HR professionals are the lifeblood of any successful organization. From job applications and pay to performance evaluations, offboarding and everything in between, organizations rely on HR to help shape company culture. Despite HR’s strong influence on an organization’s wellbeing, disjointed processes and paper-based tasks have resulted in time management crises and an increasingly hands-off approach to HR.
HR automation benefits are really convincing thousands of companies to digitize their systems and processes. We mentioned some of the ways your organization can thrive by automating your workflow.
1. Keep your forms, documents, workflows and signatures all in one place
Sometimes papers get lost and things get overlooked. HR digitization ensures that all forms, documents, and legally binding eSignatures are interconnected. This helps automate all existing business processes and ensures that nothing gets misplaced along the way.
Rather than stressing about locating employee files or filling out sensitive information by hand, HR professionals can now quickly locate crucial documents and approve requests with just a few clicks of a button.
Ultimately, an all-in-one automation system will improve communication and collaboration across multiple organizational departments. This is great for keeping HR team members organized and improving employee satisfaction rates across the board.
2. Guaranteed information security compliance and data integrity
Another key reason to shift to automated HR comes in ensuring all private information is safeguarded. Ultimately, HR automation takes the guesswork out of staying in compliance for HR professionals.
From day one of onboarding, employees are required to submit multiple documents containing sensitive data. This includes I-9 forms, direct deposit information, vaccination records and driver’s license copies, to name a few. Safeguarding this sensitive information is essential to avoid fines and build trust with employees, and having the right HR automation software is key to keeping this information secure.
Automation tools making it easy for employees to submit their information digitally, while also taking the pressure off of your HR department.
3. Streamlining and simplifying the hiring process
Productivity is key to any organization’s long-term growth and development. According to HRM, one of the top concerns across industries is finding the right talent. To combat this, HR professionals are feeling increased pressure to connect supervisors with the right candidates.
Thankfully, HR automation has evolved in ways that make attracting the right talent easier. Nearly 60% of applicants quit filling out applications if they are too complicated, leading to missed opportunities to hire great people.
Using HR automation software combats against those lost form fills by simplifying the process.
The way it works is simple: your HR team can set up an easy workflow to collect information from candidates. Candidates simply fill out an online form with auto-populated fields and submit. Once submitted, the form will be automatically sent to your HR team to review and escalate if applicable.
4. Improvements in consistency across the board
Human error is real, no matter the level of HR experience someone has. Especially when said HR professional has been spending hours upon hours filling out the same tedious paperwork, contacting stakeholders and double checking all information to ensure complete accuracy.
Repetitive tasks like PTO requests, benefits enrollment, tax forms and more can easily be automated to reduce the number of errors coming through in paperwork. With automation, HR professionals can enjoy a more hands-off approach to paperwork.
5. Get stakeholder approval much quicker
Automated workflows allow employees to automatically route important documents to the right stakeholders to fill, sign or approve and send back within minutes. This makes the process easier for everyone involved and tends to increase engagement while decreasing time spent waiting on responses.
Additionally, HR automation solutions feature built-in reminders as an extra safeguard when workflows get stuck. These notifications are a great time management tool, thanks to their ability to be set at any time increment needed. This flexibility helps HR employees cut down on time spent following up on documents and chasing down signatures.
6. Save time for your HR staff
It’s no lie that HR relies heavily on document-driven processes. As HR teams’ roles and duties continue to grow and evolve across organizations, automation saves HR staff from hours of unnecessary, tedious work.
Automation tools are designed to ensure time is spared from repeatedly filling out the same documents, faxing information back and forth and hunting coworkers down for clarity, signatures or to amend signed documents.
Between printing and scanning PDF forms and paper documents, which could potentially be misplaced or contain errors, tedious tasks take more time than they’re ultimately worth. This keeps HR employees in the weeds and away from assisting employees or other coworkers in need.
By implementing automation processes, HR departments have an easier time recruiting, hiring, training and ultimately retaining employees, as all of these important forms, documents and signatures will all be easily accessible. Better yet, HR automation encourages productivity and transparency, taking the tedious nature out of data entry.