Human resources is the glue that holds together your most valuable asset: your team. Employment contracts must be read and signed by new employees during the onboarding process and in a paper-based office, this process requires someone to make sure the contract is accurately prepared, printed, signed by the employee, received by HR and properly filed.
In 2022, HR’s greatest ally is tech. HR automation has been growing rapidly in recent years, with businesses investing in cloud-based SaaS systems to help them hire, manage their team, run payroll, handle employee requests, and more. Although the employee contract is an essential part of onboarding a new employee, spending hours of valuable time to complete this process on paper is not. To deliver the best HR operations, you can use tech to streamline processes, enable remote working, and automate workflows.
To optimise your HR operations, here are some of the best automation ideas to deliver excellent HR support and to free up more space in your schedule.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software and automation help HR professionals work more efficiently
1. Create a standardised onboarding and training process for new hires.
Onboarding is one of the best opportunities for HR automation. HR managers can create automated workflows to deliver the key forms, documentation, and training resources that new hires need to get started in their roles.
One way to automate this using Laserfiche Cloud, is to create dedicated onboarding workflows, forms processes and bots to introduce new employees and pass over key training documents to relevant team members and onboard new members into on premise and other cloud systems – all in one unified process.
As with many of the HR automation ideas in this list, it all starts with understanding the key processes that you carry out. List the common steps that you take when onboarding every new employee, standardise this where possible while keeping it personalised, and look for areas to streamline or automate.
2. Automate timesheets and approval processes.
If your business requires employees to submit timesheets, this is a key area to automate first. With Laserfiche Cloud, employees can record their daily work hours in an online form over the course of a pay period. The form is saved daily as a draft and submitted at the end of the pay period. The supervisor reviews and approves the timesheet. Approved timesheets are then saved in the Laserfiche repository.
3. Automate contracts.
One of the biggest challenges for organisations attempting end-to-end contract management automation is signatures, which traditionally had to be signed by hand. Depending on local laws, some of which may have changed in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, many jurisdictions allow for all types of contracts, agreements and more to be signed online with electronic signatures.
An ECM system, like Laserfiche, can help organisations meet these challenges by offering additional integrations with electronic signature services including pre-built solutions that are ready to work with your workflows right away.
With built in connectivity to apps like DocuSign and others, you can request the signatures you need, get contracts signed online, and automate follow-ups until everything is collected and stored within your Laserfiche repository. When working remotely, these automation additions make contract management much easier and quicker.
4. Automate submitting and approving expenses.
Don’t let expense requests clutter up your inbox. For the smoothest process, you want to have a clear and well-documented workflow that everyone in the team knows how to follow.
If you’re still using paper-based expense report systems, you’re missing out. Moreover, linking expenses with your enterprise content management (ECM) system can save you time and money. To ensure expenses are submitted in the exact format your HR team needs, you can use Workflow and Forms processes from Laserfiche Cloud. To find our more, download our Quicker, Better, Safer : HR Automation eBook.
5. Streamline offboarding processes.
Like onboarding, creating smooth offboarding processes is one of the best ways to streamline HR operations. Although it’s important to keep this highly personalised and to talk things through 1-1 with each employee, you can also introduce some standardised data collection processes — even if these are talked through in person during the exit interview.
6. Integrate HR tools and processes.
As you automate more of your HR processes, think about how you can integrate your tech stack. This can include setting up native integrations and connecting data between apps. With the Laserfiche Cloud API, your office applications are connected and updated from one central location.
eBook: The Ultimate Guide to HR Automation
Want to learn more about HR automation? Download the free guide, which includes the descriptions of automated HR tasks, interviews with experts in the field and a whole lot more.
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