Human resources teams should be spending their time on tasks that are focussed on – you guessed it – the human element of work. That means long-term HR strategies such as employee engagement and wellbeing, company culture, talent management, employee onboarding, and any HR practices that strengthen employee relations and feed into overall business growth.
And yet, a survey by HR Magazine found that only 17% of HR professionals said they spend a lot of time on tasks that generate real value, compared to 84% who say email takes up the bulk of their week. A further study in the same publication found that UK workers are spending a third of their working year on repetitive admin tasks. This paints a very bleak picture indeed.
Emails inevitably need to be read and responded to, and admin tasks need to be done – but why do they have to drain so much time?
According to 72% of HR leaders, the blame lies with manual HR processes and systems. Without the right technology and tools in place to take care of repetitive and manual tasks – such as questions about pay, onboarding paperwork, and job application screening – the responsibility falls back onto the shoulders of HR teams. As a result, there’s very little time left for HR departments to work on the strategic HR processes that generate real value.
But with the right technology, your staff can switch out manual HR processes for automated ones, which will reduce the busywork that HR teams find themselves buried under.
An intranet with workflow automation and digital forms is a great example of the kind of tech your HR department needs to modernise and simplify time consuming HR processes. Let’s take a look at the reasons why.
Why an intranet is the best tech for streamlining your HR business processes
For starters, it’s likely that your human resources team is well acquainted with intranet software, especially if they were part of the initial intranet requirements gathering process.
This means the HR team will already be familiar with how the software works, which will save a lot of time – there will be no need to learn how to use a completely new system.
Aside from saving time on additional employee training, there are many more reasons why an intranet with workflow automation capabilities is the best tool for streamlining your human resources processes. Here are a few examples:
Save money with an all-in-one system
Installing new business software is costly, especially if you have multiple subscriptions. Adding yet another tool to handle your HR processes adds yet another cost to your monthly bill.
But by using an all-in-one intranet – like Claromentis – you can keep costs low, because you won’t be paying for various individual apps that do different things. Instead, you can consolidate your HR operations – and costs – into a single system.
Using an all-in-one intranet like Claromentis helps keep costs down
Reduce admin by automating busywork
We know from the stats above that HR managers and teams are snowed under a lot of admin as a result of manual processes and systems. This can lead to frustration and loss of productivity, because teams cannot focus their time on valuable projects such as planning the year’s HR strategy, employee retention initiatives, or improvements to company culture.
An intranet with workflow automations reduces those admin tasks significantly by automating the repetitive parts and liberating HR teams from busywork. (More on this later!)
Improve communication with tools that are fit for purpose
We also know that the majority of human resources teams spend most of their week on emails. This is hardly the most effective use of time, nor is it always the best way to communicate. Indeed, it’s easy for important emails to get lost in inboxes that are bursting at the seams, and for sensitive employee data to get into the wrong hands.
An intranet with workflow automation features streamlines the communication process by automatically notifying the relevant people when an HR process – such as an employee performance review – needs their attention. This ensures that only the appropriate HR managers see confidential data relating to their HR team members.
List of HR processes to automate using your intranet software
It’s clear that the combination of intranet software and workflow automation is a powerful one, and generates tangible benefits to human resource management and operations. Let’s take a look at some example HR processes you can start automating today:
Employee onboarding
For the most part, the employee onboarding process should be personalised for each new hire through dedicated human resource planning. Doing so increases your chances of hitting those organisational goals like stronger employee relations and company culture, which lead to better employee retention.
However, let’s not forget that the onboarding process involves a lot of admin and paperwork for getting new recruits settled into the company, such as setting up email accounts, ordering IT equipment, and recording contact information. This is hardly the most inspiring part of the onboarding process, especially if HR management are still relying on paper forms.
Instead, you can speed up the manual parts of onboarding by turning your paperwork into digital forms and workflows that capture information and automatically send it to the relevant parties. This will give HR teams more time to work on building a personalised and engaging onboarding process – which is a key HR responsibility.
Watch our video below to see how to use an intranet to automate employee onboarding:
Hiring process
These days, a recruitment process that requires candidates to attach their CV and cover letter to an email and send it to a generic “jobs” inbox is a little behind the times.
Not only does it make selection process management extremely difficult – the hiring team will need to constantly monitor, review, accept, and decline candidates manually from an unorganised list of applications – it also provides a poor experience for those applying. For instance, they won’t know if their application was successfully received, nor will they know if they will be updated throughout the hiring process.
Talent management is a crucial HR process to get right, because a bad hiring experience can have a knock-on effect on brand reputation (think negative reviews on sites like Glassdoor) and impact your future recruitment efforts.
Instead, you can use your intranet as a recruitment portal that manages the entire employee lifecycle, from application, review, and selection through to interview, job offer, and then onboarding.
In fact, this is exactly what UK training provider Apprenticeship Connect did to improve their recruitment process. Using their Claromentis intranet, they streamlined previously complex processes that involved multiple stakeholders, departments, and systems by building an online recruitment portal that both prospective employees and the HR department could use to manage applications, interviews, job offers, and contract signings.
(Source: claromentis.com).
Changes to employee contract details
Updating an employee’s job description, salary, or contract details is a pretty standard HR process. Usually, the c-suite and a representative from the human resources management team will need to sign-off on any changes to employment terms.
This HR process can be time consuming if managed manually – especially for large companies with thousands of distributed staff – because it requires multiple levels of approval before it can be actioned. And trying to organise all of this via email or paperwork will likely cause delays, which could have a substantial impact if changes to salary miss the payroll deadline.
You can make this HR process a whole lot easier and hands-off by building an automated approval workflow in your intranet. In this scenario, an employee’s manager can submit a digital form to request a change in job description or salary, which is then automatically assigned to the relevant human resource management team member for review. Each approver will be notified when they need to take action, and add their digital signature to provide proof of authorisation.
