9 Ways to Create A More Human Workplace With RPA for HR Processes

Human resource and talent management professionals today aren’t just transactional admin players. They are the ultimate employee-experience builders. It is them who drive talent development, make better people decisions, and improve the quality of employee experience.

But, guess what? Often they are bogged down with repetitive and mechanical tasks which barely leave them any time to do what they do best i.e. making the workplace more human-centric. In fact, an HR employee spends a third of their working year i.e. more than 600 hours on average on administrative tasks. This calls for putting the human back in human resources, which organisations can effectively achieve with robotic process automation (RPA).

So, how do you let the HR function be in the driver seat and manage the modern workforce with RPA? This article has the answer. Plus, it helps you to understand the nitty-gritty of using RPA for HR processes. So, if you want the HR team at your organisation to partake in value-added strategic activities instead of running administrative chores, this is for you.

What Is HR Process Automation?

Robotic process automation for HR processes benefits organisations willing to focus on people instead of paperwork. Be it interacting with potential candidates or using chatbots to screen resumes, the combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and RPA can do wonders for human resource tasks and processes. While RPA mimics human actions, AI is equipped to mimic human judgment. So, what happens when you deploy human resource automation processes at your organisation?

Human resource automation utilises automation workflows to streamline and digitise the process of handling document-centric tasks. This improves efficiency besides reducing cycle time and human error. And, you can set security and privacy protocols to safeguard confidential information and comply with regulatory requirements. So, what kind of HR processes can you automate? Processes that are usually time-consuming, repetitive, time critical, and prone to error. Here are a few examples of HR processes and tasks that RPA can help you to automate:

• Strategic: HR program/policy implementation, organisation design, workforce planning, and employee satisfaction management
• Talent Management: Hiring management, onboarding, employee training and development, performance management, career & succession planning
• Rewards: Compensation and benefits management
• Operations: Employee data administration, payroll management, health and safety management, and employee relations

9 HR Process Automation Examples

Understanding the type of HR processes you can automate using process automation or RPA becomes easier with a glimpse of real-life examples. Here are 9 HR automation examples to help you get started.

1) Resume Screening and Candidate Shortlisting: Did you know screening resumes for one hire can take up to 23 hours, making it one of the most time-consuming tasks in recruiting? With HR automation, you can utilise bots to gather resumes, screen them, run background checks, and evaluate skills against the job requirements. This allows recruiters to focus on spending more time on having conversations with eligible candidates and understanding if the candidates’ personal goals are aligned with that of the organisation.

2) Offer Letter Administration: Offer letter administration involves creating and receiving letters and documents sent to new joinees. The HR team is responsible for ensuring that the contents of these documents and letters comply with organisational regulations. This doesn’t seem daunting but takes several hours for them to check data against multiple databases and regulations. Needless to say, such processes are highly prone to errors. With HR automation tools, organisations can send tailor-made and accurate offer letters after cross-checking with existing regulations. This helps recruiters to save time and proactively look for people that fit the role.

3) Employee Onboarding: Employee onboarding doesn’t end with new joinees accepting offer letters. Recruiters need to take care of inter-departmental coordination, training, and orientation as well. When the HR team takes every joinee through these processes, an organization suffers from an unnecessarily longer onboarding lifecycle. With RPA bots, organisations can easily schedule orientation sessions, assign relevant training, and inform both finance and IT teams about actions to be taken.

4) Employee Timesheets: Mid-size and large-scale businesses suffer from substantial payroll headaches when they depend on employee time trackers. Also, time tracking can be rife with errors when employees manually update working hours. It can take hours for the HR team to accurately check time records and calculate overtime entries. With robotic process automation, organisations can efficiently manage attendance, shifts, and payroll. RPA bots can also flag erroneous data entries which may reduce unnecessary expenditure.

5) Leave Requests: Picture it: your organisation is exceedingly large. Employees raise leave requests and receive approval via mail. Finally, the HR team goes back and forth between these mails at the end of the month. This can be a nightmare for large-scale organisations. With RPA bots, organisations can empower employees to raise leave requests via a simple and easy-to-use user interface. This allows managers to respond and approve leaves, and the HR team to have a ready-to-use information database for payroll processing.

6) Monthly Payroll: Payroll processing often involves a number of data-entry tasks. The slightest error in updating the data can wreak havoc in organisations. The limited capability of the HR team can also lead to payment delays. With process automation, you can easily navigate all these challenges and adhere to the best practices related to compliance and security management. Once the RPA process is set up, organisations can enjoy increased accuracy with minimised processing time.

7) Expense Claims: The HR team at an organisation has to go through a stack of files and multiple excel spreadsheets while processing employee expenses. No matter how detailed your manual processes are, there are always chances of inaccuracies. Such discrepancies may have to be reviewed by managers and the accounting team. HR automation backed by RPA eliminates the need of handling such tedious manual processes. With RPA bots, not only can you reduce accounting errors but also verify and process these claims.

8) Performance Management: Managing the workforce today can be overwhelming as there are more things to track and process than you can imagine. Performance management is one of the most important dynamic HR processes that help organisations to track, measure, and analyse employee performance. Manual performance management is not only time-consuming and laborious but also can suffer from biases and inaccuracies. With robotic process automation, organisations can ensure flawless performance management and encourage employees to do better.

9) Exit Interviews: Employee retention has become more challenging with the rising number of job hoppers. You’ll be surprised to know that an average employee exit costs 16% to 213% of that employee’s annual salary to find a replacement. Moreover, manual employee offboarding can be time-consuming, biased, and ineffective. Human resource automation tools can easily take care of multiple offboarding tasks such as generating exit documents, collecting assets, revoking system access, notifying the right teams, and completing payoff. RPA bots can also collect feedback from these employees to derive actionable insights which can help an organisation to improve employee retention.

5 Benefits of HR Process Automation

No matter how futuristic it sounds, RPA has the capability to deliver value and the RPA industry is estimated to expand at a CAGR of 34% from 2020 to 2027. With its demonstrated capabilities, business leaders today realise that it’s not anymore about humans or robots - it’s about humans and robots working side by side for achieving greater efficiency.

Is your organisation ready to be productive and efficient? If yes, here are the benefits that you can expect after deploying HR process automation.

1) Easy Integration: Robotic process automation is completely non-invasive meaning organisations can easily integrate it with their existing systems. Because of its low-risk technology, RPA paves the path for an organisation to continuously grow with new algorithms.

2) Improved Productivity: When organisations deploy RPA for human resources, they significantly free up the time of human resource executives. This allows the HR team to focus on high-value tasks such as employee engagement, employee retention, etc. and therefore improve organisational productivity.

3) Scalability: Organisations can deploy RPA for human resources at a relatively lower cost per effort when they operate on a large scale. This means there will be no wastage of effort or downtime.

4) Accuracy: HR processes often require time-consuming and laborious data entry tasks which are highly prone to errors. With robotic process automation, organisations can leverage computational supremacy to avoid such errors and mistakes.

5) Reliability and Flexibility: Unlike humans, robots can consistently perform 24x7 throughout the year. This makes RPA reliable for critical HR operations such as payroll, leave management, timesheet, etc. In addition, RPA tools are industry-agnostic meaning they can be deployed in any industry irrespective of the environment.

4 Ways RPA Can Make a Workplace More Human

It is hard to imagine a natural partnership between humans and machines. But magic happens when organisations use machines or bots to complement tasks undertaken by humans. If you want to reduce errors, create seamless HR workflows, and boost business efficiency, it’s worth knowing what kind of paradigm change to expect with HR process automation. Here are 4 ways in which robotic process automation can put the human back in human resources at your organisation.

1) Human Resource Managers Become Employee Experience Builders: Gone are those days when the workforce used to be orchestrated around manual labor. So, if you were to name three things that differentiate a company today, what would those be? Businesses today value knowledge-based work and there are things that offer competitive advantage - their culture, intellectual property (IP), and the talent inherent to the workforce. To excel, organisations don’t only need award-winning products but also the ability to foster a culture that attracts and retains the best talent. This is where the human resource teams come in. With robotic process automation taking care of tedious tasks, human resources managers will have more time to redefine the organisational culture and become employee experience builders.

2) New Technologies Deliver Optimal Employee Experiences: Why is it so important for organisations to be able to hire and retain the best talent? Because, superior talents can be upto eight times more productive. This is why organisations around the world have made it an agenda to win the war on talent. With the increasing number of millennials and post-millennials in the workforce, it has become an imperative for organisations to deliver immersive employee experience. Robotic process automation allows HR departments to create a personalised digital experience for employees and focus on what makes a workplace more human i.e. innovation, negotiation, and critical problem-solving.

3) HR Professionals Can Create Competitive Advantage: HR departments are often considered as cost centers when they can actually become the drivers of competitive advantage. They spend most of their time on completing routine and repetitive tasks that barely contribute to building this competitive advantage. Overburdened HR teams are so saddled with tasks that they can’t focus on accomplishing what adds value to the organisation. RPA helps HR professionals to save time and focus on designing training sessions, optimising employee performance, improving work culture, offering rewards, and enhancing business performance. All these activities help an organisation to have engaged employees and save $450 billion to $550 billion per year in lost productivity.

4) Human Resource Teams Can Facilitate Strategic Changes: Did you know 50% of an employee’s tasks are mundane, tedious, and less satisfying for the employee? This makes it inevitable for robots and people to co-exist. While robots can take care of routine, transactional, and repetitive tasks, people can focus on tasks that are complex and crucial for business success. Human resource teams should advocate towards bringing this automation-first approach and therefore facilitate strategic changes.

The Way Forward for Human Resources Is Digital

The future of work is digital. Moving forward, the HR teams at organisations will become more technologically-engaged and will play a strategic role. At the core of their initiatives will remain three things i.e. ability to embrace automation, utilise new resources, and drive organisational change.

1) Creating and Embracing a World of Automated Work: Putting humans back in the human resource is no easy feat. That’s why human resource teams need to learn and embrace the nuances of new technologies such as robotic process automation. Studying well-documented use cases and identifying HR processes for RPA will help them to gauge the potential return on investment. To create a functional world of automated work, they may also consider leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for less repetitive tasks and unstructured data.

2) Utilising New Resources: Deploying RPA for human processes will help HR professionals to free up their time — the time they never realised they had. They should be using this time to understand if there are processes that can be further automated. Additionally, they should focus on strategic activities that will improve business performance and enhance the organisational culture.

3) Driving Organisational Change: HR teams will always be the link between the employees and the management. This puts an additional responsibility on them i.e. helping employees to adapt to an RPA-enhanced workplace. Facilitating training and addressing potential challenges will aid them in redefining employee experience and creating a competitive advantage for the organisation.

Is It Necessary to Hire a Robotic Process Automation Consultant?

There is no right or wrong answer to this. Instead, let’s look at challenges that organisations usually come across while deploying RPA for HR processes and how a RPA consultant can address them.

1) Proof-of-Concept Projects: A pilot project shapes your perception of how automation can benefit your organisation. It usually demonstrates the scope of automation in a more controlled fashion. The general enthusiasm is always towards automating as much and as quickly possible. This may lead to project failure and may not give you the comprehensive view of how RPA can help HR operations. Reputed robotic process automation consultants can help you with proof-of-concept projects that focus on low-importance tasks and yield high user frustration. With time, your consultant can help you implement RPA for large and mission-critical tasks which your staff will support as their resistance to new technology is relatively low now and they would want to automate more tasks. For example, organisations may consider trivial processes for pilots before moving to business-critical tasks like onboarding and offboarding.

2) Change Management: Implementing RPA for HR processes resembles change management exercises. Employees may feel threatened with RPA bots taking over some of their tasks. RPA consultants come in here and make it easy for employees to understand what RPA is, what it means for them, and how it will help them to achieve more. Educational training sessions are key to preventing your automation efforts from failing.

3) Understanding ROI: Besides helping you choose the right tools with their extensive experience, RPA consultants can aid in understanding the return on investment as well. To understand whether RPA tools are working or delivering unintended consequences, your organisation needs RPA experts who will be there to answer queries and help if needed.

NeeVista is a leading robotic process automation consultancy helping mid-size and large-scale organisations automate processes, reduce errors, save money, optimise business processes, and enhance customer experiences. Whether you are looking for a RPA consultant partner or need help with identifying HR processes to automate, NeeVista is your go-to digital consultancy.