By: Siddharth Wadehra, QuickReach Digital Transformation Practice Lead
The human resources department in the organization is a complicated machinery. With the responsibility panning from hiring and onboarding new employees, getting them set up, training, ensuring compliance to local labor laws, the importance of the human resources department in the organization’s overall operations cannot be underestimated.
Given the importance of human resources in the success of a company, a lot of the processes in the department are still manual and done by associates. While technology is making significant inroads to how the HR department functions, a majority of the companies are still used to their traditional ways of handling tasks. In fact, a study by Deloitte suggested that 47% of the companies have HR software that is more than seven years old. While companies recognize the importance of technology in HR, there has been a visible reluctance and that many are slow to adopt automation to streamline their HR processes. Another study by Software pointed out that as many as 45% of the companies are still in the very early stages of implementing basic automation.
The traditional approach is clearly not working
As automation aided by intelligent tech finds its way into the corporate workplaces, the human resource department, with all its inefficiencies, is a good place to start. As your company looks to scale and add more workforce, not going for hr process automation could only bring business problems.
Here is a quick list of possible problems that might occur in case the company chooses to ignore HR process automation.
1. Inefficient HR operations
Like with all cases of successful automation implementation, increased efficiency is one of the biggest takeaways. HR associates are often spending their time on unproductive and monotonous tasks that do not add business value. These include filing tedious paperwork or feeding the same set of information into multiple tools that do not communicate with each other. According to a report by the CareerBuilder Survey, HR managers lose an average of 14 hours per week completing tasks that could have been automated, while more than a quarter waste 30 hours or more. Automation would help significantly reduce inefficient HR operations and allow repetitive tasks to be completed by machines or bots, leaving humans to undertake work that adds business value.
2. Costly operations and human errors
The human resource department has a number of repetitive tasks that should be best left for machines to tackle. These could include verifying timesheets, checking leaves, calculating payrolls and the like. Involving HR associates could often be the recipe for disaster. Human errors often creep in which could take a large amount of time and effort to identify and correct just like how a single human error on an Excel spreadsheet costed JP Morgan billions of dollars in 2013. Couple this with the fact that paper is costly, inefficient, and bad for the environment. Manual error only makes it worse. Papers can be lost or misfiled, illegible or somehow unusable which means they are often replaced by more paper files. eFileCabinet, in one of its reports, suggests that the average organization spends $20 per paper to file it, $120 searching for each lost document and $220 for the recreation of the document.
Automation technology is a great investment that will make employees’ lives easier and improve customer engagement. Digital software also catches mistakes before you submit your form or document. This prevents inbox flooding and employees will not need to track down their manager to fix simple errors anymore.
3. Poor customer experience
Inefficient onboarding process and different aspects of the hiring processes could leave the candidate frustrated and might lead to a bad hiring experience. Candidates might feel disheartened if the HR does not often follow-up with them. Given the fact that the associates are swamped with manual tasks, it is possible that they miss catering to the candidate experience. The same holds true for training. A report by Businesswire says that 36% of HR professionals expressed that their inability to automate and organize their onboarding process negatively impacts their training process. Another report suggests that organizations with standardized onboarding processes experience 62% new hire productivity along with 50% new hire retention.
There are a number of HR processes that you can automate. From employee onboarding to maintaining accurate timesheets, leave requests, performance management, and even exit interviews, HR process automation is possible. This provides the HR team with actionable insights and speedS up the decision-making process.
QuickReach brings business process automation to HR departments
The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that as much as 56% of all tasks human resource departments perform can be automated with existing technologies. Needless to suggest, this HR process automation would allow associates and executives with time to focus on delivering business value which matters. Low code business process automation solutions like QuickReach allows you to use pre-defined and ready-to-use templates which would allow you to roll out your first automated HR process in a matter of minutes.
All of the HR processes, even those in sales, finance, office admin, and IT, can be automated using solutions like QuickReach. Reach out to our Customer Success team here or try QuickReach by signing up for a free 7-day invite-only access here.
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