Typically, HR teams are the biggest champions for employee wellbeing, productivity, and efficiency – always finding new and innovative ways to make employees’ lives a bit easier. But who is helping HR teams with their efficiency and wellbeing? Throughout the pandemic, HR departments have played a crucial role in helping businesses continue their services as usual. While this has been necessary, it’s placed a strain on thinly stretched HR teams. But with HR technology, HR employees can spend more time on strategic projects and improve employee engagement with the wider teams.
What’s changed since the pandemic?
A solid HR department has been invaluable in navigating businesses through the pandemic. With more companies prioritising mental health than ever before, the “human” element to HR has led the way in modern human resources departments. The transition to remote working has also been an ongoing priority for HR teams, along with recruitment, onboarding, retention, and more. The increased reliance on HR employees was inevitable, but it comes with a strain on the department’s own wellbeing, productivity, and efficiency.
HR System Providers, Zellis, found that 4 in 10 businesses in the UK and Ireland have found their HR processes to be less efficient since the start of the pandemic. With increased responsibilities and less time to focus on strategy and processes, this comes as no surprise. The research goes on to reveal that 28% of organisations plan to outsource their HR processes to allow for better management of other duties. This decline in HR efficiency has resulted in increased pressure to adopt technological solutions.
How do HR teams benefit from technology?
With the majority of HR teams being buried in work, many are often experiencing stress or burnout. A study conducted by People Management revealed that 37% of HR employees feel “extremely overwhelmed” at least once a week. A further 50% said they feel stressed once a month – that’s 87% of the HR workforce regularly feeling stressed at work. It seems like digital tools that shoulder the burden of paperwork, payroll, processes, and more, could massively help HR teams decrease the amount of stress they’re experiencing and increase efficiency.
How can technology help HR teams’ day-to-day responsibilities?
Payroll
Preparing for payroll is one of the heaviest strains in a HR department’s workload. It’s also one of the most meticulous HR tasks. It requires 100% accuracy, is time-sensitive, and must be compliant with different regulations. People look forward to payday every month and interruptions or mistakes to their payslip causes issues for HR teams. Human error is unavoidable sometimes, but automating this process significantly reduces the likelihood of mistakes. It also frees up time by getting rid of complicated processes. Tasks such as determining rates for overtime hours, relocations, wage increases, entitlements, freelancers, maternity leave, etc. are intricate processes that can be simplified with automation.
We know that payroll is laborious and takes away the opportunity for an internal HR team to work on other projects, so you can go one step further than implementing a technological solution by outsourcing your payroll services. Outsourcing payroll enables HR employees to take advantage of expert knowledge and experience without needing to be a payroll expert themselves!
Compliance Management
Like payroll, compliance management is often time constrained. Organisations don’t want to miss deadlines and incur penalties, so HR teams are under pressure to do their due diligence within a tight time frame.
With a HR system in place, HR professionals can be alerted when employees are approaching overtime hours and more. Compliance can be tricky to navigate, so companies want to be sure that they’re not breaching any regulations and are staying compliant.
Measuring Performance
When it comes to appraisals, one size does not fit all. A common mistake when doing performance appraisals is using the same key performance indicators for everyone in the company. But the workforce is made up of different and nuanced people, which should be reflected with individual, tailored KPIs. With HR software, managers can quickly and easily define performance metrics on an organisation level, a team level, and an individual level. This bespoke take on performance management allows managers to identify areas of improvement that are specific to that employee. Some HR systems can even create a self-service feature where employees can access their performance metrics themselves.
Employee Feedback
Possibly one of the least favourite duties amongst HR departments – getting employee feedback. It’s always valuable but sending out employee feedback surveys and compiling the data into simple, useful reports is not easy. It’s one of the most indispensable duties of every HR department, and it can be made so much more effective with a digital feedback system – something that HR technology can really help with.
Typically, surveys are handed out quarterly or even annually. By this point, employees might already be disgruntled about an issue and when the survey comes around, the dissatisfaction has become irreversible. A HRIS system where employees can give honest and constructive feedback would be a lot more beneficial to managers, HR teams, the company, and the employees. HR teams can build a feedback system that checks in on employees and enables them to regularly give feedback as and when. It’s one of the best ways to foster engagement and strengthen retention, as employees will feel listened to and managers can learn from employee feedback.
Need help with your HRIS selection?
The reality is that the workloads of HR professionals aren’t going to lessen anytime soon. As processes in the workplace get more complex, and as the needs of employees evolve, the responsibilities of HR teams will continue to increase.
Fortunately, adopting HR technology can be a huge help to HR departments, increasing efficiency and productivity. HR software can automate complicated and time-consuming tasks, leaving HR teams with more time to shift to strategy-oriented responsibilities.
Thinking about introducing HR software? We can help with your HRIS selection; from choosing what’s right for your teams, to completely onboarding it for you and providing training on how to get the most out of it. It’s important to get everything you can from your investment, and working with specialist HR software consultants ensures that you’ll reap the rewards. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss your options.
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