The Human Resources(HR) department plays a vital role in every business that takes care of each phase of an employee’s life cycle, right from employee onboarding to employee exit management. However, considering the process and tasks involved in the HR department requires high skill requirements and effort, and offering on-time resolution is quite a challenge for the HR service desk.
Imagine a scenario where routine, repetitive tasks within the realm of HR could be entrusted to machines, freeing up human resources to concentrate on crucial decision-making, cultivating interpersonal relationships, and nurturing the well-being of employees. Let’s explore the potential of RPA in HR operations and how it can impact the customer-employee experience.
Why RPA in HR Operations?
The integration of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) within HR functions offers a transformative solution to enhance operational efficiency and elevate the role of HR professionals.
https://www.workato.com/the-connector/hr-automation-statistics/
By automating repetitive and standardized tasks, RPA empowers HR teams to allocate more time and energy towards strategic decision-making, fostering meaningful human connections and prioritizing the overall well-being of employees. As per the report, HR automation makes up 11% of total automation built at an organization.
As we can see the widespread adoption of RPA in human resources, you might be thinking that all enterprises can automate HR processes. Let’s explore the HR process that can be automated using RPA.
Top Use Cases of Robotic Process Automation in HR
Right from reducing manual intervention in the HR process, RPA in HR operations can create a digital experience for employees and customers. Let’s have a look at some of the use cases of RPA in HR-
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Employee Onboarding
Employee onboarding in HR requires a lot of task management, such as creating new user accounts, email addresses, and access to data, applications, and new files. This whole process requires data integration from several systems, which makes employee onboarding more challenging.
RPA can expedite the onboarding process by automatically-
- Generating and sending offer letters
- Setting up new employee accounts
- Initiating background checks
This not only accelerates the hiring process but also ensures data accuracy and compliance with company policies. Apart from this, organizations can also integrate communication technologies like WhatsApp and MS Teams with RPA bots to facilitate communication between employees and new joiners.
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Recruitment & Hiring
Sifting through a large volume of resumes and finding the ideal candidate is an uphill task. RPA can be employed to scan and evaluate resumes against predefined criteria, shortlisting candidates whose qualifications match the job requirements. In addition, the RPA bot can help in scheduling job interviews and drafting messages to new employees with ready and automated templates. This enables HR professionals to focus their attention on more strategic aspects of recruitment.
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Leave and Attendance Management
Logging attendance and leaves on a daily basis is quite challenging for employees, especially when it requires filling up several forms. RPA can manage employee leave requests by verifying available leave balances, cross-referencing them with the company’s leave policy, planning training & events, and updating the records accordingly. It can also track attendance data and generate reports, minimizing errors and facilitating payroll processing.
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Payroll Management
Payroll management in HR operations involves high-volume data extraction and verification for counting working hours and considering potentially variable tax regulations. Automating payroll processes with RPA ensures accurate calculation of salaries, taxes, and deductions. The technology can extract data from timesheets, attendance records, and other sources to generate error-free payrolls, reducing the risk of human errors.
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Performance Management
Creating an employee performance review requires HR managers to gather valuable data from various surveys and KPIs and compile it into reports, which represent a holistic picture of the employee’s performance. RPA can help schedule and manage performance reviews by sending reminders to employees and managers, collecting feedback, and consolidating performance data. This simplifies the review process, enhancing transparency and accountability.
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Employee Data Management
An organization’s employee data management involves collecting, storing, and maintaining employee information. From employee bios and medical information to employment details and performance data, HR requires employees to provide data about themselves. However, this operational need of maintaining and managing the information collected at onboarding and during employment is an arduous task. Using an Intelligent document process solution integrated with RPA can handle this data extraction from multiple systems, reduce the chances of data entry errors and maintain accurate employee records.
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Compliance and Reporting
HR managers have to comply with complex and ever-changing regulations when it comes to reporting, which is strictly required by labor law. Often, HR departments are responsible for ensuring compliance with various regulations. RPA can automatically track and monitor changes in labor laws, generate compliance reports, and notify relevant stakeholders about necessary actions.
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Employee Offboarding
In a similar way to onboarding, RPA can be used to improve employee exit experiences. The HR team handles various tasks during employee offboarding that can be automated using RPA. Some tasks RPA can automate during employee exits are
- Generating exit documents,
- Conducting exit surveys,
- Notifying the right people,
- Revoking system access,
- Collecting company assets,
- Processing final payments.
Skipping any of these tasks may result in multiple audit flags. But, RPA can simplify this process just by integrating an intelligent data management solution.
Conclusion
Robotic Process Automation is transforming HR operations by automating mundane tasks and enabling HR professionals to focus on strategic endeavors. By leveraging RPA, organizations can enhance efficiency, accuracy, and compliance across various HR functions, ultimately leading to a more streamlined and effective HR department. As the business landscape continues to evolve, embracing RPA in HR becomes an essential step toward success.