Why SMEs Should Start Automating Administrative HR Tasks

Are the growing piles of receipts on your desk from employees making you frustrated? Trying hard to manage endless calls from your employees asking if you have received their claim submissions or n...

 

Are the growing piles of receipts on your desk from employees making you frustrated? Trying hard to manage endless calls from your employees asking if you have received their claim submissions or not? 

Today, most HR departments realize the significant impact of implementing strategic automation for their business tasks, as manual HR work is quite time-consuming. A number of administrative tasks are required on a daily basis to keep business running, and hardly anyone has time to make contributions to the organization’s future.

HR initiatives such as enhancing reports and analytics used to determine business trends or minimizing absenteeism at the workplace add a great value but still the problem worsens when tasks are performed manually. . Automating administrative HR tasks minimizes work pressure and frees up your valuable time so you can focus on more important work. 

Here we present some major HR processes that need automation to help save time and increase productivity:

a) Centralizing Employee Information
For a small organization, managing personal data of employees is not so difficult but as the head count increases, the complexity also increases. Tracking and updating personal information of employees across multiple spreadsheets can be a headache. So, centralizing personal data can help you save time, enhance reports and analytics, and minimizes the risk of data loss, non-compliance, and errors. With a single and centralized database, you can quickly access any required employee data such as training facility, remuneration packages, and more. 

b) Enhance the On-boarding and Off-boarding Process
Automating HR processes can especially help during on-boarding by providing timely reminders to set things up in advance of the new hire’s joining date. Also, you can receive notifications to receive a copy of the new hire’s identification proof to avoid payroll delays or red-tape in the future. Automating the off-boarding process in a similar way by reminding your employees to deactivate their email accounts, return official equipment, and more. HR personnel do not have to manually follow up with employees, ensuring that the exit checklist is verified and mediates the need for pursuing ex-employees after they have left your organization. 

c) Streamlining Reports with Expense Management System
Traditionally expense management has several touch points but still often requires spreadsheets to get completed or processes through a separate accounting software. Expense claims on an excel spreadsheet are completed along with numerous invoices and receipts, all checked by the manager before it is then sent to the accounting team to enter data manually in the organization’s system. Only then a claim gets processed. Automating the expense process eliminates manual steps, ensuring employees are reimbursed on time and minimizing the risk of accounting blunders. 

d) Scheduling and Automating Feedback Sessions
A modern performance management system has revived the workplace appraisal process with accurate analytics, contributing to feedback process in the business. Sometimes, scheduling appraisals can be a major challenge to HR professionals and due to time crunch, the feedback session keeps slipping further. But automated reminders and notifications ensure that these appraisals happen in a timely manner and employees receive a consistent and regular flow of feedback. 

e) Simplifying the Leave Request Process
Often HR departments wish to put an end to the excruciating holiday booking process. Leave requests can at times turn out to be complex and require employees to submit time off requests multiple times as they clash with other co-worker’s day-offs. Such requests are very time-consuming for both the managers and the employees, and the latter get irritated if their request gets rejected. Instead of that chaos, a common calendar can be shared between employees so they can view their team members days off and then can apply for leaves accordingly without creating conflict. Automation will speed up the leave request process by leveraging notifications and reminders for each intervention and updating the employee record automatically. 

f) Eliminating the Use of Manual Spreadsheets
In small and medium business enterprises (SME), timesheets play a key role in tracking and managing performance. So, recognizing ways to automate the management of timesheet data can reduce work pressure to a great extent and save you from updating records manually. A modern HR management system has self-service functionality which makes it easier to manage timesheets and reduces the effort required in the HR process.

To Sum Up 
Heavy manual HR processes are time-consuming and frustrating for HR professionals and are unable to satisfy employees making them annoyed by holding up the leave requests, appraisals, training facilities, and more. So, centralizing data via HR software solution and automating these above processes can reduce the HR burden very quickly that will lead to contributing to a more productive work environment. Thus, automation will help the HR department to play a more proactive role in enhancing the performance of the business.