SMBs depend on efficient process flows and effective documentation to keep their employee lifecycle seamless. Businesses that fail to keep up with the technological transformations run the risk of falling behind and losing to their competitors in the war for talent.

HR automation can transform their day-to-day HR processes and pave the road for employee engagement and satisfaction. However, without measuring the ROI of HR process automation, SMBs may as well throw out a bunch of process initiatives and hope some miracle makes their employees stay.

Ultimately, when it comes to any process automation investment, it all comes down to ROI. And if the HR team has trouble showcasing the benefits of their automation investment, then the management may start retracting their decision to embrace automation.

In order to help HR business units bring themselves up to speed on the benefits of HR automation, we have broken down three areas where SMBs can accelerate ROI and their business growth using automation.

1. Offer an onboarding experience

Research shows that traditional, paper-driven onboarding processes drown employees in paperwork and drag on for over 11 hours. Boring employees to death with paperwork will force new hires to exit the company twice as fast. What’s more, statistics show that 58% of employees tend to stay for 3 or years if they go through a structured onboarding experience.  

Onboarding process automation can simplify labor-intensive tasks like documentation, manual follow ups, and file storage. It can also enforce accountability and ensure policy compliance with automated checklists and rule-based workflows. With all these features by their side, small businesses save more than 50% of the time and expenses they typically spend on their onboarding process.

2. Create a performance-driven culture

Proper measurement and evaluation are at the heart of growth. Timely evaluations show how things are progressing and whether or not preset goals were achieved. That’s the core of employee performance management as well.

Are your employees delivering the top-tier result that is expected out of them and how do you go about restructuring their compensation into something they truly deserve? However, depending on outdated tools like paperwork, excel sheets, and manual workflow management, makes it impossible to get a clear overview of an employee’s performance. As a result, businesses end up relying on instincts and gut feel, falling into the trap of favoritism and bias.

An automated performance management process can help SMBs ensure that confidential employee performance data and sensitive compensation information remains secure while streamlining the process with timely performance check-ins, historical performance comparison, and accurate documentation.

3. Give your employees the gift of hassle-free payroll

Manual payroll processing is the most redundant HR process in existence. It is a daunting task that needs to be accurate and error-free, else there will be a ton of repercussions to face. Small businesses that cling to excel-based timesheets and email payslips are depriving themselves of the productivity that process automation can offer them.

A robust payroll processing platform can streamline the payroll and compensation management process within an organization by catering to every HR and payroll processing needs with a user-friendly and accessible interface. Automation simplifies the tedious wage calculation process by generating accurate, error-free results within a few clicks.

On top of that, an automated compensation management process can facilitate hassle-free financial planning, ensure accurate timekeeping, improve the productivity of HR staff, and enhance employee satisfaction.

Conclusion

The conventional way of executing HR processes is run completely on human efforts, consuming a ton of time and effort. A well-thought out and implemented HR automation project can help small businesses save time and money no matter which process you decide to automate.

If you’re having trouble managing your HR processes manually, simply focusing on automating repetitive tasks and eliminating manual intervention can leave a huge impact on your process efficiency. If your manual dependency is holding you back from scaling up, then speeding up the implementation by restructuring your existing processes is very high leverage. Using a tool like Compport FIT for only $0.3/employee, can give you greater peace of mind for a fraction of the cost.

Either way, any small business (irrespective of industry) can extract high-impact ROI with HR process automation. Start with these three HR processes outlined in this blog, further along the way, start automating more HR processes like vacation management, recruitment, more, to multiply the ROI even further.