Does your HR Software Feature Sophisticated; But Easy To Use Approval Workflows

Majority of the HR solutions will allow you to define work flows for approvals and for various types of requests processed through employee self service. However you need to be careful when you select an HR solution and ensure that it matches your requirements.  Below are some considerations you may want to do before your selection.

• Can you define approval workflows based on different types of organization structure classifications i.e. Departments, Location, Roles or any other employee classification.
• Can you actually create your own Employee Groups irrespective of the organization structure classifications above, for the purpose of any individual process like leave requests, expense claim requests, may not all go to one approver for a department, they may have teams under a single department.
• Can you have different approvers for each individual service or are you restricted to have the same approvers for all services i.e. Leave Requests, Expense Claims.
• Can you have different set of approvers for even different leave types, i.e. different approvers for Sick Leave, different approvers for Annual Leave and also create different employee groups.
• Can you create different Employee Groups for Approvals for different services, i.e. mix and match any combination you like.
• Can you define the workflow in a completely different way, i.e. can you simply configure that the Line Manager is the 1st level approver for a process (Leave Requests), Department Head is the 2nd Level approver, based on your reporting line, the approval workflow automatically route the requests.  In this way you dont create employee groups.
• Do you have the ability to define multiple alternate approvers i.e. have 2 approvers as 1st level approvers and let any approver that request, in case any one is on leave.
• What is the maximum level of approval levels can each of the service have in your workflow.
• Can you see proper structured audit trail on who has approved what, at what level the requests are pending.
• Can you actually see what fields have changed, when the request is sent out for approval.

There are many more considerations to be taken into account, before you actually know, that a particular workflow system actually caters to all your needs, before you think about a system being powerful or weak, do the following exercise:

• Identify who approves what in your organization, make a small chart.
• Try to configure it during a presentation or demo or training and see how it works in action with one sample.

Following the exercise you will have a better understanding whether the system in question does actually fulfill your needs of a proper approval workflow in your HR and payroll system.

At HR Chronicle we take a very sophisticated approach to approval workflows, whether it be for having control of data or Self Service Requests.  We feature a very rich approval workflow engine with automated email triggers, checks and controls, to ensure no one has unauthorized access to information.  Information is stored and managed and authorized in a controlled and secured manner.  Contact us to for more information.