Human resources teams are only human—this past year has been extremely taxing on them. HR is there to manage and support the people behind the technology. Good leadership is up to your HR team to monitor. In fact, it's the top priority of 60% of HR leaders in 2023. The new work environment is challenging leaders to be more authentic and adaptive. It's calling for a new type of leadership—a more 'human' one.
Remote work has also brought some new changes. Challenges to HR teams have mounted: How to recruit quality talent in a remote setting? How do we foster morale and a good culture as WFH team members feel out of the loop?
Many HR teams have turned to automation to streamline certain processes, giving them the time and flexibility to focus on areas where humans are most needed. This post will explore how human resources automation can help your HR team today.
Automated for the People: How Automation Helps HR Teams Thrive
The benefits of automation are becoming clearer by the day, department by department. A recent Deloitte study showed that 68% of business leaders are using automation. Due to the problems and worries of remote work, HR teams now need more time to do organizational diagnosis and human-centered strategy. They can't afford to be tied up in administrative tasks. Luckily, automated solutions exist to provide precisely this time and freedom. Brian Kropp, VP of Gartner, puts it like this: “A lot of what an HR manager has historically done has the potential to be or has already started to be automated.”
A perceived “con” of human resources automation is that it will require training and upskilling of the workforce, familiar burden HR teams hardly want to add to their plates. Well, breathe easy—then look into a ready-to-use automation platform like Wrk, which requires no complex integration or steep learning curve, just the ability to drag and drop pre-configured actions into a Wrkflow that does the rest for you. An automated solution like the Wrk Platform is designed not to disrupt existing HR processes, but to enhance them. Such a platform is seamless, and connects to any software—whether legacy systems, or internal software—without being limited to public APIs.
5 HR Processes to Automate Now
With the right tool, the results of human resources automation can be dramatic. Here's how:
1. Recruitment and hiring
HR automation can empower talent teams to get the most out of their prospects. Recruiters can average 23 hours of screening resumes for a single position. Automation platforms can handle the tedium of resume sifting and do it much faster. For example, a Wrkflow from Wrk can function within your applicant tracking system (ATS) to immediately decide on and rank qualified candidates against internal criteria, then generate a list of top candidates for the hiring manager. Think of the time saved.
More companies are looking to hire based on “culture fit,” which might be hard to gauge if you’re interviewing virtually. This is one process where it makes sense to take time. In a video interview with Wrk, Ben Lemelin, Senior Vice President of Talent & Culture at Stradigi AI, spoke of the value of diligence and slowness in recruitment. To Lemelin, recent events have only driven home the importance of being patient with some aspects of the hiring process:
“Everybody’s running all the time. There are moments in your days when you have to strategically walk. And when you’re doing an interview, that’s one of them. You can’t run. You can’t book it for 45 minutes because you have another call for 15 minutes after that.”
Finding a culture fit is possible remotely, provided you give yourself the time—indeed, the quality time HR automation frees up for you.
2. Employee onboarding and offboarding
A happy new employee begins with a warm, easy welcome. Employee onboarding may never be “simple”—it’s been estimated that new hires often complete 54 activities during the onboarding process—but that doesn’t mean it has to be confusing or painful.
Ensure that your employee onboarding and offboarding processes are as seamless as possible with Wrk. Photo Credit: True Agency
By harnessing automation, your HR team can trigger an end-to-end Onboarding Wrkflow when you add a new employee contract to Oracle. From there, such onboarding staples as welcome emails, account access, requests, benefits enrolment, and more can be streamlined by automation—speeding the process of employee onboarding by up to 33%, with 50% cost-savings.
When an employee and company prepare to part ways, aspects of the offboarding process can be automated to generate checklists for both employee and HR, and to ensure a secure transfer of information. On the human side, relevant parties can focus on gaining value from the exit interview.
3. Employee training and development
Training may be an area where HR teams could afford to dedicate more resources. Research by Middlesex University showed that 56% of HR managers identified employee training and development as an essential driver of growth, yet this same study indicated that a large number of employees lacked development opportunities. How to explain this gap? Existing HR processes might operate on the “fit training in” model, a recipe for neglect.
HR teams should explore automated training and development. These can be done with LMS applications to increase engagement and offer vital insights into learning needs. Training materials can now be paperless, with the rise in portals and webinars that slot easily into automated platforms. Even creating these training materials can be part of your automation solution! Think about the power of a human workforce that works with automated processes to make webinars that are perfect for your business.
4. Claims and requests processing
Small, regular things that employees do, like filing expenses and asking for time off, can use up bandwidth. It can take, on average, 20 minutes to process a single expense claim. Scale that up to a month’s worth of claims and the drain on resources can seem head-spinning. Therefore you can then use automation to speed up the claims process.
By eliminating approval delays, for expenses and time-off requests alike, human resources automation can make employees feel more supported, thus boosting all-important morale.
The approval process for claims and requests can be immediate with platforms like Wrk. HR teams can trust Wrk Actions to decide on the eligibility of a claim or request as soon as someone enters it in Expensify. Human resources automation can make employees feel more supported by eliminating approval delays, for expenses and PTO requests alike, thus boosting all-important morale.
5. Compliance
Complying with the rules is a complicated HR task that could use some help from automation. About 40% of companies say they feel prepared for an audit. As federal laws, company rules, and company procedures change, HR teams must make sure employees follow them to reduce risk. Automation can play key compliance roles in recruitment, wages and hours, and employee credentialing. To lessen risks, you can automate reminders and updates. If compliance audits occur, such applications as payroll automation can reduce the risk of error in any good data.
With HR Automation, Be More Present—Remotely
There are great reasons for HR teams to shift to automation. It’s efficient, reliable, and takes care of tasks no human should have to do. In this remote world, dare we say that automation can help bring... humanity back to HR?
For further solutions to human resources, visit our HR Wrkflows page and our HR Hub!
