Whether your business is in Local Government, Aged-Care, Manufacturing, Retail, Hospitality, Not for profit or Financial Services, there are key areas that each of these industries will benefit from in terms of HR automation. Different industries require similar automation and there are generic HR tasks across all business types that can be automated in a standardised manner. If manual, repetitive tasks haven't been automated within your organisation, then you run the risk of your people spending all their energy on such tasks and not having the impetus left to work in a way that contributes to human contact, which is what builds engagement and enhances culture.
Do The Values of Your Employees Align to Your Business?
Do you know what the individual values of your employees are? Did you hire them by aligning their values to the values of your business? Have you facilitated the alignment of these individual values to your organisational values through internal processes in relation to operational tasks? Do you link both individual and orgnisational values to what good performance looks like in your business and enable your entire team to provide feedback about how everyone does in this context? That may be a lot of questions to throw at you in one paragraph, and you may not necessarily have immediate answers to them right now. However, they are increasingly important in an evolving labour market. If you don't currently answer yes to all of the above, then ask yourself how you're going to get culture and engagement right within your business...?
Short Term Thinking
Taking a step back and looking at the Culture and Engagement question, there is little chance of an HR team being able to focus on transforming culture and building engagement unless administration is kept under control. People are still falling into the trap of thinking that technology is simply about allowing many people to log in to one location to see information. This is nice to have and in the short term, will relieve pressure on HR in terms of appeasement. The inability for many systems to change and scale is where, in the short to medium term there will continue to be a backdraft because paper work is still landing in the laps of managers and HR. It is so important for Technology to be able to meet short, medium and longer term needs, because as we know, things are not static. Because of the hype in the HR Software industry, many new entrants have come into the market with nice looking systems that present well, but grind to a holt when you load more processes and users onto the platform. The old adage of lipstick on the Pumpkin comes to mind.
Track and Measure for Time-Saving
A more holistic view of HR and the life-cycle of the employee is based on maximising productivity and minimising costs at the same time as transforming culture and improving engagement. Engagement relates to the interaction of your employees with the end-to-end HR process within your organisation, as well as how they interact with your customers, bearing in mind that processes change, and needs grow. For example, from a compliance perspective: the process of setting up an automated requisition to hire can sometimes be quite detailed. If your Technology platform does not support this automation or if it is too expensive to establish, Employee Engagement is not going to compensate for that issue. The reason for this is that if Managers and HR are not working together in a collaborative manner in the most efficient way possible, they will not have the time needed to engage your people. Engagement does not simply come from allowing employees to log in to an HR system and request leave or download a payslip. IBM has spent the last few years talking about how pacesetters use SaaS solution like HR technology, to improve customer experience. But let's now forget that your employees are your internal customers and the people that you sell your product or service to, are your external customers. How well you serve your external customers will be wholly predicated on how you service your internal customers and automating manual processes using SaaS technology for your HR processes is the foundation you need to get the rest of the culture and engagement piece right.
Start to Finish
Are you able to engage and understand each employee's journey from hire-to-retire, picking up on unique behaviours and characteristics of each indivdual who works for your organisation? Without an integrated platform allowing you to monitor every touch-point, every interaction, every piece of feedback, how are you and your HR team going to make informed decisions about future hiring and performance engagement? More importantly, how are you going to service your customers better than your competitors do?
Busy is not Productive
Not being busy and being productive is a strange sensation, and not one that happens frequently enough in business. You will be surprised how many hours you actually need to make a difference once 'busy' is removed from the equation through automating those tasks and processes that it is possible for you to automate using technology. HR Professionals have many different areas to manage, yet this is impossible to do effectively without the right assistance. It has been clear for many years that the HR department has been under-resourced and for a long time there was little to no resolution to this issue. However, HR technology and the automation it enables, makes engagement and culture transformation more possible and more likely.
Engagement is Human
Engagement equals allowing people to interact with one another as humans to get their human needs met. This is supported by technology, yet it is not replaced by technology. In an increasingly complex and digitised world, without a significant amount of automation to assist with repetitive, manual, bureaucratic tasks, there is little chance for us to connect, human to human.
Discover how the City of Palmerston, a Local Government in the Northern Territory automated their HR tasks to liberate their employees from manual administrative tasks. Learn about how HR Software technology can help you put the human back in human resources.
