Automation is in higher demand than ever as organizations want to ensure they are prepared for any changes or disruptions in their workforce.

Cloud-based HR technologies enable openness and collaboration across the enterprise in new and innovative ways and have become important drivers of engagement from the C-suite to frontline employees. When organizations first went live with human capital management (HCM) platforms a decade ago, many companies quickly realized the benefits of automation technology and its ability to give HR a better line of sight into the downstream impacts of employees’ behaviors. This more standardized approach – and the scalability and repeatability it brings – has enabled automation to take root and further extend and enhance organizations’ cloud investments.

Related: 4 steps for effective cloud technology integration in HR

Access to rich data and analytics can help HR leaders respond faster – with more informed decisions – to the needs of an organization. Before moving to the cloud, for example, many organizations used several systems and processes to onboard their employees. Global cloud HR platforms bring natively standardized, streamlined processes that help HR more easily pinpoint and resolve delays or issues in the onboarding process, such as late entry by certain departments or a gap in a job aid employees use to complete their benefits enrollments. ‌

Because HR professionals are the owners of these business processes, they play a key role in using onboarding data to enable their workforce to start work sooner. Chatbots and digital assistants can also further transform employee self-service and provide a faster, and simpler customer experience for issues related to annual enrollment, health savings accounts, password issues, and medical and retirement benefits.

Data, analytics and technology can position HR as a critical value creator for the organization, not just another shared service cost center. However, many organizations do not operationalize the vast amounts of data they possess—particularly when it comes to their human capital data. Without an effective strategy, efforts to attract top talent, enable growth and elevate HR as a strategic partner will be stymied.

In order to leverage automation to drive further efficiencies, cost savings and risk reduction, companies should consider four important factors:

Speed and ease of use

Automation should target the most common challenges HR departments face—such as creating a single source of truth for HR and payroll data and streamlining consistent operating procedures across multiple geographies and business units—and leverage standard bots that directly solve those problems. If designed well, standard bots shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to implement.

Solutions should also be able to be implemented with little ongoing involvement from HR. A good automation partner will ask HR for system data and document access up front at the start of the project, allowing HR to continue their day-to-day processes while the automation partner runs the project with little disruption to daily HR operations.

Security and adaptability

Automation solutions should comply with organizations’ data and file-sharing demands, pass third-party security audits, and comply with all laws and regulations. Furthermore, in today’s constantly changing environment, organizations are likely acquiring, divesting, reorganizing, and changing technology platforms frequently. Automation solutions should be able to easily absorb growth and be able to adapt to change with minimal disruption.

Additionally, these solutions should come with diagnostics that explain where and why automation was not possible. This process-mining should be used as a foundation for continuous process improvement and for continually increasing automation percentages.

Successful integration

Bots should be fully integrated with underlaying technology architecture, otherwise manual steps will still be required, redundant validation rules will be in place, or other inefficiencies will exist. Organizations should be given integration choices. For example, application programming interface (API), versus upload template, versus automated user interface input. To ensure the most appropriate selection, organizations should discuss and understand all options available along with the pros and cons for each with the automation technology and implementation partner.

Becoming more insightful

Automation programs often start with transactional, data-driven processes for which there are proven automation solutions. Many of the related functions are similar across industries such as recruiting and onboarding. Consequently, if the automation partner has enough experience, they should have a point-of-view on what processes are the best early candidates for automation.

Automation solutions should also help organizations move beyond becoming faster and cheaper and help HR become more insightful. For example, a good automation solution should help organizations fix control issues, self-explain payroll variances, and improve forecasts. This level of partnership can help organizations redeploy their retained resources to focus on more strategic initiatives and ultimately help the business make better decisions.

It can be a daunting task for HR to execute on an automation strategy. Many teams are battling just to deliver day-to-day operations in a cost-conscious and compliant way, much less focusing on engineering value back to the business itself. The most successful organizations are those that recognize the value of an automation partner in these situations. Finding, retaining, and reskilling the right level of internal resources at the right time across all of the various applications and technologies is most often impractical. Depending on the maturity of an organization and the operating model, these can be true business process-as-a-service (BPaaS) partnerships, where the level of support and type of automation services executed can scale up or down based on the long-term plan or adapting business demands.

Automation is in higher demand than ever as organizations want to ensure they are prepared for any changes or disruptions in their workforce. It’s a critical tool in the never-ending need to be faster, cheaper, and better than the competition. With the right strategic considerations and a best-in-class automation partnership, HR is well-positioned to be the agents of automation adoption and help transform how their organizations thrive.

Christian Keller ([email protected]) is a solution architect for Alight’s cloud services business. 

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