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What is HR Automation? Benefits, Challenges & Solutions

HR is one of the most important departments in any business as it’s responsible for training, recruiting, welcoming new employees (and letting go of others!), payroll, vacations, sick days, and more. Without it, organizations wouldn’t be able to operate efficiently. Until relatively recently, there was no option but to perform all the aforementioned tasks manually, but now HR Automation has arrived. Let’s dive in to discover its benefits.

What is HR Automation?

HR Automation is short for Human Resources Automation. The concept is simple, it’s the use of software to automate and digitize repetitive tasks such as onboarding administration, expense claims, sick leave, and payroll, therefore boosting efficiency and reducing the potential for human error. This in turn gives HR employees more time to focus on strategic tasks that add true value to the company.

In the next section we’ll take a look at the benefits that HR Automation can bring to your organization.

Benefits of HR Automation

Why should you invest in HR automation? To answer this question, let’s look at its top 6 benefits:

1. Improve efficiency

Some HR work can be time consuming and extremely repetitive. What’s more there’s potential for human error. Instead, using HR automation we can digitize all the time-consuming tasks and at the same time increase efficiency. This then allows HR employees to focus their efforts on culture building, working practices and communications.

2. Overview of the insight

For any organization, data is important, but it’s also important to be able to follow, gather and analyze it. HR automation allows you to do just that. It enables you to check if there are any clear trends so you can write reports on what you have found. Once that’s done, you will be able to improve processes and correct any failures using said data.

3. Reduce/eliminate errors

The manual input of data is open to human error. Instead, HR automation can do the job much quicker and minimize those errors at the same time.

4. Improve communication

Having a clear overview of all the stages and processes that are involved helps employees to better understand each other’s responsibilities. Furthermore, it improves teamwork as well as communication among them.

5. Positive experience for employees and job candidates

Recruiting it’s a job in itself, let alone when HR staff have to do that task. They often forget to check in with the new job candidates and that can easily create a negative first impression. If HR staff are freed from those tasks, they can have more time to get back to candidates and enhance their initial contact with the company.

Self-service tasks are another benefit of HR automation. For example, they allow employees to get their vacation requests approved faster and they can also keep track of their employee benefits. All of the above contributes to a positive experience from an employee and staff perspective.

6. Reduce paper processing costs

Printing, filling and storing are just some of the characteristics of paper-based procedures. With HR automation you can eliminate pretty much all the costs that are associated with the above. It also helps to minimize storage space and instead, you’ll have all your documents just a click away.

-You may be interested in this article:7 reasons why you should Integrate, Automate & Orchestrate with Workato

Challenges of HR Automation

While HR Automation provides multiple benefits to an organization, there are challenges and limits to automation that you should be aware of:

1. Security

One of the characteristics of HR Automation is its collection of data but that can also be a challenge. The organization has to outline and provide a clear understanding of how the data might be used to avoid any problems.

2. Automation Initiatives

It is difficult to assess the experience of an employee, so it’s important that businesses find ways to utilize data from software in order to boost efficiency as well as to lead to decision making minds.

3. Correct Integration in current procedures

It is difficult to integrate the same features of your HR Automation software as it has particular procedures that make it more difficult to implement into the IT architecture.

Solution: Reaping the benefits of automating HR

Now that you understand the endless benefits of HR automation, it’s time for you to Integrate your applications and automate your HR processes for seamless onboarding and employee management. Automate these processes to save time, collaborate across teams, and provide a scalable solution for employee growth.

If you want to implement and enjoy the benefits of HR Automation without worrying about its challenges, then do not hesitate to contact us! You won’t regret it!