Automation Takes Robotics Out Of HR

Removing mundane aspects of the job could help boost HR happiness rates

The HR department manages the entire employee lifecycle, from recruiting and hiring to the exit interview, and every step in between. HR professionals handle mountains of paperwork and many labor-intensive tasks. The dramatic shift in the workplace caused by the pandemic means that most HR departments have an even greater workload than before. It’s no surprise that 1 in 3 HR decision-makers are unhappy at work due in large part to the fallout from Covid-19.

What if, instead of spending hours on repetitive, time-consuming tasks, HR teams could focus on the human part of their work? Removing some of the necessary but mundane aspects of the job could help boost HR happiness rates. Robotic process automation (RPA) excels at handling these activities.

With day-to-day duties such as updating employee data, running reports on benefits, checking compliance, and attending to payroll, HR teams are busy ensuring employment functions run smoothly and efficiently. But with automation, employees can delegate these tasks to software-powered bots, so HR professionals can focus more of their time on the work that got them interested in human resources in the first place: helping people and solving problems.

By replacing the burden of repetitive workflows that detract from employee satisfaction with tasks that engage people on a deeper level, work becomes more fulfilling. There is one desire that transcends income level, department, and industry. People want more than a job; they want a sense of purpose. It’s easy to become discouraged working in HR. There are times when the job can seem uninspiring. Many HR professionals feel ineffectual and unhelpful to employees because they are tied up with administrative duties. This might be a fleeting feeling due to a specific situation at work, such as open enrollment. But it can also be a sign that an HR department is overwhelmed and ready for help.

This is how many hours can be saved with automation and reallocated to areas like professional development, team support, focusing on strategic activities, and simply giving people more time to do their jobs well.

The employee-company relationship begins with recruitment. Identifying and contacting qualified candidates can be overwhelming. As the world reopens in response to increased Covid-19 vaccination rates, companies are gaining the confidence to begin hiring again. An open position that may have previously drawn in fifty or a hundred applicants may now bring hundreds of resumes and online submissions. HR will have to go through all of these resumes and find the candidates who are the best possible fit for the open position, which takes a considerable amount of time.

Automation is ideal for many recruitment tasks, such as gathering resumes, scouring social media accounts, conducting background checks, checking qualifications against job requirements, and creating and issuing offer letters that meet employment regulations. After analyzing each candidate, bots can present a shortlist of qualified people for the HR representative to work from, vastly reducing the time it takes to identify and secure top talent.

Consistency and accuracy are two essential qualities of a successful HR department. When using automation for the hiring and onboarding of employees, each person receives the same experience every time, reducing the possibility of unintentional bias and building trust with new hires.

Compliance is a significant concern in many areas of human resources, such as payroll accounting, benefits management, employment taxes, and hiring practices. Implementing automation for data-heavy tasks improves accuracy significantly and can virtually eliminate human error and the time required to manually correct mistakes, protecting customers from tax authority issues.

Whether an employee leaves of their own volition, is terminated or ends their employment to enjoy retirement, the exit process is an important step. Many offboarding tasks are ideal for automation, like revoking access, knowledge transfers, recovering business assets, conducting exit interviews, and filling out forms. For example, unattended RPA can cross-check government and company regulations before automatically issuing a personalized termination letter.

Automation empowers employees to control their work, reducing the amount of time HR spends on training and reinforcing company policies. Too many new hires spend their first day completing paperwork and awaiting access to company systems and IT equipment. But with a bot that learns the fastest way to manage this onboarding process, new employees can come up to speed more quickly and be ready to work from day one.

For example, developers can design rules that enable bots to assign roles and grant automatic access and privileges to new employees on their first day. Equipment can be pre-ordered, email set-up, and onboarding documents sent directly to the employee, shortening the time-to-competence for new hires. This type of professional welcome quickly engages fledgling employees and helps them feel secure in their new positions.

Self-scheduling is a tool that can save employers and employees time when arranging interviews, training, and performance reviews. It eliminates the need for time-consuming phone calls and voicemail, prevents scheduling conflicts, and makes rescheduling and cancellations easy.

The benefits of self-scheduling apply to training, too. On-demand training gives employees the flexibility to work at their own pace and deep dive into topics when they want or need more information. A classroom environment may be ideal for some, but online learning offers various methods to accommodate employees with different learning styles. The ability to self-help reduces the strain on human resources, IT, and managers.

Continuity is a factor in training as well. Two instructors can present the same material differently, potentially leading to confusion or conflicts in methodology. Virtual training is an excellent way to train all employees on new company-wide systems or to reskill or upskill people for new roles.

HR employees juggle the demands of compliance, employee experience, and department performance. The many demands on their time can leave them unsatisfied with their jobs. It only makes sense to alleviate the burden of high-volume, repetitive tasks to make way for work that yields more valuable results. Automation can handle these processes, leaving the HR professional with more available time and resources for the parts of the job that require a human touch.