5 Quick Wins for an Automated HR

Daily life for the HR team in an organization revolves around a never-ending list of repetitive and monotonous tasks, from generating contracts for new hires to dealing with paperwork relating to performance appraisals and organizing training sessions. It can sometimes feel that there aren’t enough hours in the day for an over-stretched team.

Automating your core HR processes using workflow software is an excellent way to refine your people workflows and save valuable resources at the same time. An automated HR team is one that doesn’t have to spend the bulk of its day chasing down details, managing spreadsheets, and monitoring inboxes.

Here are five popular processes that are relatively easy for the HR team to automate and increase their efficiency dramatically.  

1. Time Off and Leave Management

A common complaint of line managers is the time and effort that it takes to authorize time off requests from their team members–usually using paper forms or emails and manually calculating leave entitlement.

Automation can provide an employee with a digital form, pre-populated with their available leave balance, giving managers access to shared team calendars to ensure department cover, as well as one-step authorization processes.

Interestingly, a recent study conducted by West Monroe found that more than one in five (23%) of line managers said that they spend more than five hours a day on administrative tasks such as time tracking. This goes to show how time-consuming this process can be in practice, preventing your managers from carrying out more value-adding activities that could contribute positively towards the success of your business.

2. New Hires and Onboarding

Automating the employee onboarding process is a savvy way to integrate all of the different tasks that need to happen when somebody joins your business, as well as the various people who are involved. Examples include organizing induction meetings, conducting training sessions, granting IT access, and more.

Another benefit of automating all of these activities is making the onboarding experience more efficient, consistent, and personal for your new hire, giving them a great first impression of their new company. In the war for talent, where companies compete against each other to recruit and retain the best employees, this could give your business a real edge.

3. Employee Offboarding

When somebody leaves a company, there is a multitude of things that the HR team usually coordinates. Often, this consists of completing manual checklists and constantly chasing outstanding tasks.

Automating your offboarding process means that no critical steps will be missed, since it gathers essential information and tracks completion, from the return of IT equipment, to access cards, to finalizing salary and benefits.

With the average turnover rate in the US at 22 percent (Mercer), without automation, that’s a lot of manual forms and tasks to complete every time somebody hands in their notice.

4. Recruitment Requests

This functionality is the perfect way to improve communication between HR and line managers, allowing the latter to complete a digital form to relay all information about a live vacancy and desired candidate to the HR team. This system avoids miscommunication in the recruitment process. HR can also use this form to check off all required steps related to candidates, such as tracking multiple interview arrangements and requesting references.

HR’s time should be well spent, and utilizing the benefits of this type of functionality with an HR automation tool can help to ensure that the majority of the work that they do is needed and valued.

5. Performance Appraisals

It’s fair to say that the annual performance appraisal process can often be subject to bad press in an organization. Often labeled as time-consuming, ineffective, and overly-manual, completing multiple feedback questionnaires and performance review documents and collating scores can deplete line managers’ time.

You can use a workflow tool to customize your performance appraisal process, offering employees and managers tools such as automatic reminders, easy-to-follow templates, and built-in scoring calculation matrices. Not only does this substantially speed up the time it takes to complete the process, but it also adds valuable consistency, as well. It can even improve employee motivation and morale during this inevitable annual ritual.

Conclusion

This is just a sample of some of the ways that an easy workflow automation tool like Kissflow HR Cloud can help your organization to make noticeable improvements to the speed, accuracy, and effectiveness of its core HR processes, benefiting employees, line managers, and the HR team alike. Contact us to find out more about how we can help you to drive your business forward by utilizing the benefits of Kissflow HR Cloud’s range of apps to streamline your core HR processes.