HR managers in a small business battle against feral processes everyday. While they know that wearing multiple hats and keeping a close eye on everything is how they keep their organization in the black, there is only 24 hours in a day. Managing fragmented records, overflowing inboxes, and irate employees with manual HR processes is a recipe for disaster (and sleepless nights).

As they become engrossed in all these heavy-lifting, they tend to miss out on the latest developments in the HR tech arena, that can save a penny or two and slash down a couple of hours. What’s more, HR is a domain that is ripe for automation and by eliminating redundant tasks and repetitive processes can make the life of a HR manager easy.

It doesn’t matter what industry vertical your organization belongs to or what kind of products or services it offers, placing your employees and HR processes can take your ROI up a notch. By automating their HR processes, businesses can save valuable employee time, reduce manual errors, identify process bottlenecks, and gain valuable insights.

While HR automation will require some substantial upfront investment to set up the technology and standardized HR processes, small businesses can enjoy several benefits by embracing automation. HR automation can help small businesses:

1. Reduce Operational Costs

Typically, small businesses tend to follow this formula that hiring more people to manage labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks can solve their problems. In reality, it just makes the problem worse.

Similar to the old saying, “too many cooks spoil the broth”, adding employees will only make them spend a lot of money and yet doesn’t add much value to the business. HR automation, on the other hand, can lower administrative overhead, cut down process time, streamline processes, and increase your profitability.

2. Bridge Process Gaps

As small businesses start to grow, their processes become mature and there comes the need to document and enforce them properly. However, when you try and enforce HR policies using an outdated HR system, there are an array of challenges from approvals getting lost in the email to accountability being tossed out of the window.

As a result, HR managers are forced to create and manage more spreadsheets to keep their HR processes up and running all the time. However, after investing so much time and effort, all it takes is one manual error to bring all their hard work crashing down.

In this scenario, HR automation will not only eliminate the need for constant manual interference but also standardize all HR processes fso that it delivers a consistent experience for all stakeholders meeting their demands, keeping them informed, and ultimately, securing employee trust.

3. Ensure Policy Compliance

When there is a ton of confidential employee information involved, having proper security measures in place and adhering to government and industry regulations is pivotal. Outdated HR tools pave the way for data manipulation and non compliance issues that can result in hardcore penalties like prison time, hefty fines, and more.

By automating their HR processes, businesses of all sizes can ensure and enforce policy compliance across their company. Automation can turn an arduous compensation management process into a breeze by incorporating rules into process flows and automating checklists to ensure that the necessary criteria is met before the approval is signed off.

4. Provide Actionable Data

When information is scattered across an array of spreadsheets and email threads it is impossible to attain a clear view of it. What’s more, this lack of transparency hinders the data visualization and insight extraction process pushing HR managers to rely on their gut feel to decide on a course of action.

With an automated system in place, HR managers will not only have a bird’s eye view of all pertinent information but they can also create visual-rich reports on an array of HR metrics in the touch of a button. Such features like graphical data and visualization aspects empower HR staff to take prompt action and prevent process disasters before they occur.

Conclusion

These four unbeatable values of HR automation will eventually help small businesses improve their overall operational efficiency. While automation itself is a tried-and-tested course of action that will save SMBs a ton of time and money, the HR domain is ripe for it.

The key to extracting maximum value out of an HR automation project is simply identifying the right platform that can offer all the benefits you need without drilling a sizable hole in your bank account.

‍