Francis works as an HR manager in a service-based company with 2000+ employees and manages a small team of 30 Human Resource professionals. He leads the company’s hiring, payroll, leave and benefit management, policy management and employee experience initiatives.
What Francis and His Team Do on A Typical Workday…
Despite the availability of advanced technologies such as intelligent automation, RPA (Robotic Process Automation), OCR, AI-powered digital assistants, HR analytics and so on, Francis and his team still rely on rudimentary technology and disparate systems for their daily operations. As a result, they end up wasting precious time and resources on extensive manual effort even for routine tasks like onboarding, leave management and payroll.
On any normal workday, you can find Francis buried under mind-numbing amounts of paperwork. From scanning through resumes, drawing up contracts and signing off on documents to preparing presentations, administrative tasks and reporting, he spends 60-70% of his workday on manual drudgery causing him to lose an average of 14 hours a week on low-value, routine tasks that do not require his seasoned expertise.
Francis finds it difficult to draw up reports owing to the lack of HR analytics, real-time intelligence and visibility into processes. Without such important insights and performance metrics, convincing the board on critical HR investments is incredibly difficult. Similarly, the lack of HR analytics makes the appraisals process ineffective and complex.
With an HR to employee ratio of 1.67:100, the Human Resource executives find themselves engaging in massive amounts of busywork and paperwork. They too spend 60-70% of their time on tasks that could be taken care of by automation software and AI-powered digital work assistants.
Recruitment: With an attrition rate of 30-40% in the company, hiring quick and hiring right are critical to the company. The HR Team ends up spending up to 20 hours a week reaching out to the right candidates. The operational workload, including candidate outreach, screening and matching, and other tedious task such as gathering of data from different systems to create a new user account, email address, IT equipment, access rights, causes a significant waste of time, money and effort. As a growth-oriented company, the delays in hiring affect their scalability.
Not just Francis and the HR team, but the employees too must engage in tedious processes and extensive paperwork during onboarding, exit, daily operations and even in providing feedback, instead of focusing on core business and high-value, productive activities.
Overall, the efficiency, productivity and experiences of Francis and the HR team suffer. The higher error rate associated with manual tasks increases the costs. The HR team is unable to focus adequately on strengthening employee engagement and experiences.
Futuristic HR: Where HR Drives Business Value
Stella is an HR manager who works in a similar company as Francis. She has a similar-sized HR team as Francis including her job responsibilities. What differs starkly from Francis’ situation is that Stella and her team are augmented with technology such as intelligent automation, Robotic Process Automation, digital enablement platform, AI-powered self-learning digital assistants, OCR. These enable them to focus their energy on high-value, productive tasks.
Recruitment – Irrespective of the number of applications that come in, their scalable digital enablement platform powered by AI, ML, NLP and OCR scans hundreds and thousands of resumes within minutes. It screens applications and filters out candidates based on the pre-defined criteria (role, experience, skills, etc.).
Stellas’ AI-powered digital assistant ranks candidates based on candidate traits, role-organizational fit, etc. the assistant equips Stella and her hiring team with relevant insights about the candidate through the pre-assessment and interview stages, making the selection process data-driven, quick and effective.
Further, the AI assistant takes on follow up, offer acceptance and onboarding and eliminates manual tasks involved in these processes. Stella utilized her digital enablement platform and optimized the process, reducing the time taken for recruitment from months to weeks and the cost of recruitment to a much smaller proportion of the earlier costs.
The use of smart digital forms during recruitment reduces the amount of mindless paperwork and repetitive data entry that employees and the HR team have to go through. The smart digital forms store relevant information from the resume and automatically input the information in future forms.
What is Digital Enablement Platform?
A digital enablement platform is a software designed to assist people with performing digital tasks and improve their productivity in the digital workplace. It includes integrated conversational AI, natural language processing, intelligent OCR, low code business process management and robotic process automation technologies for assisting and automating end to end business processes across customer experience and employee productivity.
Companies that adopt a human-centered approach to business see a 32% lift in revenue, deliver outcomes to their market 2x faster, and outperform the S&P by 211%.
Through the integration of the digital enablement platform with HR and other business apps, Stella has greater visibility and powerful insights about employees. This not only makes appraisals effective and simple but enables Stella to take instant actions in case of compliance failures, employee disengagement, prolonged low productivity and so on.
The team can now focus only on what matters most – employee engagement and experiences, reducing attrition, enabling change management, strengthening L&D initiatives and so on. Equipped with real-time insights on employees’ needs and concerns, they can take instant action and create moments that matter to employees.
From the employee point of view, the amount of paperwork and complex HR tasks they perform are minuscule. Their digital work assistants enable employee self-service in just a few clicks from anywhere for almost all HR and administrative tasks such as leave applications, scheduling, reimbursements, benefits enrollment, viewing company policies and so on. On the L&D front, employees are also equipped with relevant learning modules and capability-building opportunities by their digital work assistant. Overall, employee satisfaction levels are high.
Despite an HR to employee ratio of 1.5:100, Stella’s team is able to service all employees without increasing the team size with 100% accuracy in transactions and at reduced costs.
Augmented HR Professionals as Strategic Business Partners
Stella is a strategic business partner and not just an administrator or compliance monitor for her company. Given her unique position where she has real-time intelligence on employees and has influence over talent acquisition, capability development and company culture, she works with the business leaders to influence and redesign company policies and strategies that help drive business value. This was made possible by augmenting Stella with technologies like digital enablement platform, intelligent automation that freed her up from all the grunt work.
Conclusion
It is amply clear from the cases of Francis and Stella what difference agile technology like the digital enablement platform can make to the lives of HR managers, HR executives and general employees. Companies stand to save enormous amounts of time and money while accelerating business value through the augmentation of HR professionals with intelligent automation and other futuristic technology. Start reimagining and transforming HR processes now!
References:
https://www.betterteam.com/hr-manager-job-description
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/digital-workplace-trends-you-cant-ignore/
https://www.automationanywhere.com/resources/customer-stories/nhs-lowers-cost-with-rpa
https://www.zenefits.com/workest/how-hr-leaders-can-make-a-business-case-for-an-hr-platform/
https://www.uipath.com/resources/automation-case-studies/quess-corp-business-services-rpa