From recruiting your organization’s next superstar to ensuring all employee payrolls are accurate, the Human Resources (HR) department adds unparalleled value—but these pros are often bombarded with high-touch, time-consuming, and manual processes. While replacing every broken process within HR overnight isn’t an option, implementing new technology helps the department quickly improve important areas before a disaster strikes.
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However, while 91% of small or midsize business (SMB) leaders say HR technology is critical or beneficial to their business, only 57% currently use it. Here’s how you can leverage technology to avoid a disaster in five of the most critical HR processes.
Process #1: Recruitment
Although recruitment has become an incredibly competitive and dynamic process, most recruiters are using outdated strategies that only focus on filling a position, thus failing to meet the needs of an ever-evolving workforce. Today’s recruitment process is deeply flawed and still involves countless steps, people, and approval levels, making it hard to achieve consistency and accuracy.
Implementing automation within the recruitment and selection process allows HR to spend more time evaluating candidates and less time head-down in spreadsheets, Kanban boards, and data sets. With automation as an integral part of the recruitment process, teams can quickly and efficiently target best-suited candidates while saving time and minimizing their workload.
Process #2: Employee Onboarding
The traditional employee onboarding process is full of challenging workflows, causing most organizations to heavily rely on their checklist. Yet, while these checklists may get teams through the onboarding process, it’s seldom an enjoyable journey on either side. The stress of paper pushing and file chasing in an onboarding process creates a lack of employee engagement and satisfaction that correlates with a spike in turnover.
The good news is that onboarding new employees doesn’t have to be a cringeworthy, stressful, and time-consuming process. Today, more and more companies opt for an onboarding solution to automate the process and improve new hire satisfaction and performance, as well as increase organizational efficiency.
Process #3: Leave Management
Everyone loves taking time off from work—unless you’re the person in charge of everyone’s leave management. Last-minute time-off requests, low visibility of employee records, disconnected spreadsheets, and siloed e-mail threads don’t allow for a straightforward leave management process. The manual interventions and inaccuracies that result from outdated tools and techniques only make the leave management process more time-consuming and inefficient, and errors and miscalculations lead the way to trouble like payroll mistakes, administrative issues, and even legal problems.
There is a reason 56% of organizations are looking to adopt cloud-based leave management software this year. With a leave management software in place, HR teams can cut down on paper, modify the leave forms, improve collaboration to complete the approval faster, and easily track the number of paid and sick days both availed and available.
Process #4: Time Sheet Management
While time sheets are incredibly important, the vicious cycle of retrieving, verifying, and manually updating information into the system for traditional time sheet management is nothing short of a nightmare. Issues caused by manual time sheet collection hinder the organization’s payroll, which, unfortunately, is a result of not only paper-based time sheets but also digital forms that can cause chaos and errors in the payroll process, as well, resulting in hefty fines for organizations looking to file erroneous payroll summaries because of wage discrepancy settlement issues.
The traditional time sheet management process is in desperate need of automation, but the only way to improve your existing process is to apply the right time sheet management system to it. Using an automated, self-sustaining employee time sheet system eliminates the issues surrounding employee attendance and increases overall team productivity.
Process #5: Performance Appraisal
Yearly reviews create a barrier for managers to give instant feedback and provide development opportunities, causing employee dissatisfaction and hindering performance and organizational growth. But, while these traditional performance appraisals are a painful annual errand hated by almost all employees, nearly 71% of organizations still use them.
With an automated performance appraisal process, HR teams can track metrics and figure out which are key to boosting employee productivity and improving their outcomes, giving leaders a view of the big picture. Now, by having the ability to keep an eye on the larger scheme, HR teams can spend time tackling issues such as high employee turnover rates, decreased engagement, absenteeism, and a low return on investment.
Using outdated HR practices in today’s modern world is a recipe for disaster. While there is significant scope for improvement within the HR department, technology can fix what’s broken and ensure critical processes don’t impede organizational growth.
Suresh Sambandam is the CEO of Kissflow, a disruptive, software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based, enterprise-level work automation and collaboration platform with more than 10,000 customers across 160 countries. He is an expert and renowned entrepreneur on a mission to democratize automation and create an immersive work experience for enterprises of all sizes.