HRMS Strategy: Workflow Efficiency

HRMS workflow keeps the HR world moving! We all know that transactions require notifications and approvals; it will always be a necessary evil and part of the processes. Fortunately, most HRMS vendors provide extensive workflow functionality which enables automation and process efficiency. However, It wasn’t always this way…

Do you remember the early years of HR, when ‘workflow’ meant that an HR Professional was tasked with emailing a scanned paper form to someone to print and sign and scan again? Then, when there was a question or the auditors came along, it was a matter of searching for that printed and filed paper or worse, through someone’s memory skills and email box, as to where the form may have stopped. Many HR teams have benefited from the workflow capabilities in the current generation of HRMS

As you build your processes, you define your workflow rules and routings to reflect your company’s requirements. Does a requisition need to route to a Financial Controller for budgetary approval after a series of HR approvals? The HRMS knows the reporting lines and positions, so this routing is automatic. Such HRMS system automation is an improvement over some earlier products where the transaction initiator needed to choose the relevant approver from a list or worse, where an administrator needed to manually maintain lists of transaction initiators and approvers and the relationships of who can approve what for whom. Without HRMS workflow, it’s guaranteed that someone will inadvertently choose an incorrect approver, thus sending sensitive HR data to the wrong place. Such maintenance and extra efforts are still commonplace in HR in companies without HRMS workflow implemented.

Another advantage of workflow is that you can allow for holiday designees and roll-ups so that a transaction is never ‘stuck’ along the way, as often employees do not know if someone further in the chain is unavailable to approve. HRMS workflow removes the guesswork there. In addition, workflow is saving the time of everyone involved in the processes by being delivered to an email inbox with a link to follow to make approvals in the HRMS, plus, your document storage can usually be integrated into these approval processes. Such integration can be a godsend in the event of an audit where a sample size of 30 off-cycle pay increases is chosen and your HR Partner needs to find the approvals for the transactions. With workflow inside your HRMS, this is normally an easy exercise of running a report to pull the transactions being requested.

HRMS workflow—now that HR has seen the possibilities, we’ll never look back!