In small businesses HR covers everything from payroll, and compliance, to employee records. These jobs are time consuming, repetitive, and susceptible to mistakes. Ideally, these operations should be carried out automatically. In fact, 85% of HR managers from companies that have adopted automation report it consumes less time and is generally more efficient for them.
Here is HR automation explained, along with how organizations can benefit from it.
What is HR Automation?
Human Resource automation is the use of software, or technology to make repetitive and time-consuming HR tasks take place on their own with minimal human supervision.
For this, you need purpose-built HR tools, and a strong Document Management System to ensure that your tasks are automated the way you want, and that your documents are kept safe.
Advantages of HR Automation
Employee retention is always cheaper than employee turnover. The slower and more susceptible to human error a business is, the less secure employees will feel as part of that company. HR automation helps cut down on that and it offers a few more advantages:
Time and Cost Saving
HR managers’ job covers processing every individual request by hand to make sure all HR tasks are running smoothly at all times. Any mistake can lead to lost work hours and piled up costs.
With automation, you only need to configure the system once and the rest happens without any additional follow up. This saves time, and keeps operating costs down.
More Secure
Protecting employee information is a legal and ethical requirement for any modern company. An open system is as secure as the hardware and building it is in. HR automation systems, however, can be as secure as banks with encryption and access control. This type of security keeps you safe from brute force attacks while keeping it easy for authorized users.
Scalability
All time spent on manual HR management is going to multiply with each additional employee. After a certain point HR will have more people than time on their hands. By using automation tools, you’re ensuring that your business can scale up or down at the click of a button with next to no effect on daily operations.
Ideal Areas for HR Automation
There is a temptation to want to optimize every aspect of HR, but it stands to reason that certain processes stand to benefit more from automation and others still require a human touch. Here are some of them:
Recruiting, Onboarding, and Employee Records Management
The HR recruiting and onboarding process is quite simple:
- Post job openings
- Source potential candidates
- Review resumes fast
- Conduct initial interviews
- Evaluate candidate fit
- Finalize hiring decisions
- Share onboarding docs
- Set up access tools
The recruiting process can be made simple if, after interviews, the HR teams catalog resumes alongwith interview notes in a folder that can only be accessed by the relevant people. This is better organized for each department and job type. A good system should also be configurable in a way to get approvals either in parallel or sequentially.
Keeping employee records safe requires strong digital record management software, as they are covered by data protection laws from unauthorized access.
Leave and Attendance Tracking, and Payroll processing
Manually tracking leaves, schedules, and attendance is bound to run into error sooner or later. Using an HR automation tool helps you keep track of all updates in a centrally accessible location, freeing you from the stress of dealing with mismatched data, unnecessary duplication of efforts, or
With a connected payment platform, HR can simply refer to their documents to see if there are any increments due, invoices to clear, or other payments to process and connect them to the system.
- Performance Management
A DMS provides a secure and centralised repository where performance data of all employees can be stored and easily accessed. Automated workflows can be set by HR for performance reviews through which forms can be routed to managers before review cycles. On completion, they can be sent to the employee for acknowledgement, and the finalised documents can be stored in the employee’s secure files.
To achieve a great HR automation balance, consider Folderit, that offers all the above features with an award-winning interface that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
