In today’s millennial world where digital media, artificial intelligence, and automation are growing rampant across the streets, it seems only wise to incorporate the bounties of automation at your venture. Well yes, human resources automation has made its way to make your company even more credible and competitive.
HR automation utilizes software to automate and rationalize the management of document-centric tasks, allowing the human resource departments to have improved efficiency and reduced cycle time, and in the process reduce the risk of human error.
On top of this, a recent report by Forbes magazine elucidates that the younger workforce or the ‘millennials’ find automation-driven workplaces much more collaborative and organized to work with. Thus, taking measures to accommodate automation in your business’ HR communications can be extremely advantageous to get fresh young talent to your venture.
To dive deeper into the world of HR automation, it is essential to understand how beneficial this type of automation can be for any kind of business – be it a large scale or a medium, small business.
Benefits of HR Automation
Cost Savings like never-seen-before
One of the biggest selling points of implementing HR automation at your establishment is that it increases the efficiency of work by eliminating any kind of paper-based records and tasks. By centralizing all the information at one computer not only makes it accessible but also adds up to saving a tremendous amount of money. Since thousands of company hours are saved from handling the data and records, employee management gets better and proportionally costs get cut. For instance, according to a case study by Gravity Flow, a medical company generated $4000 in cost savings per month by replacing paper with automated processes.
Employee Self-Service
The HR office is quite worked up throughout the year with a lot of queries to answer their employees about timesheets, payroll, and benefits, and everything related to HR. In such a situation, the employees must be encouraged to derive as much information as they can on their own by introducing automation to lead a self-led approach at the venture. The BambooHR study states that employee self-service can reduce the time required for HR tasks by 40 to 60 percent.
Efficient Hiring Process & Candidate Experience
With 83% of employers feeling that acquiring and retaining talent is a growing hiring challenge, a strongly organized hiring process is a must to overcome this challenge. HR automation allows your company to enhance its organizational growth by easing the hiring process at an optimal cost. On top of this, it improves the candidate hiring experience at your company which speaks volumes of your company’s stature.
Automating the recruitment process can be done by posting jobs in one go on various platforms, screening resumes automatically, automating interviews and even putting up gigs to hire freelancers through already devised methodologies.
Freeing Up HR Staff
Introducing human resource automation does not necessarily mean a loss of jobs for existing employees. HR is an ever-growing discipline of business that keeps on getting complex as your venture delves into organizational development, training, and retention methodologies. With that being said, menial administrative tasks take up about 73.2% of HR’s time. Now, if the staff is caught up in these routine tasks, it is difficult for them to focus on things that can be more beneficial for the company and offer a learning curve to them as an employee.
Medium and small businesses can especially grow on this fact that introducing automation improves the employee experience and gives more time to analyze the data and make decisions that can be profitable. Moreover, employee costs are saved due to their increased engagement and storage and printing costs are cut, making it an excellent decision for your business.
Expanding Productivity For All-Scale Businesses
With 61% of companies already modifying jobs to improve efficiency with automation, medium, and small-scale businesses can take this as an opportunity to scale their ventures by sustainably incorporating it. While HR automation reduces the risks of costly errors and frees the HR staff to work on better areas to improve business, it also gets your staff more time from their own HR responsibilities. Thus, improving employee’s morale and speeding productivity.
On the other hand, by not automating the tedious and repetitive tasks at your venture, you not only lose important work hours but also a lot of operational costs that could have been applied elsewhere.
Complex Tasks Made Easy
Having centralized data allows ventures to look up for any information concerning payrolls, attendance, remuneration in the blink of an eye without having the staff from HR to pull out the data. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 56% of all the tasks HR performs can be automated with existing technologies. Imagine how optimal tasks would become.
Consistency Across Locations
Global businesses and multinationals can have a great deal of struggle when it comes to finding consistency in their human resources system that can work for everyone. Selecting an automated system that can judiciously meet the demands globally has the ability to better the workflow across offices and increase the productivity of the business great manifolds.
Reduces Human Error
Important tasks like verifying timesheets, generating payrolls, and checking leaves, require the utmost perfection for coherency in your business. Automation of these tasks can save you from introducing any human error in such important tasks. In addition, it can also save up time by performing hefty calculations with great ease.
Make Intelligent Business Decisions with Insightful Reports
Businesses that are looking forward to sustaining in a competitive market like the small-scale and medium businesses need to play it smart. HR automation can allow you to make important decisions by providing concrete facts and reasons interpreted from your data which can help you expand your company and become less prone to risks and failure.
What can be automated in your company?
With passing time, as this technology has established itself in the business world, it is getting easier day-by-day to carry out complex HR tasks like predictive modeling, workforce planning, talent identification, and analytics. All this advancement and improvement leads to asking the question of how feasible the implementation of automation is? Well, there are a variety of techniques to introduce automation to your workplace.
HR Help Desk
Often, you come across a chatbot shown as a ‘live’ option on websites to ask for any queries that you may have. With respect to HR, it is the first step to building a knowledge base where an intelligent chatbot can answer your questions with the utmost accuracy. Ventures can establish their own automated employee help desks that use the latest technologies like NLP to answer employee queries.
Virtual Onboarding of Employees
HR professionals have to perform some laborious tasks of collecting and selecting resumes, interact on platforms, gather documents, etc which can all be done without any hassle by automation. Automated onboarding can streamline the hiring process and it can always be altered as per the needs of your company. Organizations implementing this process have witnessed a 62% greater new hire productivity, along with a 50% greater retention rate.
Training and Induction
The vast digital technology available through apps, portals, and webinars can be quite fruitful in training employees at their own pace. Employees can finish their online training and get clear with the functionalities before taking up a role at the company and avoid any mistakes in the near future. It even allows for a system to get constructive feedback so that the process of training can be improved.
Document Management
The HR officials are often tasked to deal with a lot of resumes. Scanning resumes, picking the right fit and entering the data into the application or database can be quite tasking. Automation and AI algorithms eliminate those tasks by picking up the required data through scanning and putting it into the application. They can even identify the best candidate by searching for the appropriate keywords from thousands of resumes. Through this, the company can screen the applicants effectively and a lot of time is saved. According to CareerBuilder, 71% of employers find an automated application system improving the candidate experience by allowing the candidates to track the status of their application.
Management of Tasks
Human resources work incorporates a lot of documents and paper, and managing this can get extremely difficult in any kind of company – be it small, medium or a full-fledged brand. Tracking payroll, performance management, leaves, travel requests, employee status change, and data, offboarding, employee benefits, and expense claims are some fundamental tasks that the HR professionals have to deal with. Placing automation to carry out these tasks is an intelligent choice to save on your company’s assets and making management efficient. Even succession and workforce planning can be handled using the analytics applied to the talent pool available in the company. This, in turn, helps to cut down a lot on those heavy recruitment expenses.
To sum it all up, human resource automation is that powerful key that has the ability to open all newer avenues for your venture while making sure that your revenue is not hampered with and costs are cut. It even digitizes the whole hiring process and helps all kinds of businesses to sustain and upgrade. On top of all this, it is a win-win for small and medium businesses to achieve more with lesser people and costs which can prove to be a boon for them in their developing stages. There is no doubt that HR automation is a great tool to build efficacy and stature.
