Your HR Automation Tech Stack: 10 Must-Haves

Most businesses are familiar with the sight of piling paperwork on the HR desks and the impact of excessive administrative load resulting in undue stress on the team.

HR managers lose 14 hours a week manually completing tasks that could be automated.

While the problem is no longer hidden behind closed doors, the question remains as to how we can eliminate inefficient manual HR work?

In the pre-Covid era, the overburdened HR department somehow managed to sort and complete the hundreds of manual tasks daily. But the limitations brought by the pandemic forced companies to think smarter and replace their manual management of HR tasks. That's when HR Automation came floating in like a lifeboat.

What is HR Automation?

HR Automation is the process of automating and digitizing the manual HR processes using technology. The digital transformation streamlines the core HR functions and creates a more favorable, convenient, and faster HR management system.

There are repetitive administrative tasks that consume a major chunk of HR’s time. With the help of HR automation, the manual process of onboarding, offboarding, time tracking, payroll management, staff performance analysis, and employee benefits administration can be put to autopilot mode. This would drastically reduce the cost and the consumption of resources allowing the HR employees to concentrate on human-centered activities and strategic planning that benefit the firm.

What not to miss in your HR Automation toolbox? 

Picking the right human resource management software can help solve all your HR challenges. After performing extensive research, here are the 10 must-have HR Automation tech stacks to look out for in your HR software.

1. Recruitment / ATS

Recruitment is imperative yet an agony for many companies considering the amount of time and energy each stage of recruitment requires. But all of this can change in just a few clicks with a recruitment software or applicant tracking system (ATS).

The recruiting process becomes a lot more productive and quick by automating the process of creating job listings, collecting applications, sending offer letters, onboarding, sending automatic rejection emails, screening applicants, and gathering feedback. Additionally, businesses can leverage the automation functionality to retrieve relevant candidates from talent pools in just a few steps.

Learn more about how to revamp your recruitment process and get better results from our step-by-step guide.

2. Onboarding

Employee onboarding necessitates a substantial commitment from both HR and manager, yet it is a repetitive job that can be readily automated. This frees up time for your HR teams to focus on providing a better work experience for freshly hired employees.

A smooth-functioning employee onboarding process gives new hires a great first impression and assists in building a good employer brand. Some of the automation rules or processes you can create with an onboarding tool include:

• Creating customized onboarding checklist templates for different positions in your company
• Assigning specific tasks for responsible team members
• Reminding the due dates of pending tasks

3. Time Attendance 

Tracking every employee’s work schedule manually can get time-consuming and aggravating. Establish a productive working culture by putting the time tracking function on auto-pilot. With automated time tracking, HR and employees can save time from manually inputting and tracking working hours which helps increase company productivity.

In addition, a touchless time tracking system that is accessible on-the-go aids in
avoiding unnecessary contacts especially with an ongoing pandemic.

4. Leave Management

Checking an employee's leave balance, having the leave approved by the manager, and maintaining a record of those leave for payroll distribution are much too many tasks for one person to handle, leaving a lot of room for human error.

Automating the time-off/leave management system is a simple approach to prevent this. Employees can quickly request time off, and the program will help managers approve/decline leaves in one go while keeping track of employees' time off.

Plus, the recorded time off data will auto-sync to your payroll system, making it easier for you to calculate employees’ salaries.

5. Payroll

Processing payroll can be one of the most complicated yet tedious HR tasks. On top of that is the headache of repeating the same process for hundreds and thousands of employees.

Make this process simple and fast with Grove HR’s automated payroll management system that helps you in payroll preparation, review, and configuration. Other payroll tools can also help you file and manage taxes, keep track of payroll data, calculate net salaries, process direct deposits via bank transfers, and generate payroll reports.

6. Employee Benefits Management

Employee Benefits Administration includes giving the employees insight into the various health care benefits, retirement plans, workers' compensation, and other benefits.

Most employees remain unaware of all the benefits available to them during their employment. Some tools like Plum can help them track and quickly look through all the benefits offered like:

• Clearly categorize and elaborate the situation-specific plans available
• Lay down and explain the eligibility for each plan
• Manage compensations and deposits
• Employee self-service allows employees to easily search, research, and find the best plans

Check out Plum’s exclusive benefits for Grove HR’s customers.

7. Employee Engagement

Companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable.

Build better relationships between team members by offering a place to connect digitally. You can easily manage interest groups and maintain the company's social feed to promote employee interactions using Sprynkl - Grove HR’s employee engagement app.

Additionally, automating employee engagement practices of conducting polls & surveys, collecting feedback forms, and providing/receiving peer reviews & recognition contribute towards ongoing improvement. Such HR automation helps make the work environment focused on both organization and individual betterment.

8. Employee Performance Management 

Companies are shifting from performance management to performance enablement to adapt to the new workforce’s needs.

A great way to aid this new perspective is to use Performance Enablement software. The tool should come with features like on-demand review schedule, manager and peer reviews, statistical individual performance metrics, customizable review forms, and so on. This would not manage your employees’ performance but help enable them to shine to their full potential.

Plus, with the help of the software, employees can easily read their performance appraisals and follow their development.

9. Employee Self Service

When a machine can do it much quicker, your HR department shouldn't have to deal with the hassle of collecting, managing, and ensuring that every employee's data is documented manually, orderly, and on time.

By adopting HR Automation, companies can enable employees to upload and update their required documents themselves on a cloud-based HR platform without going through HR anymore.

10. HR Analytics

For a long time, decision-making in HR has been largely based on intuition and guesswork due to a lack of supporting data. But it doesn't have to be that way anymore. HR Analytics tools completely turn this game around.

HR analytics refers to analyzing the workforce of a business and gathering relevant data for standard HR metrics. The problem with a data-driven approach for HR is the collection and management of such a large data set. That’s where HR Automation comes into play. You can securely manage and store all kinds of data to help your business analyze information and develop quick insights without the risk of data loss or human data input errors.

You can use the raw and processed data to develop insights on worker absenteeism, employee turnover, engagement rating, productivity assessment, time and cost of recruitment, etc. This would increase the success rate of the strategies formulated to meet your business needs.

HR automation is the future of HR

The drive to keep up with others and be relevant has grown dramatically following the pandemic. Leave the mundane HR workflows for the HR software to enjoy and automate your HR process so that you can commit your company's precious resources towards more valuable parts.

Embark on a journey into the future with HR automation, and watch your company's productivity graphs skyrocket as you invest in quality HR software.