the burden of manually finding details of an employee in a pile of documents. It ensures transparency, accountability, and efficiency across departments. The entire information about an employee’s lifecycle can be fetched instantly through HR management software.

Employee Onboarding & Offboarding

It includes HR tasks right from bringing onboard an employee till the final offboarding process. There are chances of biases or inefficiencies during these processes but automating these tasks will ensure transparency. Additionally, it will also save your company from any potential legal issues in the future.

Notifications & Reminders

With HR software, you can send automated reminders and notifications for special days or events. These include work anniversaries, employee performance reviews, holidays, and other key dates. This will ensure that you don’t miss important dates, and you no longer need to chase people to complete their tasks or give them reminders. Along with improving communication, it will also ensure timely actions.

Apps and Tools Access

When a new employee joins your organization, he or she will need access to all the applications with the right permission level. This entire process can waste a lot of time for employees. However, using an automation tool, you can provide apps and tools’ access to employees easily. With the HR software, employees can request access for certain apps and get them approved from managers based on pre-defined criteria.

Expense Claims Management

Automated HR systems can help you streamline and digitize the expense management system. Employees can upload a photo of receipt in the expense management software where the data like amount, merchant name, and VAT will be extracted. After submission, details will be sent to the relevant manager who will reject or approve it. The controller will check and process the receipt, thereby reducing the processing time.

Best Practices for HR Automation

We’ve listed some of the best practices for HR process automation across different industries:-

Invest in Low-Code and No-Code Tools

Low code and no-code tools have made it easier for organizations to create and customize the modules of their HR software as per their requirements. Most of them offer the drag and drop functionality to easily create and design modules as per your needs.

Start Small

Adapting to modern technologies takes time, you can’t expect your HR team to understand and implement new automation processes in a single day. So, instead, try starting with small changes in the complete process.

To incorporate automation tools in your HR procedures, it is better to automate small tasks and business procedures first. For that purpose, you can follow the agile methodology where you can first automate, test, and iterate a few HR processes first. Once you get successful, you can automate other human resources processes as well.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

The idea behind using automation tools is not to isolate human workers, instead it should help accomplish their tasks accurately in a shorts span. For instance, you can create automated workflow guides for your new employee to help them get familiar with their new job responsibilities. This will help the HR team to focus on other important tasks and save time on explaining each and every to the new joiners.

Simplify Workflows

One of the main reasons behind adopting HR automation is to simplify and define workflows in the organization. With the help of automation technologies, tasks like maintaining records of working days, holidays, and other HR requests can be simplified and streamlined. If these tasks are done manually then it will take a lot of time to complete and also require multiple people to manage each step of the process. For example, manually maintaining the track of employees’ sickness, paid, and unpaid leaves can be tiresome for the HR department. However, with HR automation, companies can create a separate portal for each employee where their used and remaining leave balance can be maintained.

Train Employees on Latest Technologies

There has been a lot of advancement in the field of AI especially with the coming of machine learning and deep learning technologies. Therefore, it is important for you to train your employees in these technologies so that they can use HR automation tools and other business software with ease.

Built a ‘Self-Help’ Attitude

To understand new HR automation software, your employees might constantly contact the IT or HR department to ask several questions. In this case, providing a self-help option like a few basic tutorials or a handbook of certain FAQs would be of great help. In this way, employees can always get access to the information they need to get their job done.

HR Automation Benefits

Automated HR processes save time by streamlining tasks like payroll, record management, tax filing, employee onboarding, etc. Thereby increasing operational efficiency and reducing data discrepancies. Some other benefits of implementing automation in HR procedures include:

• Cost-Effective: Human resource automation will help reduce your processing and inventory costs. It includes reducing paper costs, stationery costs, and time and resources spent on manual work.
• Ensure Transparency: HR automation enables you to achieve transparency in the processes by defining everyone’s roles and responsibilities clearly. It is especially beneficial for organizations working from multiple locations.
• Enhanced Productivity: Performing tasks like employee onboarding, updating data record, and payroll processing manually can take up a lot of time. However, by using the HR solution, you can easily automate these tasks and complete them in a short period. By automating tedious, manual tasks, the HR team can invest their time and effort in more strategic tasks. At the same time, employees will feel more engaged with training, feedback, rewards, and recognition.
• Ensure Optimum Security: Automating HR processes will ensure that only eligible employees have access to any information. There will be less chances of information leak or theft. Further, all the data is stored in a single system, making it vulnerable to data breaches. Therefore, you can restrict access use multiple security protocols like 2FA or data encryption to keep all the data secure.
• Facilitate Collaboration & Communication: HR automation clearly defines roles and responsibilities for every employee and ensures accurate reporting. It helps with seamless collaboration and workflow.
• Reduce Mistakes: Many HR procedures like leave management, employee data updating, and payroll processing when managed manually can lead to discrepancies and incorrect data entry. However, with automated human resources processes, all the data will be automatically recorded accurately.
• Improved Hiring and Onboarding Process: Your human resource department can greatly benefit from automation in hiring and onboarding processes. HR software can help you in identifying the best candidates from talent pool, categorizing selected and unselected candidates, interviewed candidates, etc. In the onboarding process, the automation can help you with verifying the candidates’ documents, sending them welcoming emails, providing access to the company’s apps and tools, etc.
• Better Business Decisions: HR automation can help analyze and learn from the data. With accounting software, you can collect data from different processes like payroll, recruitment, attendance, etc., to perform data analysis and gain insights.HR automation allows you to pull out insights and make data-driven decisions. This data can be used to improve processes, rectify failures, and identify loopholes.

Conclusion

Investing in HR automation tools may seem like a hefty investment in the start, however, in the long run, it can greatly help you save money on manual processes. From managing recruitment, to streamlining employees onboarding and processing payroll, every HR process can be streamlined and completed in a short span with greater efficiency.

Suggested Read: What is HR Analytics: Definition, Types and Benefits

FAQs Related to HR Process Automation

Related Categories: HR Software | Payroll Management Software | Leave Management Software | Attendance Software