HR automation: how SMEs can deliver efficiency and compliance
HR modernisation: will you throw your hat in the ring?
For today’s HR professionals, it can feel like work involves wearing a lot of hats. Need to navigate a route towards improved company performance? Pop on a pilot’s cap. Busy with health and safety concerns? Try this hard hat on. Involved in difficult staff situations, or legal disputes? Time for the police helmet. Got training and coaching programmes to set up? Look out your mortarboard. Mindful that a hundred more tasks are waiting in your in-tray? Maybe a magician’s hat is what you really need, so you can pull a few more rabbits from it.
Luckily, achieving greater efficiency with a HR or payroll solution is not just for larger organisations, as moving from manual processes to software simplicity works for SMEs too. Indeed, every opportunity to automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks will free up your team to focus on responsibilities that have a real impact on your business. So, let’s look at some of the ways you can leverage software to make your work life easier, using the key areas below.
Recruitment > Onboarding > Compliance > Self-service and Mobile > Reporting > Integrations
Recruitment
Effective recruitment can feel like a daunting task. Expectations around the best fit for your culture are high, the market is wide, and unless you progress quickly you can lose out on top talent. So start by generating the strongest coverage with social recruiting. You can help to cast your net as far as possible by using job boards – search engines that display job openings – and once you’ve advertised a vacancy externally, redirect to your company website to showcase your organisation in its best light.
Look to leverage the tools of the trade too via an efficient applicant tracking system, and select software that automatically posts vacancies to job boards. Of course, you might also want to look internally for candidates, since it’s always great to offer development opportunities in-house, and a tracking system should let you do both. Adding an RSS feed to your internal and external company websites means you can also advertise vacancies in real-time. Each listing then redirects candidates to your company careers page, where they can consult all the details about a job. Simply put, an applicant tracking system helps to manage your recruitment pipeline efficiently.
Once your candidate pool is built up and it’s time to proceed to the interview stage, you can harness the power of smartphones to screen applicants. For example, with People HR’s Video Recruit app, applicants can record audio and video responses to predetermined screening questions. A straightforward and flexible system, it enables recruiters to watch, evaluate and share videos with the whole hiring team, at everyone’s convenience. Video interviews also provide a good idea of how candidates communicate and how they might fit into a company’s culture. They’re great for standardising the screening process too, as with phone interviews it can be difficult to guarantee that recruiters will stick to the script and ask the same questions of each candidate. To help you monitor progress further, our software sends a weekly recap email with a range of relevant information about applicants.
Onboarding
Once you’ve secured your preferred candidate, ensuring a smooth transition into your company makes a big difference, as onboarding programmes can increase retention by 25% and improve employee performance by 11%. To make it the best possible experience, use a combination of mediums before and after your new starter begins – mixing task lists with rich content such as images and video will make it more engaging for new employees.
To make it a bespoke experience that reflects your company’s culture, it’s beneficial to use software that allows you to craft a customised workflow. Not only can you use it to make your new starter feel welcome, but you can also use it to automatically cross off monotonous HR tasks. So from voice notes and videos to checklists, questions and document uploads, you can combine tasks to create an onboarding experience tailored to your organisation, or a specific team within it.
Compliance
Team-specific processes are great, as they make everyone feel special and valued. However, every HR professional is likely to agree that it can soon make things overly complex, as it becomes tricky to remember all the activities required to manage day-to-day admin tasks, many of which are compliance-related and time-critical. In an ideal world, your HR software will help you remember every task you need to complete, but since you might not always know what’s expected, how do make sure you cover everything required? With ‘follow me’, People HR helps you at key decision points to make smarter choices, faster. We use anonymised data from other HR departments to suggest logical sequences of tasks – all you do is tick the ones you want to remember and it’ll automatically add them to your list of tasks, to be completed later on.
Self-service and mobile
Deadlines and important dates can pass by all too easily, but automatic alerts help you to stay on track. Automated reminders ensure that the right people get the right info at the right time, and since you can remind everyone that they’re due to complete an activity you can also defer the task itself, by redirecting users to self-service. You can tailor recipients by roles too, rather than having to specify everyone by name, so if and when your organisation changes, you won’t have to update the reminders.
Employer and manager self-service isn’t new, but it’s evolved from a basic transactional tool to being at the forefront of applications. It starts at onboarding, with employees required to provide information about themselves, complete tasks and sign important documents, then later on they should feel comfortable updating their profiles, addresses and bank information. But there are all sorts of areas that self-service is a massive help, especially with the functionality of today’s mobile devices:
- Leave and absence management: makes leave entitlement calculations quick and easy by accessing real-time information about leave balances and enabling the requesting of leave on the go.
- Payslip administration: saves you from having to email employees’ payslips individually and removes the risk of getting things wrong.
- Sharing news and views: allows staff to broadcast items and information, with newsfeeds and chats helping to ensure that everyone remains connected and informed.
- Clocking in and out: with geofencing or the use of Bluetooth beacons, employees can automatically clock in and out of the office when they cross a defined perimeter.
- Expenses: mobile expenses means staff can snap pictures of their receipts and submit expenses on the go, making everyone’s life much easier.
Reporting
Automating is great, but with all this information being collected and amended by so many different users, how do you stay on top of it all? That’s where reporting comes in. Reports and queries help you verify data, monitor progress and spot trends, to help inform key decisions. It used to be daunting – for example, understanding data structure and how to visualise it – but it’s so much simpler now, with modern software. At People HR we use ‘queries’, making all the information input by HR managers and self-service users available at all times, so you can consult it directly, export it to Excel or create graphs in the system.
Integrations
What’s more, queries can be used to integrate into other solutions. Integrations allow you to extend your HR ecosystem and automatically synchronise data between applications, to satisfy critical requirements, or enhance employee experiences. This saves time and increases accuracy, by removing the need for manual data input in multiple applications. So whether you need to pass on information or want to schedule a data extract, our plug-ins are a great way to automate data transfers – and push your HR software’s boundaries.
For all these reasons and more, it’s no wonder increasing numbers of people are taking their hats off to HR automation.
