Automation is the Key to Creating Efficiencies in HR / People Ops

As technology continues to develop, automation is steadily working its way into every industry from manufacturing to health care. Any company that’s looking to remain competitive in today’s digital age is quickly realizing the necessity of incorporating automation into its workflow. Automation is especially helpful in boosting efficiency for HR and people operations teams that deal with a high volume of document-heavy tasks.  

How Exactly Can Automation Create Efficiencies For Your HR And People Ops Teams?

Reduce Time Spent On Repetitive Tasks

Administrative tasks comprise an overwhelming percentage of the total workload for your average HR department. Whether you’re verifying timesheets or calculating payrolls, you’re spending hours on tedious manual work that could just as easily be automated. By automating these tasks, you can accelerate the process and reduce your overall labor costs.

Increase Employee Productivity And Innovation

It’s difficult for HR professionals to focus on bigger picture tasks such as talent forecast and pipeline succession when they’re spending hours each day filling out paperwork or compiling data. Automation increases efficiency by reducing the overall workload, which allows for even greater productivity and innovation. This frees up your HR and people ops teams for other tasks such as searching for and retaining talented workers. It also empowers these people to be creative in coming up with innovative new ways to grow the organization or modify the hiring process.

Eliminate Human Error

Human error is always a factor you have to take into consideration when trying to maximize efficiency.  When it comes to tasks like employee onboarding and offboarding, a mistake can not only cost you time and money, but can potentially open you up to legal issues. Automation eliminates the potential for data entry errors and misplaced or lost documents, thereby reducing the amount of time spent rectifying mistakes.

Reduce Levels Of Employee Turnover

Jobs with high volumes of menial office work often result in high levels of burnout, which then leads to high levels of employee turnover. Employee turnover is not only bad for the business environment, but it’s also bad for efficiency. Each time you need to bring on a new employee, you’re having to deal with the offboarding process of the old employee as well as the onboarding process of the new one. This increases the amount of work for the HR department, which compounds the problem. Automation boosts efficiency by reducing the amount of employee turnover, thus cutting the problem off at the root.

How Can You Automate HR / People Ops Tasks?

Emphasize System Integrations

Whenever possible, consolidate your HR systems or at least purchase systems that integrate with one another. The biggest manual task that exists in HR professionals' lives today centers around collecting and consolidating employee data - performance data, happiness data, demographic data, etc. If you prioritize finding systems that integrate with one another, the automatic flow and compilation of data will free up hours for your HR teams to get back to the strategic and more impactful parts of their job.

Buy Systems Employees Will Actually Interact With

There's nothing worse as an HR / People Ops professional than having great ideas and no data to justify pursuing those ideas. So there's often a lot of time spent in HR trying to collect employee data. But here's the problem: collecting employee data usually relies on engagement and manual input from those employees. And there's a historic trend of underutilization when it comes to traditional HR platforms. When purchasing a system for a process that requires user engagement or input, try to meet employees where they prefer to be. Leverage Slack, GSuite, Trello, Asana, or other core communication systems as much as possible, so that HR teams can focus more on the analysis of data than the collection of it.

Efficiency is the name of the game for any business owner looking to manage and grow their company as effectively as possible. Although automation is being embraced by companies left and right, only 40% of HR leaders have a digital workplan in place at the enterprise or HR level. By incorporating automation, you can tackle the problem head on and transform your workforce for the better.