Are you an HR or People & Culture Manager who spends too much time creating documents to manage the employee life cycle within your organisation? From Employment Agreements and Company Policies to Performance Reviews and Surveys, creating content can be time-consuming and tedious.

It doesn't need to be that way.

As an HR or People & Culture Manager you need a lot of content to manage the employee lifecycle. In the modern world, you've almost been forced to become a content marketer, as well as an HR Professional. From Letters of Offer and Employment Contracts to Company Policies and Surveys, creating content can be time-consuming and tedious.

It doesn't need to be that way.

Every year at this time, HR software companies across the globe publish blogs about HR trends for the coming year (and beyond). Some blogs list up to 25 trends to keep your eye on, but who has time to stay on top of a list that long in this day and age? If you apply the 80/20 rule to a list that totals 25, you really only need to focus on 5 trends or priorities. And more importantly, you need to choose the top 5 things that matter most to your business. In our first HR Blog for 2020, we're going to explore Gartner's perspective on the top 5 priorities for HR leaders in 2020. These are derived from Gartner's 2020 Future of HR Survey, which polled HR leaders to assess their priorities and expected challenges in 2020 and beyond.

Efficient training and development systems are crucial throughout an employee’s life-cycle. From onboarding to preparing for a new role, to ongoing performance management, HR teams need to have access to high-quality learning content to both retain and upskill staff.

In 2018, HR.com and Iron Mountain conducted a study on The State of HR Automation in Mid-Sized Organisations. Findings reveal that most HR departments are STILL bogged down by manual administrative tasks. A majority of respondents (59%) said the HR professionals in their organisation spend over half their time on manual administrative tasks. This is supported by other HR.com research. In their Advancing HR Function study, half of respondents predicted that 'HR will be transformed into a much more strategic function as administrative duties are automated or outsourced to others.' And yet, despite all the advancements in technology, HR often still finds itself trying to balance two roles: Rule-driven bureaucrat and strategically motivated talent manager. If HR Professionals want to take a leading role in redesigning work, such a redesign needs to amplify efficiencies through automation so as to have the bandwidth to become a more strategic function. In this blog we explore where HR automation can produce the greatest efficiency gains across the employee lifecycle.

As we've illustrated in the previous blogs in the this series on whether to automate or not to automate, automation of the right tasks and processes in the employee lifecycle is critical to business success. is now a key pillar of the future of work and implementing a human-automation collaboration is essential to any digital transformation program. But what process and functions should you automate first? And how do you make sure that it is roles as opposed to people, that are made redundant? EY has done considerable research in this regard and this blog explores how their best practice advice on how to automate intelligently.

Automation will certainly change human resources as we know it, but the impact will reach far beyond the HR department to encompass the entire employee lifecycle. Organisations that manage such transformation successfully will be those in which leaders and HR professionals recognise what tasks machines can do significantly better than humans and automate only those tasks. Focusing human effort on activities that humans do best will result in a happier, more engaged and more productive workforce overall. Designing such an organisation requires a much longer-term people strategy (one that goes beyond the usual succession planning), coupled with transparent dialogue with the existing workforce about the benefits of automation on what it means for them. This Blog in the HR automation series explores the broader implications that automation will have on leadership, employees and the entity of the organisation itself.

Apparently you can’t solve the ‘how to automate work’ problem by thinking solely about automation replacing jobs. This is the premise behind Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work by Ravin Jesuthasan, Managing Director at Willis Towers Watson, and John Boudreau, professor and Research Director at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective Organisations. Based on their decades of experience helping companies transform approaches to work and leadership, Reinventing Jobs offers a new set of tools for applying automation and artificial intelligence in today’s organisations. In this Blog we will examine the 4-Step framework for applying automation to work outlined by Jesuthasan and Boudreau, who believe that 'simply asking which humans will be replaced by automation fails to take into account how work and automation will evolve.' Now let's continue our exploration of this series on whether to automate or not to automate tasks and processes across the employee lifecycle.