7 HR Workflows to Automate to Boost Operational Efficiency

When we talk about HR technologies, one of the keys to capturing efficiencies, ensuring compliance, and boosting operational efficiencies is within automation technologies. There are plenty of HR automation use cases worth checking out, and there’s no better time than now.

HR departments are under increasing pressure to deliver more value to their organizations. But if you’re still devoting your time to tedious manual processes, that’s a challenging request to meet.  Want to spend more time in meaningful conversations with candidates and employees? Turn to automation.

By automating key HR workflows, you can allow yourself more time to be more strategic and provide value-right outcomes.

Let’s explore seven HR workflows you can automate to boost operational efficiency and unlock value for your HR department and beyond.

HR Automation Use Cases: 7 HR Processes to Automate Now

1. Onboarding

Onboarding is a great way to start your automation journey, as it’s one of the most paper-intensive processes in the employee life cycle. In many organizations, you collect more information about an individual during their onboarding process than you do in their entire first year. How many of your onboarding processes are managed by a manual process and deal with paper? Each of these is a great opportunity for automation. Some common onboarding processes that organizations automate include:

• Creating and sending new hire materials prior to a new hire’s first day (welcome to the organization, here are a few things to share to get you ready for success here!).
• Collecting and verifying documents as they are submitted by your new hire.
• Routing and communicating new hire data to those that need it internally and externally (think IT setup information to your internal IT team or benefit selections to your carriers).
• Assigning and tracking tasks to others in the organization about your new hires.

You can create personalized automation experiences for your new hire according to their unique makeup like their role, location, and preferences.

Onboarding is also an important time to ensure your new employees have a positive experience, as it directly correlates to their long-term success at your organization. Starting with a stack of forms to complete is in a good look. You want to give your new team members a seamless, engaging onboarding experience so they can feel welcome and excited about their future with your organization.

2. Employee Departure

Employees leaving an organization is another significant process and data-centric time.  There are an influx of tasks to complete including revoking access, conducting exit interviews, processing final paychecks, and updating records. These are great opportunities for automation.

Employee departures can be a very sensitive time for both the individual and the organization and ensuring that you have the right processes automated and the right data collected, is crucial for a successful departure.

While a process like exit interviews can be a great opportunity to automate, it doesn’t mean that you have to remove the connection gained from a face-to-face interaction. Automation can help with things like the data collection, the routing and reminders, the storage, and the reporting, which should free up your time to allow for a more meaningful communication with that individual that allows you to gain insights from that individual that can help improve your employee experience. This is an ideal automation!

3. Applicant Tracking Process

From sourcing and screening job candidates to interviewing and hiring them, the applicant tracking process is a highly involved process for HR professionals, whether you are facing high volumes of applicants or needing to find ways to organize your applicants according to their fit to the role. This stage of the cycle involves a lot of steps, starting with requisition approval, through candidate reviews, and ideally ending with the selection of a perfect candidate.

Automating the applicant tracking process can help you speed up your hiring cycle, improve your quality of hire, and enhance your candidate experience (which does equate to your employee experience!). You can use automation to facilitate communication and approvals for your requisition, post jobs to a diversity of platforms, provide communication to your candidates, manage and route applicant materials, schedule and conduct interviews, send and track offer letters, and collect and analyze feedback, and really so much more!

With automation easing the applicant tracking process, you can ensure that you’re gaining quality applicants and guiding them through a seamless process, allowing you to have more time to provide meaningful connections with and insights around your candidate.

4. Employee Changes

With the talk about change management at the forefront in our organizations, in HR, the top of change management is typically around employee changes. Throughout an employee’s lifecycle, there are a plethora of changes they go through, from life event changes like marriage to career changes like promotions. With each change, there are varying levels of work to be done that typically involve the need to notify, provide data, and track with individuals and departments across the organization as well as with external vendors.

Automating employee changes can help you simplify and standardize your processes and ensure accuracy and consistency, but it can also allow employees a smooth experience during these impactful times of their lives and careers.

5. Performance Management

After considering some of your core employee lifecycles like onboarding, departures, applicant tracking, and employee changes, start to think about the other processes that your HR professionals regularly perform that could be automated. Another impactful opportunity for automation is within your performance management practice. Performance Management involves a multitude of activities and data points that can be automated, like goal setting, feedback, ratings, and recognition.

Once you automate this process, you can better align and motivate your workforce, improve productivity and quality, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. With the manual aspects of these processes put aside, you’ll be able to put more energy towards making these employee experiences more engaging.

6. Leave Management

Employee leave management involves a great deal of regulatory considerations as well as often personal impacts to your employees. Whenever an employee needs to take leave, whether it’s vacation, sick, maternity, or otherwise, there is a need to follow specific procedures while managing requests, approvals, tracking, and reporting. When leave processes are manually managed, they are at a greater potential for liability for your organization and negative impact that could impact your employees.

If your organization has a larger volume of leave management, this is a strong candidate (no pun intended) for automation. Automation in leave management creates an environment of accuracy, compliance, and timeliness.

7. Benefits Administration

Benefits administration is another strong automation candidate for automation, given the amount of data, documents, and transactions that go into managing the enrollment, administration, and communication of various types of employee benefits. Certainly, traditional benefits are a consideration for automation, such as health, dental, and retirement, but also consider non-traditional benefits like your parent program, volunteer time off, and more.

You can use automation to create and offer benefits plans, enroll and update employees, process and verify claims, and communicate and educate employees. When it’s automated, you can enjoy saving time and money and ensuring compliance and accuracy.

8. Unlock Value for Your HR Department and Beyond

In these seven examples, it’s clear that automation can have a huge impact on your HR operations and efficiency. Once automation is applied, you can save time and resources, improve quality and compliance, and enhance employee experience and engagement. You can also focus more on your strategic and value-added HR activities, such as talent acquisition, retention, and development.

Want More Content Like This and Keep Up with Tricia?

• Subscribe to the Naviant Blog. Each Thursday, we’ll send you a recap of our latest info-packed blog so you can be among the first to access the latest trends and expert tips on workflow, intelligent automation, the cloud, and more.
• Connect and follow Tricia on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.