RPA in Human Resources - Solving the Pain of HR - Lawrence & Wedlock
RPA in Human ResourcesEmily Graham-Cumming2021-05-23T14:47:58+00:00	
Chances are, that staff in your Human Resource teams are spending far too much of their valuable time and truly feeling the pain of highly routine, repetitive and manual tasks.
Processes in HR can benefit significantly from RPA, with noticeable reductions in manual tasks, improved productivity, accuracy and compliance and the potential to significantly improve the bottom line! Below is some key information on RPA in Human Resources.
RPA in HR Processes
When the best candidates aren’t sourced or you lose them in a badly managed recruitment process, it has a massive impact on your organisation. After all, you need to acquire the top talent to make your company highly successful and competitive.
Is it taking ages to find the right candidates because CVs and online application forms are being manually checked and processed? Is generating a shortlist of those to invite for an interview proving to be highly time-consuming? Are background verifications a laborious task that you can’t guarantee is 100% correct? Statistics show that one single hire is estimated to take a total of almost three working days.
By automating the recruitment and screening processes, you can ensure that not only are you finding and selecting the right candidates for the roles – it will take at least 80% less time to do so with greater accuracy.
Creating, sending and monitoring the return of documentation for the successful candidates has multiple dimensions – the content of the offer letter must be well-tailored to each individual and may also need to comply with different sets of company and legal regulations. Manually checking all the data against diverse databases and regulations makes verification and cross-checking a time consuming and error-prone task.
Through intelligent automation all the information can be swiftly gathered and checked against the various regulations. In addition, automated letters can be crafted for your new employees and sent with high accuracy and without any delay. Not only will this ease the pressure on the HR department, it will reduce the operating cost and ensure a better introductory experience for the new employee.
New Hire Set-up & Onboarding
When a new candidate accepts the job offer, data from several systems must be coordinated to create a new user account, an email address and access rights for applications and systems. In addition, IT equipment and other assets have to be requested and ordered.
Automation streamlines this process by automatically creating user accounts, instigate the prepare and despatch of equipment by orchestrating multiple parties and systems involved in the process. And the major benefit of RPA is no lengthy or costly system integrations are required, because robots interact with applications at User Interface level, the same way a person does.
In addition, disparate and manual onboarding processes can take up far too much of your team’s valuable time. Automation of these processes will ensure delivery of sleek induction programmes, enabling new recruits to successfully undertake all the tasks and activities required in record time. It will help new employees to hit the ground running and focus on delivering the required outcomes in their new roles instead of spending more time than necessary onboarding.
Payroll is a perfect example of a repetitive, monotonous task that organisations can’t forgo. The payroll process can involve large amounts of data entry, sometimes in multiple systems, which is prone to error, restricts visibility and compromises regulatory compliance.
Through the automation of data extraction and data entry tasks, payroll management can be swiftly handled and without error. Not only is this a great time-saving result for the payroll team, it has a positive impact on employee satisfaction.
Expenses can be a pain for both the employees who have to submit them as well as those processing them – it can all be highly manual and time consuming, especially as it can involve a lot of paperwork too.
By automating the submission and administration of expenses and reimbursements, hours of work will be saved a week which can be applied to more strategic and value-based work. What’s more, automation of these processes ensures 100% accuracy resulting in happier employees as well as happy HR and F&A teams!
Talent management is another area where total visibility of your employee’s data is essential. Is it a time-consuming challenge to manually aggregate the right information so that you can formulate robust succession plans or understand a person’s skills gaps?
Automation of the data aggregation will ensure that you’re provided with accurate employee data, save hours of time and ensure that quality employee skills development plans can be generated.
Employees reap exponential value by attaining their objectives and being rewarded; it ensures quality staff are retained. When performance reviews, goal setting, competency management and talent development planning are disorganised and poorly delivered, it negatively affects both the management and the staff that report to them.
Automation of employee performance management processes will save your organisation money by reducing the time required to evaluate employees and decrease the length of the employee performance management cycle. It also improves the workflow between management, employees and HR, increasing manager and employee participation and ‘on time’ completion rates – all ultimately leading to greater employee and management satisfaction.
Compensation planning is an essential element of any successful business. Making strategic pay decisions can help to support an engaged workforce, as compensation is a major factor of employee satisfaction. Pay can also be leveraged to support your retention and talent acquisition strategy, as compensation can be factored into formulating an attractive employee value proposition. Is managing your compensation and reward practices an efficient process that contributes to supporting your workforce or are they frustrated enough to want to leave?
Automating the compensation and rewards processes will cut out the use of spreadsheets to calculate and track compensation and stop costly errors and process inefficiencies. It will improve collaboration between line managers, senior management and compensation professionals allowing the transparency required to keep all parties aligned when making important salary decisions. One of the greatest benefits of an automated compensation management system is the significant amount of time savings it can produce including automation of budget controls, manager decision support, and review and reporting tools – all resulting in a significantly streamlined compensation delivery cycle.
Sick leave, absenteeism and vacation management
Managing the administration of sick leave, absenteeism and vacations can be highly time-consuming because of the amount of manual work involved gathering all the information from various sources – even if it has all been digitally recorded.
Time spent on sick leave, absenteeism and vacation administration can be greatly reduced by 90% by automating all the manual administration – resulting in the correct status of every employee being reflected.
Manual revision of employees’ time records on a daily basis is not a viable option on a large scale. In addition, collecting the information on working standards and overtime regulations, and checking every single record for compliance with these regulations, makes this an incredibly time-consuming task.
Automation of this process will revise the employees’ time records, check regulation compliance and generate reports that can be further analysed by the HR department.
The performance of your employees can effectively make or break your business. Structured employee training and frequent skill development sessions can sharpen the skill set of your employees and keep them on par with the industry standards. But is your training and development programme in a disorganised mess and is the set-up discouraging employee engagement?
In an ever-evolving business environment, only the automation of your training and development processes will help you stay ahead of the curve with increased employee retention, lower costs, enhanced programme quality, improved productivity and increased ROI. Of course, many of your workforce may also have been affected by recent redeployment, reassignment or reallocation – all of which requires a lot of manual administration.
Automating your training and talent development programmes will ensure they’re better organised, more intuitive and more enjoyable for your workforce. What’s more, you’ll have a clearer picture of each individual employee’s skills, experience, needs and wants. Plus, the HR team will have more time to directly engage with your employees and give them a far better employee development experience and support them in their pursuit of wider organisational goals.
Off-boarding is more than just revoking access. HR has to deal with a lot of steps when an employee leaves – steps that are critical for data security and compliance as well as business continuity. Manual off-boarding is subject to human error, time-consuming and can be highly tedious and frustrating for the employee, management and the HR team.
There is an extensive list of activities that need to be undertaken when an employee leaves the organisation including systems access revocation, device and asset retrieval, data transfer, mail routing, licence management, directory updates, account deletion, final payments and exit interviews.
Automation of these activities ensures faster completion at each stage and overall – making the whole process less painful for the employees, their management and the HR team and it guarantees everything is completed with compliance and within the target timeframe.
RPA in HR – Further Insights & Reading
RPA in HR – Processes to Automate
RPA In HR – The Payplus Story
RPA in HR – Process Heatmap
RPA in HR – UiPath Whitepaper
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