“Take care of your employees, and they will take care of your business” – Richard Branson.
“You don’t build a business, you build people, and then people build your business” – Zig Ziglar
These wise words underline the significance of employees in building your business. When you value your employees, enable and empower them with the right processes, technology, tools, and resources to save their time and efforts, you improve how they function, enhance their efficiency and productivity, and boost their morale.
Happy employees will make your customers happy, close deals faster, and generate more revenue. A sense of achievement will lead to higher motivation and enable business growth! The confluence of people, processes, and technology will provide the desired momentum to achieve growth and success in business.
The term automation refers to the use of technology to perform work with little or no human intervention. According to HRM Practice, HR automation is a process that improves the efficiency of HR departments by automating manual HR processes and eliminating information-centred risks.
Let’s explore how HR Automation brings out the best in employees to increase their efficiency.
Why invest in HR automation?
HR is a vital function of a company. It involves hiring, onboarding, training and development, compensations, appraisals, career planning, and more. The more effectively HR keeps employees engaged and happy, the more smoothly a company will operate & reach greater heights.
Although HR is primarily a people-centric department, it is also very document-intensive and relies heavily on the manual processing of documents. For example, many HR departments still receive resumes in physical mail and send offer letters, contracts by post.
Other common manually-performed tasks include:
- Gathering personal documents
- Verifying information against originals
- Filing signed agreements during onboarding
- Maintaining timesheets and records of performance appraisals
Digitizing and automating routine, monotonous HR tasks such as these will minimize manual data entry errors, reduce the possibilities of misplacement or loss of documents, and make achieving regulatory compliances easier and faster. In addition, it will enable faster information sharing, speed up processes, improve collaboration and productivity.
Automation leaves HR teams more time to focus on people-centred activities for employee retention, learning and development to improve employee engagement for higher employee satisfaction and retention.
Another significant benefit of HR automation is that it saves a substantial amount of paper and money spent on printing documents and physical storage.
Which functions can benefit from HR automation?
A KPMG report found that virtually all HR functions can be partially or fully automated. Some exceptions are highly strategic functions such as HR business strategy, change management, employee relations, which require the human touch and connection to build trust and develop long-standing relations for employee retention.
Scanning, digitizing, and indexing all HR documents is the first step in HR Automation. Digitizing documents makes them easy to circulate to employees based on roles and rights and are accessible from smart devices, anytime, and from anywhere. This lays the foundation for automating HR processes.
Setting up a digital mailroom for scanning, digitizing, indexing and storing digital versions of all incoming paper mail enhances the information sharing process for employees working from home and remote locations.
Let’s look at some HR functions that can be digitized and automated:
- Employee onboarding: Easy electronic document collection & verification
- Timesheet management: Maintain accurate records, manage employee timesheets automatically for payroll calculations.
- Leave management: Track leave requests, update leave balance, send leave application forms for e-approval to the concerned authority, thus speeding up the workflows.
- Performance management: Software can make the performance appraisal process fair and transparent, eliminating the probability of bias.
- Surveys: Conducting online and anonymous employee surveys enable employees to put forth their opinions fearlessly and help identify areas for improvement
- Collaboration and engagement: A lot of software tools & apps are available to ensure real-time collaboration & faster processing of work
- Online training: Online courses are freely available for up-skilling, cross-skilling employees. Training and achieving certifications form the basis for performance appraisal and boost employees’ career prospects.
- Rewards and recognition: Based on the employees’ performance, HR can provide badges, gift vouchers, or even recognition on social media for valuable contributions.
- Exit interviews: Exiting employees may not always be comfortable revealing the real reasons for their exit in a face-to-face interview. Automating the process can bring to light problems that need to be addressed for employee retention.
Automate, upskill, reskill, and reap the rewards!
Automation is undoubtedly the future of work.
Over 59% of employees state that the technology used in the workplace is very important to them when they consider switching jobs.
89% of employees believe that automation has made them more efficient at work.
Switching from manual HR processes to HR automation can be challenging – but organizations that achieve HR automation are sure to reap rich rewards.
Upskilling and reskilling are essential as you deploy automated technologies. Upskilling promotes organizational productivity.
According to a survey by UIPath, 80% of workers globally believe they would be more productive if they learned new skills. In addition to driving greater business outputs, employees who receive skills training are generally more inclined to stay at their jobs.
Switching to HR automation requires upskilling and training in using the new technology.
Work with an automation partner like AMI Imaging—we have extensive experience in implementing HR automation solutions like OnBase by Hyland—an HR automation software for improved employee management. Here’s a glimpse of the features that OnBase provides:
- Employee relations: Grievance tracking and incident handling minimize legal risks.
- Recruitment and selection: Capture, store, and route applicant files.
- Employee onboarding: Provides complete visibility into onboarding processes.
- Employee file management: Provides a single location to store employee files, to make them instantly available.
- Compliance: Identifies missing documents in each employee file and automates document retention to meet compliance standards and regulations.
- Policies and procedures: Enables electronic storage and distribution of policies and procedures to ensure employees are aware of the latest policies.
- Employee separation: Automates necessary activities from benefits to payroll for departing employees
AMI Imaging: Your trusted HR automation partner
AMI Imaging provides industry-leading document scanning and document management services. We offer onsite and offsite document scanning services for backfile scanning to convert your legacy HR documents into digital formats and day-forward scanning services to maintain your paperless operations.
Contact AMI today to discuss how you can empower your employees and improve efficiency with HR automation.