With the exponential growth of SMEs in Asia Pacific, the region is expected to witness the highest adoption of business process automation software and HR workflows. According to Future Market Insights, that’s four times from 2023 to 2033. In India, the growth rate is even higher, at five times in the same period.
As a business leader, you want to keep up with business trends and facilitate your HR workflow. Understanding areas where you can implement automated HR workflows or automation software systems can streamline your processes and reduce administrative costs. Here’s everything you need to know to set up your HR workflow.
Why should you implement automated HR workflows?
HR automation is the use of automation software systems to automate repetitive HR tasks that require little to no manual input. But why invest in an automation software system when your employees can do the HR processes manually?
Automated HR workflows are time-efficient, economical, more accurate, and compliant with labor laws in your region. It also provides data and insights that inform your business decisions and enhance your employees’ overall work experience. Also, when you relieve your HR team of these tedious tasks, they have more time to work on strategies that matter.
10 HR Workflows Examples
Choosing the right, efficient operations to automate is important so that you can reap the benefits of your automation software system. Here are some examples to consider:
1. Job postings
Part of the recruitment process that may require automated HR workflows is posting job ads. You can automate job posting to career websites, social media platforms, and multiple job boards, such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed.
Use an automation software system that integrates with the websites of your choice to automatically post your job ads, promote the ad on your social media pages, and target the most relevant job boards and applicants.
This way, you can maximize exposure and have a bigger and better pool to choose from. Automated HR workflows such as these optimize your hiring process, which means you can run fewer hiring cycles and save on recruitment costs.
Relevant reading: How to Define Your Employee’s Job Scope (With a Template!)
2. Employee onboarding or offboarding
One of the most automated and complex HR workflows is employee onboarding. With a multi-step workflow, you can add an employee to your Human Resources Information System (HRIS), and an organization email account will be created automatically for them.
The first few emails they receive will include the onboarding material. Think of it as a starter pack for joining, including a welcome message, employee handbook, necessary company policies, and contact details for senior staff.
The automaton software system can also collect e-signed forms, generate official documents, deliver devices to them without IT support, manage your employee data in one place, update it automatically, assign their onboarding schedule, send notifications to your new hires, set up payroll and benefits, and give them access to employee portals.
As for the offboarding process, it all starts with an employee’s leave notice. The company can choose to retain the employee by counter offering.
Otherwise, the automated HR workflows will kickstart to revoke access to portals and tools, schedule exit interviews, prepare exit documents regulating equipment returns with checklists of the requested items, updating employee information, and sending surveys to former employees to ask for feedback.
3. Leave request and approval process
Leave management is one of the best automated HR workflows, as it prevents missing leave request emails and disrupting operations.
For example, the automation software system can check an employee’s leave balance whilst abiding by the company policies to ensure there is minimum available workforce for each department. Once that is done, it can send automatic notifications to an employee’s manager for approval or rejection.
4. Leave tracking
With the right automation software system, you can record employee paid leaves for payroll circulation automatically and classify them according to the type of leave, such as sick leave and maternity leave. Then, the platform calculates and updates your employees’ remaining paid time off. Additionally, it consolidates all this information for easy access.
5. Performance review process
Consider automated HR workflows for the performance review process. This can be done simply by creating custom performance review questions for employees and managers to fill out. Then, you can set the automation software system up to send the company-wide surveys on set dates, thus establishing a regular review cycle.
After that, the analytics and statistics feature in the automation software system can supply you with the data necessary to establish or refine your HR strategies. Additionally, the program will store past performance reviews, which enables you to track employee progress easily.
Accordingly, you can issue raises and bonuses, take disciplinary action, or terminate your employees’ agreements. Either way, the decision will be bias-free because the tracked employee performance data from your automated HR workflows gives you a great reference point.
6. Employee recognition
Picture this: your managers and employees log into your employee recognition app to send a virtual clap to their employee or colleague for the effort they put into their latest team project. This form of employee recognition helps foster a positive company culture that every organization strives for.
You can do so by implementing an automated reward system (ARS). This software rewards employees for their achievements and milestones based on defined criteria. Think bonuses, days off, public accolades, e-gift cards, and experiential gifts.
An ARS integrates with the HR software you already have to track your employees’ performance, identify rewardable achievements, and issue a personalized reward. For instance, you can send employees gifts on their work anniversaries to promote company loyalty.
7. Reporting expenses
Reporting expenses can benefit from automated HR workflows, leaving a positive impact on your employees. These include employee wages, office expenses, legal and professional services, insurance and tax expenses, and meals.
When you digitalize the expense reporting process, your employees can upload documents within an employee self-service portal from their end. Then, the software will notify the relevant manager to approve or reject the expense.
You can also use an integration platform to create an account for new hires automatically on the expense reporting software or app.
8. Payroll inquiries
One of the automated HR workflows you need is payroll inquiries because there’s less room for error, and employees get paid the correct amounts promptly. You can outsource it or integrate your HR system with the payroll system.
With such automated HR workflows, handling payroll inquiries about withholding amounts, time-offs, pay rates, and accumulation rates becomes a piece of cake. You can easily keep track of these payments, and the automation software system will withhold any necessary amounts for tax purposes.
9. Time and attendance tracking
When you have automated HR workflows for time and attendance tracking, you avoid missing or delays in approving or rejecting a leave request via Slack or email. Instead, you get automated sheets with real-time updates.
Even better, an automation software system with attendance tracking can be especially helpful for remote and hybrid teams, supporting team-wide visibility into who’s working at any given time. This way, employees can take their well-deserved time off without impacting business operations.
Additionally, a time-tracking automation software system allows you to track how many hours your team has worked per week. To illustrate, you can log your employees’ work hours manually or automatically and track attendance and absence.
Your HR personnel can benefit from the data and insights generated by these automated HR workflows. They can calculate the company’s absenteeism rate and notice alarming trends, such as when employees are taking too many or too little days off.
With these insights in hand, they can schedule meetings with such employees to find out the underlying cause. Then, they can take mitigating and actionable steps to optimize team productivity and labor costs.
10. Getting HR documents signed
As mentioned earlier, you can create automated HR workflows for signing forms. Using an automation software system for this makes processes like onboarding less stressful for new hires and the HR team, requires little to no physical paperwork, and accommodates hybrid or remote working models.
An automation software system can send new hires the relevant HR documents (such as employee handbook, offer letter, confidentiality agreements, and employment contracts) and request their digital signatures.
Then, the platform automatically collects e-signed forms, generates HR documents in PDF format, and stores them automatically within your HR management system.
Leveraging HR Workflows for Strategic Advantage
HR tasks shouldn’t feel daunting. Omni automates admin work, freeing up HR professionals to focus on more strategic tasks.
From onboarding to offboarding, save time with Omni’s workflow automation software system. With our customized template of workflows and task sequences, you can send out tasks to your team and track completion progress with a click of a button.
Save time and improve accuracy with streamlined information and document collection. With our employee self-service portals, you can get employees to upload and input their employee data directly in Omni. Say goodbye to manual entry and error prone data!
Omni also integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams to automatically send task notifications and reminders so you can rest easy when it comes time for performance reviews or getting new joiners to complete onboarding paperwork.
Book a demo with our team now to learn how Omni’s automated HR workflows can help take your business processes to the next level.
