The top five benefits of automating your HR department
There’s no denying the Human Resources (HR) team is the beating heart of any business. Far from being just the ‘admin experts’, HR teams handle everything from the recruitment and onboarding of new employees to workforce planning and payroll.
People management is a skill with lots of moving parts, which is one reason why the push towards automation is so welcome among the HR people of the world. For too long, they’ve been weighed down by the repetitive (and okay sometimes boring) manual tasks they need to do, when what they really want is to look after the people within their business.
Not to mention the drain outdated processes and clunky legacy systems can have on productivity and morale in an HR department.
While there are countless reasons any HR team will benefit from automation, we’ve detailed our top reasons in our new e-book Automating your HR Department. Here are our top five reasons you should consider automation.
1. Attract and retain talent
As any HR manager will lament, there’s currently a global talent shortage. In fact, according to the Hays Salary Guide Australia 2021, 64 percent of employers say skills shortages will impact the effective operation of their department or organisation. What this means is your HR department needs to be able to deliver what the talent is looking for.
Baby Boomers are retiring from the workforce. Millennials currently make up about 75 percent of the Australian working population and, as Gen Z were basically born with a digital device in their hands, the future is clear.
Finding, recruiting and retaining the best talent means your HR department needs to be fully automated to give new employees exactly what they want. If you don’t, another company certainly will.
And what do Millennials and Gen Z want?
New employees want a mobile optimised recruitment process. They want the application process to be easy and fully automated. A few taps and some clicks and they want it to be done. Then once they’re employed and being taken through the onboarding experience, they want to see fully automated systems within their new workplace, including payroll, self-service portals, and cloud-based training and development.
2. Save employee time
The roles, responsibilities and duties of HR teams continue to grow. Automating the more tedious and repetitive tasks can free up their valuable time, allowing them to focus on the humans in the business.
Self-service portals let employees manage their own information for things like booking leave, accessing payslips and updating contact details. Documents can be signed electronically, negating the need to email back and forth. The ‘paperwork’ required during the recruitment and onboarding process for new employees can be mostly managed with automation.
With fully integrated automation processes, HR teams have more time to focus on the human side of attracting, onboarding, training, and retaining employees because all the ‘paperwork’ is easily accessible.
3. Increase efficiency
It doesn’t matter how experienced you are or how many years you’ve worked in HR, human error is a real thing. And once mistakes are made, more time has to go into finding and/or rectifying them.
It’s also not good for employee morale or faith in the company if mistakes continue to happen, especially when there are simple solutions available.
4. Improve employee experience
With a global talent and skills shortage, the last thing you want is for recently hired staff to walk away because of frustratingly regular HR errors. You also don’t want your specialist employees being ‘headhunted’ by businesses offering superior employee experiences.
These experiences can seem worse when, again, there are simple and effective solutions available but they’re not being implemented.
Employees are human beings and, if your HR teams are constantly tied up doing tedious, manual work and unavailable to connect with and assist people, then it’s no wonder employees start looking around for more fulfilling positions where they feel valued and appreciated.
5. Step up your data management
It goes without saying that a fully automated HR system will be able to track data faster and more efficiently than a bunch of humans with a pile of reports. Automated systems can also identify patterns, monitor compliance and even spot potential problems. Not to mention, the integrity and security of personal and private information is easier to maintain.
The Access Group’s powerful all-in-one HRIS software can underpin the people management, payroll, recruitment and workforce planning needs of your business as it grows and evolves. We invite you to get in touch with our friendly team today to talk through your current situation and discover how our digital solutions can support your organisation.
