The Strategic Guide to HR Automation

Future-Proofing Your HR: A Strategic Approach to Workflow Automation

Human Resources (HR) departments and teams are often the backbone of any successful organisation, tasked with managing your most valuable asset—your people. Today’s HR professionals balance strategic business partnerships with a diverse array of responsibilities, encompassing everything from managing employee expectations and cross-border compliance to essential day-to-day tasks such as payroll, onboarding, and leave management. 

To remain competitive and drive organisational success, HR professionals must find innovative ways to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional employee experiences.

The solution? HR automation. 

What is HR automation?

HR automation is a strategic approach to optimise various HR processes with digital solutions. This allows HR teams to automate routine tasks such as onboarding, payroll, and employee benefits administration, while streamlining processes such as recruitment and employee performance. 

Benefits of HR automation solutions include: 

Enhanced efficiency and improved employee experience

• HR teams can automate routine tasks such as time tracking, expense management, and leave requests, enabling them to focus on strategic initiatives and face-to-face time with employees. 
• Digital HR services can also be provided through HR automation solutions, enabling self-service HR operations for your employees. 
• The onboarding and offboarding process can also be automated, ensuring a smooth transition for new hires and departing team members. 

Improved data accuracy and compliance

• Automated data entry and processing can help HR teams minimise errors, resulting in accurate records and reporting. 
• HR automation workflow solutions can also be tailored to meet specific compliance requirements, adhering to local regulations and ensuring data security across all HR operations.

Ability to scale and adapt to workforce changes

• With digital HR services, your teams can easily adjust HR processes to accommodate changes in workforce size, structure, or location, even during periods of rapid growth or downsizing.

HR automation empowers your organisation to elevate HR from an administrative role to a true strategic partner, focusing on high-value tasks and driving business growth. However, to fully unlock the potential of these workflow automation solutions, a strategic approach to implementation is crucial.

Best Practices to Implementing Workflow Automation in HR

Successful workflow automation implementation requires several key steps—from careful planning and workflow solution selection to managing stakeholder engagement and ongoing monitoring. These include: 

Assessing your current HR practices

Analyse your current HR processes to identify the areas that can benefit most from automation. Focus on repetitive, time-consuming, or error-prone workflows and then evaluate the potential efficiency gains from costs savings to productivity. Initial tasks include digitising manual data entry and physical document storage workflows to enhance accuracy and reduce both storage and time costs.

Choosing the right automation solutions 

Identify workflow solutions that can integrate with your current HR systems to ensure a smooth transition. These solutions should also offer customisable options to meet your specific organisational needs while being flexible enough to scale according to demand. 

Engaging your HR teams and stakeholders 

Involve your HR staff throughout the workflow automation selection process, from the initial planning to final implementation, as they will be the main users. Provide comprehensive training and implement change management strategies if needed to address concerns from both your HR department and other employees to ensure a smooth transition. 

Monitoring and continuous improvement

Regularly evaluate your new automated workflows to identify and adapt based on feedback and performance data. Some initial metrics to keep an eye on include processing time, error rates, and employee satisfaction. This allows you continuously refine and optimise your HR processes and workflows. 

 

63% of employees stop using technology if they don’t see its relevance in their day-to-day life, making HR and employee buy-in crucial for successful HR automation implementation.

Gartner, HR Technology Survey 2024

HR Workflow Automation in Action: Mapletree 

A prime example of successful HR automation implementation is Mapletree, a leading global real estate developer. Mapletree’s HR department recognised the limitation of their manual processes and embarked on a journey to streamline their HR documentation workflows. 

Through workflow automation, they achieved significant cost savings, reduced physical storage space requirements, and most importantly, freed up valuable HR resources to focus on high-value tasks that directly impact business outcomes.

Read the full case study here. 

The Future of HR is Automation

Mapletree’s success story highlights the transformative power of HR workflow automation. By strategically implementing these solutions, HR teams can not only overcome the challenges of the digital age, but also position themselves as strategic partners to the organisation, driving growth and employee satisfaction.