7 Questions you should be asking about HR automation

HR automation offers many opportunities to improve your HR processes leading to time and cost savings as well as advances in delivering services and competitive advantage. Automated HR can be tricky as process changes and system enhancements become complex, but the rewards are great if you can successfully implement considered workflows. Be sure to ask yourself these questions to drive your HR automation forward.

1) Is this a repeatable, low-level yet necessary task?

Tasks that occur with regular frequency that are able to be performed by anyone in the HR department are often prime candidates for automation. For example, a paper request to enroll a new dependent/beneficiary can be stamped as ‘received’ by any HR team member, but is that task actually needed or could the process be automated through a group email inbox?

2) Is there a standardized process or is everything an exception?

HR automation is only possible when there are rules governing a process. If there is no consistency for the approval of job requisitions then your recruiters are spending needless time on administration rather than more substantive recruitment.

3) Is it possible to perform this process with fewer resources?

I’ve heard from an IT compliance colleague who receives the same report from two separate resources, as it is an important report and he cannot take the chance that someone forgets to send it or is out sick. Scheduling this report to be directly emailed from the HRMS would eliminate duplicated work whilst maintaining the required frequency.

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4) Are you going ‘right from the source’ directly to your HRMS?

In the example of the new dependent, the employee fills out a paper form that a data entry professional reviews and then enters the data into the HRMS. HR automation would directly allow the employee to enter the data into the HRMS via self-service.

5) How can I make the sensitive HR data more secure?

This question often partners with the prior one. When you reduce the number of hand-off steps in a process via HR automation, there is often the added benefit of enhanced data security due to the reduction in human error.

6) Can you change a reactive procedure into a proactive one?

If you are paying employees in a state where the law requires that a check be sent within a certain time frame, you can run reports on a daily basis to look for terminated employees or depend on an HR partner to follow-up. Alternately, you could schedule alerts from your HRMS to automatically alert the payroll employee of the time-sensitive situation.

7) How do I make the HRMS data work for me?

Current HRMS applications offer smart functionality, such as building talent pools and candidate pipelines in advance of open positions so that the best people are readily available and can be automatically matched to future reqs.