Picture a world where your HR team has time to focus on strategic initiatives, revamp staff and employee onboarding, and conduct exit interviews with every departing team member. With HR automation best practices, that world may be closer than you think.
HR automation tools improve efficiency, reduce errors associated with manual data entry, and ease the administrative burden on HR professionals. But to fully reap the benefits of HR automation, you must implement those tools effectively, following known guidelines for excellence.
Why HR automation matters
HR automation frees up your HR team to tackle higher-value work by streamlining HR processes like the following:
- Staff and employee onboarding
- Benefits administration
- Performance reviews
- The recruitment process
- Interview scheduling
- Resume screening
- Payroll processing
According to Deloitte, HR professionals spend up to 57% of their time on administrative tasks. By automating these time-consuming tasks, HR professionals can focus on initiatives that improve the employee experience, such as training programs and development opportunities.
HR automation software improves decision-making by capturing employee data. It also helps you stay compliant with legal and regulatory requirements—both of which support organizational success.
10 HR automation best practices
Once you’ve decided HR automation software makes sense for your organization, it’s time to plan your implementation. Success depends on careful consideration and proactive thinking to ensure the HR automation system you activate aligns with your business workflows.
Bookmark this list of best practices for easy reference.
1. Streamline repetitive tasks
HR automation tools are invaluable for managing repetitive administrative tasks. These HR systems can completely eliminate some of the most time-consuming manual tasks from your HR team’s list, including:
- Sending welcome emails to new hires using generative AI
- Approving leave requests
- Processing tax forms
- Removing employee access to company systems during offboarding
- Approving and processing expense claim submissions
Because HR automation has applications across many major HR functions, it has the power to save HR teams significant time.
2. Establish clear objectives
Every digital transformation project requires clear objectives to ensure it aligns with broader organizational goals. Identifying specific initiatives also supports better decision-making, especially regarding resource allocation and talent management.
Clear objectives are also critical for change management. Your HR team should know exactly why changes are taking place and the value they’ll bring to day-to-day work. The more your team views new automation tools as helpful, the more likely they are to willingly adopt them.
3. Centralize employee data
HR automation solutions serve as a central repository for all staff and employee data, including pay rates, performance reviews, and personal details. Consolidating this information into a single system improves data accuracy and offers quicker access to information.
Human resources information systems (HRIS) are a popular type of HR automation system that excels at centralizing data. These solutions come with process automation tools that simplify data management and standardize processes to create consistency across the organization.
4. Empower staff and employees with self-service
Having a centralized system makes it easier for employees to access personal information and perform related HR tasks. Many HR automation platforms have self-service portals that allow employees to update their profiles and manage benefits, which also helps reduce HR’s workload.
5. Integrate performance feedback loops
HR automation streamlines the employee performance review lifecycle by automatically distributing review forms, sending reminders to fill them out, and generating reports based on feedback. These efficiencies enable more consistent reviews, giving employees regular opportunities to share their thoughts.
Some HR automation solutions offer customizable review templates tailored to specific roles or departments alongside automation tools that make it easier to track individual progress toward goals.
6. Adopt agile implementation
Agile implementation means entering the implementation phase with a flexible and collaborative mindset that prioritizes continuous improvement. Instead of treating implementation as a one-time event, view it as an evolving process you can adapt based on new information and changing circumstances.
Once the system is in place, keep listening to your team, reflecting on what’s working, and continually adjusting to create the best HR workflows for your business.
7. Track analytics and KPIs
Organizations need a way to measure every major project, which is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play. Consider focusing key metrics on the efficiency and effectiveness of your new system and its impact on critical HR functions.
For example, you can track metrics like the ROI of your automation system or cost per hire to see if software brings your recruiting and onboarding costs down. Measuring your progress against specific metrics is the only way you’ll know whether you’ve met your goals.
8. Foster cross-department collaboration
HR process automation benefits more than just the HR team. Providing everyone with centralized access to HR data also improves cross-department communication and collaboration.
Shared visibility and automated notifications keep teams informed and increase engagement with important HR processes, such as approving payroll and managing leave request approvals.
9. Prioritize data security
HR automation software can improve and optimize data security to help protect confidential staff and employee information. It does this by:
- Centralizing data: Centralization consolidates data within a single secure system, which reduces the risk of data exposure.
- Using encryption: By encrypting sensitive employee data, companies make it unreadable, even if an unauthorized user manages to gain access to your system.
- Providing access controls: Role-based permissions limit data visibility, ensuring only authorized employees can access specific data.
These features help reduce the risk of data breaches and improve compliance with data privacy regulations.
10. Establish ongoing training
Training is a crucial part of any successful digital transformation, but it shouldn’t end with implementation. Access to continuous training and resources is an essential HR automation best practice, as it increases employees’ confidence and competence regarding tool use. Ongoing training reinforces adoption, reduces frustration, and encourages employee retention by showing your commitment to their success.
Top HR automation use cases
From finding top candidates to staying prepared for audits, HR automation software helps streamline HR operations and reduce inefficiencies across nearly all major HR functions. Here’s a look at how you can use it to support different pieces of the HR puzzle.
Recruitment
HR automation systems can streamline sourcing and screening during the hiring process. Some organizations use applicant tracking systems to scan resumes for keywords related to job postings, enable candidates to schedule interviews online, and send automated email updates to keep candidates engaged.
Onboarding
Companies can use automation to bring consistency and efficiency to the onboarding process. Automation can handle tasks like distributing documents, scheduling orientation meetings, and granting IT access to necessary systems.
These tools can also provide industry-specific automations. For example, a scheduler at a staffing firm can use HR automation software to automatically flag orientation shifts so they can assign training or adjust pay rates.
Attendance and leave management
HR automation systems can track attendance in real time, update leave balances following leave approvals, and integrate with payroll systems to ensure accurate payments. They can also send automated reminders to employees about shifts and alert managers regarding absences.
Offboarding
Automation is also useful throughout the offboarding process. It can revoke system access on an employee’s last day, track the return of company-owned devices, and trigger offboarding tasks, such as:
- Sending exit surveys
- Scheduling exit interviews
- Reallocating work to other team members
Automation helps enforce compliance by ensuring HR staff follow all data security policies during offboarding.
Payroll management
Organizations may use automation to assist with repetitive payroll tasks like calculating wages and deductions, withholding taxes, and sending payments. Automation can also simplify employee data management and provide insight into payroll costs, helping companies identify trends and make more informed decisions.
Compliance audits
Automated HR systems make compliance audits much easier. Because your data is centralized, you won’t have to spend hours searching across multiple platforms for requested information. That’s significant, considering research shows employees spend an average of 3.6 hours per day searching for information.
Many HR systems also keep an audit trail of all user activity, simplifying responses to questions about access, permissions, or compliance.
Measuring the impact and ROI of HR automation
It can be challenging to measure an HR automation system’s full impact, since its applications are far-reaching. However, you can get a sense of how well it’s working by tracking changes in key areas.
A few metrics to use include:
- Employee satisfaction scores: Indicates overall employee happiness and engagement
- Human error rates: Denotes the frequency of errors in HR processes
- Automation ROI: Measures the HR automation software’s overall financial return on investment
- HR employee productivity: Evaluates the output and efficiency of HR employees before and after system implementation
- Cost per hire: Indicates the total cost associated with recruiting and hiring a new employee
Choosing the right HR automation software
Using HR automation best practices is only one piece of the transformation puzzle. Choosing the right HR automation tools is just as essential.
A well-designed HR technology solution helps streamline key HR functions by automating processes like onboarding, scheduling, time tracking, and communication. As one of the leaders in workforce management software, Teambridge has the power to automate all these functions and more. Better yet, you can customize Teambridge to fit your existing workflows—you don’t have to change your HR processes to adapt to a new system.
Teambridge offers more than 200 automated workflow templates you can easily build from. Or if you prefer, you can start from scratch using our composable building blocks.
Curious how this could look for you? Book a chat with our team, and we'll be happy to show you all the ways you can benefit from automation.
