Article: 6 ways automation can impact HR

HR Analytics

6 ways automation can impact HR

HR automation has direct impact on its productivity. Another benefit of automation is that HR can have lot of face time with employees which is the key element of employee engagement.
6 ways automation can impact HR

In a word where robots are replacing people for highly skilled work, HR has no choice but to ensure automation in the processes. HR automation has direct impact on its productivity. Another benefit of automation is that HR can have lot of face time with employees which is the key element of employee engagement.

Let me illustrate this by giving examples:

Sourcing of resumes

Unlike the common practice of searching for resumes on few popular recruitment portals, HR professionals today use  platforms like Linkedin which has intelligence built into its search engine like it displays your job advertisement on passive as well as active job seekers profile page. Secondly, if your look for profile, most of the portal today show profiles similar to your search. Had read about a nascent organisation “Belong” which uses the artificial intelligence to source relevant profiles. In fact, organisations are today moving away from standard resumes to “Video resumes” where the candidates present their past experience.  These tools reduces substantial time of recruiter identifying right profiles. Every effort in reducing the sourcing time, results in better cycle time from requisition to onboarding.

Onboarding Process

Gone are those days when organisation expected the new joinee to carry all their original documents with them for the joining process. Companies today provide a link where the potential employee can upload the scanned document along with filling up all the relevant forms. Organisations do share the pre-recorded induction/ familiarisation sessions. This definitely ensure that the on boarding time is spent meaningfully in discussion and creating an “experience” rather than mundane  filling up of forms.

Performance Management

This is the most painful and difficult process to manage without a system in place. To think of sending physical paper forms, collecting back the filled up form from employees, to complete the review process and share the outcomes, sends shudders down the spine. It used to be a one big project which every HR person would be involved and would like to get out, as some or the other employees would always be unhappy inspite of efficient handling of the process. The reason being employees need facts and data to be shared as feedback, they like to know the basis of decision on various career options provided etc. It is difficult for HR or the reporting manager to support every discussion with data without a system. Today organisations are taking about doing away with the current process of performance management system move towards providing compensation based on skill requirement, skill supply and demand, based on achievement of performance measure. To achieve this organisation have system to crowd source feedback from various stakeholders like customers, finance department, team members etc. This takes away the burden from HR to get the feedback and normalise before sharing it with employees.

HR Analytics

Since 30 to 40% of the businesses are service driven, their major expense is related to people. A large part of the business decision hangs on availability of employees. This means various aspects of HR data need to be analysed and monitored, which could be from as simple as number of employees joining next week to as complex as monitoring the employee engagement quotient, productivity per employee, contribution to business level wise etc. Then there are trends of employee cost on training vis a vis the return on investments. The more HR looks, analyses and presents data, the fraternity is respected for their contributions and decisions are objective. HR then has a direct impact on managing business

Separations

Employees leaving the organisation do share a lot of data during the exit interview. This data when analysed does throw a light on leadership styles of managers, type of employees leaving, type of organisations our employees leaving, causes shared for leaving.  Post exit interviews or surveys are conducted to understand details which can improve organisation 

Compensation Management

Gone are those days when organisations with multilocation and multi business presence would spend not less than 10 days to complete only the payroll of employees. Today payroll is processed within 24 hours irrespective of the size and spread of data, alongwith other management and compliance reports. That is the speed and level of automation that has freed HR bandwidth.

There are numerous HR system tools available in the market today. There are few points to keep in mind:

  1. Best of breed or generic product: HR team generally has to deal with the issue of buying best of breed products and integrating them or implementing an enterprise product which can  manage all aspects of HR 
  2. Make vs buy decision: Most  of the organisation, would like develop their own solutions instead of buying from market. Depending on the requirements as well as based on the cost benefit analysis, organisation buy products which enable automoation
  3. Cloud vs hosted products: Both have merits as well as demerits interms of investments, implementation costs, accessibility, size of data etc.
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Topics: HR Analytics, Technology, #TechHR2016

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