Published On: April 18th, 2019 / Last Updated: December 25th, 2021 / 3.7 min read /

HR Process Automation for SMEs

The most common problem the ever dynamic and diverse HR Teams face today is time, majority of the SMEs rely on spreadsheets and physical data entry to maintain employee information, rather than automated processes.

While most HR teams recognize the importance of adding strategic value to their business, automating tasks, but the time-consuming nature of HR administration is often a major barrier, to even explore alternatives to manual processes.  If this sound’s familiar to you, then its time to look forward to a reasonable, start, for automating your HR processes, which will reduce your workload and help you focus on things that automation cannot achieve.

If you are from the HR/Administration team and don’t know from where to start, this article will help you with 5 points to offer you a starting point to achieve the process automation:

1. Centralize your Employee Data
When a company is smaller, managing the personal information of employees isn’t too difficult – but with every additional hire, the complexity increases.  As the business grows, tracking and updating all your employees’ personal information can be a real headache as it resides in multiple spreadsheets, server shares.  Centralizing the data is key to save time but also improving analytics and reporting, while automation in this area also helps to reduce the risk of data loss, manual entry errors and non-compliance.  Also, you can ask employees to update their information through Employee Self Service Portals and HR is left to do only the governance of the data, that is to view and approve it and to ensure it is compliant and complete.

2. Start applying for the Leaves using Employee Self Service Portal
Its time to move from tradition way of Leave management, where you ask each employee to fill in a form and check with each colleague, when he/she goes on annual leave and the do the planning manually.  This process is time consuming and a small change in the schedule of a team member, can wipe away all the planning effort.  A better way out is to let employees start applying for leave using Web based Employee Self Service Portal or HR Mobile App, where they will be aware of their balances.  They can check when their colleague are going on leave in real time, to avoid overlaps. Simple yet effective and a reasonably powerful workflow.

3. Automate Timesheets
Timesheets are central for project and time management, but validating these records in a manual fashion can be a frustrating job for the HR department.   Generating the reports for the timesheets can still be a cumbersome job.  We get the workforce to login to their Employee Self Service Portal and fill their timesheet information for the day i.e. on which project and how many hours were spent on each job.  All line managers will approve the requests and also have instant access to valuable reports to take better and informed and accurate decisions.

4. Performance Reviews Done Right
Conducting a performance appraisal exercise, in a timely manner, will help the workforce increase productivity.  Managers can have a one to one with employees and define the goals and discuss the performance goals, conduct yearly, mid year, quarterly, on demand reviews, self appraisals and much more.  With a sophisticated out of the box flow, you are sure, all the ground is covered.

5. Simplify the expense management
Traditional way of expense claim would be completed on a spreadsheet or manual forms, supported with multiple receipts or invoices, then checked by a manager before being sent to the accounting department for manual input into the company’s finance system, thereafter being paid.  Automating this process by allowing the employee to apply for expense from Employee Self Service Portal or HR Mobile App with the receipts and with an easily done approval workflow, will reduce manual accounting processes, increase processing speed, and payment efficiencies.

So, by automating some of the key processes and centralizing your data through HR Chronicle one can quickly reduce the administrative burden on the HR Team and contribute to a more productive working environment.

HR Chronicle is a leading Cloud Based HR and Payroll Software, we have served our customers since 2006 that’s when the very first version of HR Chronicle came out, HR Chronicle is available in 2 flavors, Cloud Based and On Premise. To know more give us a shout, we will happy to discuss more.

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