5 HR processes ripe for automation

Looking for a sign that it’s time to automate your HR processes? Take a look at how many manual reminder emails you send out every day. It might be for timesheet approvals, performance reviews, recruitment interviews, filing tax or other documents with government departments … the list is endless. As organisations grow, it gets more and more difficult to keep up – yet we know that unless these tasks are done, we pay the price in terms of poor employee engagement, increased staff turnover, and possibly even financial penalties.

When times are lean and HR teams are stretched, the only way to stay on top of your “to-do” list is to automate HR & payroll tasks. Almost any repetitive job duty can be automated – indeed, a 2017 study by McKinsey Global Institute[1] revealed that 56% of typical “hire-to-retire” tasks could be automated with then-current technologies and limited process changes.

We’ve identified 5 areas that we believe can benefit the most from automation.

1. Recruitment

Successful recruitment is a delicate balance of science and art. While the art comes from personal relationships – which will never be replaced by technology – the science comes from established steps that must be taken to ensure the best talent is sourced and recruited, mixed with a healthy dose of data analytics to keep you informed of how you’re tracking. Fortunately, many of those steps can be automated.

For example, ELMO Recruitment offers sophisticated applicant tracking and candidate relationship tools to ensure each step is seamless for HR, hiring managers and candidates alike. Approval workflows can be customised to suit any recruitment process and can then be standardised for use throughout the organisation. Pre-screening questions can remove applicants who don’t meet minimum requirements for the role, and resume parsing and matching can be used to shortlist candidates who best match the job requirements. In addition, email communication with applicants can be branded and automated, and interviews can be scheduled and synched with a digital calendar. Finally, job offers and contracts can be digitally created and sent to candidates, who can sign electronically at their convenience.

2. Onboarding

Few steps in the employee-employer relationship are as document-intensive as onboarding. Tax, bank, superannuation and other compliance related forms must be issued by employers and signed by new employees. That data then needs to be entered into company databases and distributed to government entities. Fortunately, automation can help here too.

ELMO Onboarding enables managers to set up customised workflows that move new hires through each step of the onboarding process. Technology can streamline the administrative side of onboarding by simplifying workflows, sending reminders to complete tasks, funnelling new employees into learning portals and submitting relevant documents to government authorities. The key is empowering employees with self-service functionality so they can sign and submit forms electronically and move at their own pace through each step – with automated reminders if they fall behind. That personal data can then be used to sync employee information across all necessary forms and even other areas internally, such as payroll.

3. Payroll

Traditionally, payroll has been a logistical headache involving not just the management of compliance obligations but pulling together information from a number of legacy systems. It has entailed personnel spending hours or days entering in payroll data. With automation, HR or payroll staff can complete a couple of simple steps in order to complete the process.

To cite just a few examples from ELMO Payroll, employee and manager self-service helps reduce the administrative burden on HR and payroll teams. Employees can, for example, gain access and make changes to their bank, superannuation and tax details. Employees can also gain access to payslips and pay summaries and digitally fill out forms without involving the payroll or HR team. Timesheet filing and approval can also be done “on the go” with 24/7 access via mobiles and tablets. Data duplication is also minimised due to the ability to share payroll data with accounting systems.

When ELMO Payroll is integrated with ELMO Rostering / Time & Attendance, the risks of underpaying employees are minimised thanks to a powerful Business Rules Engine and Award Library. In addition, employees are empowered to track their own time and attendance on desktop or mobile devices – providing accurate and real-time reporting.

4. Leave management

Organisations can lose a significant amount of time and productivity if employees are burdened with heavy administrative tasks to support the HR function. Any manager who has wasted valuable time trawling through emails in search of holiday requests and manually updating leave records will appreciate what automation can do in this field.

ELMO’s HR Core, for example, centralises and provides access to employee data. Self-service functionality enables employees to apply for leave, check their leave balance, and forecast future leave. It also allows managers to oversee and better plan for staff absences. HR Core also integrates with ELMO’s own payroll system and other systems, so users can check payslips and payment summaries.

5. Performance management

Manually managing the performance records of 5 employees might be fine – perhaps you can even get away with it when you hit 15 or 20 employees. Beyond that, it’s time to think about automating.

Having all performance data in one system, such as ELMO Performance Management, allows managers to easily keep track of individual and team performance, spot trends and identify potential performance roadblocks. Similarly, for those HR professionals who traditionally spend too much time manually sending reminders to line managers to schedule performance appraisals with staff, this task can also be automated.

ELMO Performance Management offers a range of pre-built goals, development objectives and desired competencies, which can be utilised to create a library of content for use across the business. The solution offers auto-populating appraisal templates, so that administrators can quickly introduce highly customised appraisals for each employee.

Time to start the journey

As shown in the 5 examples above, it’s the data-intensive tasks that stand to benefit the most from automation – and that’s something that will help all HR team members, from junior co-ordinators to senior CHROs. According to a CareerBuilder survey[2], HR managers say they lose an average of 14 hours a week manually completing tasks that could be automated. Imagine what you could do with 14 extra hours a week! If that sounds appealing, contact ELMO Cloud HR & Payroll to start your automation journey today.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organization-blog/human-resources-in-the-age-of-automation

[2] http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-05-18-More-Than-Half-of-HR-Managers-Say-Artificial-Intelligence-Will-Become-a-Regular-Part-of-HR-in-Next-5-Years