3 ways HRMS improves HR administrative processes

HR administrative processes are a necessary part of doing business, but they shouldn’t take time and resources away from activities that add more value to your company’s bottom line. Your HRMS is the engine that improves the accuracy and efficiency of HR administration in a variety of ways. Here are three key ones:

1. Workflow and approvals

A large number of HR tasks are required for oversight or compliance purposes, such as requiring a second set of eyes to review and approve any HR transaction with financial implications, like a compensation change, a new hire, opening a job requisition, or granting stock options. There is no reason to live in the dinosaur age of emailing reminders and scanning paper forms to perform these tasks, though.

Many HRMS on the market today feature the built-in configuration of approval steps and automatic notification of an approver that action is required. In addition, some can send reminders after a specified amount of time or escalate the transaction upwards when action does not occur in a predefined timeframe.

Recommended Reading: HRMS Vendor Guide - Find an HRMS vendor to help improve HR administrative processes

2. Use automation to your advantage

Has your company ever experienced an emergency situation such as a workplace accident or an employee who unexpectedly does not come in and is not reachable? Is your emergency contact data up to date for every employee? I recently did a process review for a company that kept emergency contact details in each employee’s individual file; their review required HR to send individual emails to all employees, who in turn confirmed or sent updates back by email, which then needed to be updated by hand.

A smarter way to accomplish the same task is to keep the data in your HRMS and to push out a review task automatically, where the HRMS prompts employees to go online and review the data. Let the system send reminders and repeat notifications rather than using your HR staff’s time for follow-up.

3. Ease of accessibility to data

One of the biggest time drains on your operational HR staff can be questions from employees or managers regarding how to do something or where to find guidelines and policies. This is where your HRMS can really deliver a powerful administrative savings, by putting as many transactions as possible at your employees’ fingertips: changing addresses and other personal information, enrolling a beneficiary, reviewing benefits options, and so on. Employees appreciate being able to access basic data as easily as they would for any other transaction in your company, such as looking up the phone number of a colleague. In addition, when you build the rules for a transaction into the HRMS-for example, not allowing a manager to perform an off-cycle pay increase beyond a certain percentage-you’re saving managers the extra effort of searching for policy documents or contacting HR with questions.