Pankaj Minglani

Ever since the industrial revolution soared, operations became a time-consuming altar.
We can’t stress enough on the importance of introducing technology in HR.
According to TOI, in a survey by Willis Towers Watson, companies in India expect the use of automation in the workplace to increase from the current 14 per cent to 27 per cent in coming three years, higher than the global and APAC average.

"The advantage with the Indian market is its ability to skip steps and trench technologies," says a Senior Director for the Oracle's Asia Pacific operations, Shaakun Khanna. "In India, companies are relatively young and can embrace technologies faster and leap straight into the future," he also added
"If an employee were to tell Amazon's Alexa that she was pregnant, it will not only congratulate her but also inform her about the pregnancy-related assistance in the employment package. Similarly, when prompted, it will also write an email to the HR along with the benefits she wishes to avail and the maternity leaves she is planning to take.
Though HR being the most “human” function took a little while in entering this technology storm, but these interventions have enabled HRs to spend more time on strategic and people related issues.

Here some of the ways through which we can introduce automation in respective HR departments:

1. First, we need to bifurcate which functions to be automated, cause we need to separate strategic functions out of operational functions to increase productivity and performance of the overall department.
2. Creating ROI plan to understand if huge investment on technology could actually reap you benefits or put you in the loss.
3. Allowing time and patience for the HR team to adapt on the same
Artificial Intelligence is the future of HR and would play the leading role in making it a pivotal business function. Various analysis and reports could be easily generated that can enable HR to take intelligent decisions for future plans.

Few areas in which we feel where automation could be executed easily:

Onboarding and exit:  upon arrival of the new employee, there is a lot of documentation related tasks, which involves personal data also and assigning codes as well as other additional tasks which can be automated and shared on a common drive among all new joiners easily.
Sharing of employee manuals, policies and FAQs over common servers can save a lot of time incurred for explanation and answering the queries.
Similarly, during the exit process, payslip summaries and exit forms could be easily filled and shared across drives or servers.

Recruitment: here the execution could be partial, as the decision of hiring, interviewing requires human intervention. Few activities as below could be touched:

ATS
Social media profiling to do a basic assessment of personality traits.
Automated reply to CV shortlisted candidate for schedules, follow-up emails etc.
Completing unified profiles from unstructured data sets
Various popular applicant tracking systems which simplify the whole process of managing bulk applications, create an internal DB for future reference and emails are talent recruit, Zoho recruit, talent pool, recruit pro 360, bullhorn, hire craft, RMS etc.


T&D

By introducing e-learning and experiential based training programs and companies are yielding great ROIs on training budgets. And the next generation is expected to be of virtual and augmented reality.

HR Ops

Similarly, the Software’s could easily be used for managing multiple shifts, payrolls, attendance and leave requests. Various HRMS have been used for maintaining employee records. PeopleSoft HRMS, SAP HR modules and various other cloud-based soft wares used for regulating the same in some leading brands for quite some time.

There is a need to enhance the importance of a responsive HR desk in an organization and that can be efficiently managed by the newly available Chat bot’s and various grievance redressal systems.
Despite a detailed employee manual or policy booklet, employees have numerous queries in regards to their own respective cases. An employee redressal system could be the solution here.

PMS

Furthermore, soft wares are already prevailing for performance management systems like Zoho people, Candle, halogen performance etc. are PMS software.
Surprisingly corporates are having great budgets for promotions, marketing and branding initiatives but they do not give enough importance to investments in HR technology. These investments are directly on people and are the highest yielding one says a study by KPMG that 63% of organizations expected greater value adds to their business from cloud HR software implementations.

In one of the reports of TOI dated Mar 10 ‘2018 ICICI initiatives for automating HR practices have been duly appreciated. For them, employee transfers are now decided by algorithms, senior manager appraisals are being done by app-based instant feedback from bosses, and data from canteen purchases is analysed for employee health. They are also looking forward to creating a virtual amphitheatre of 80,000 people in the coming time. Also developed applications for transfer requests, post-marriage relocation, health reasons or a transfer to hometown. Based on the weightage, the algorithm identifies the vacancies and prioritises the transfer requests.
It also minimizes the risk of any bias.

Kudos to ICICI for setting a great example & enabling great HR practices.

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