Automating the Human Resources Function

In many organizations, the HR manager faces a dilemma. You’d like to spend more time truly improving the overall work environment for your employees. You want to help company management find ways to save on workforce-related costs, find and hire better talent, and improve existing talent through training and development. But most days, you are stuck doing paperwork. The routine administration involved in day-to-day HR operations drains most of your available time and energy. On average, over 50% of a human resources department’s time is spent processing employee information and answering questions. If you’re like most HR managers, you face several business challenges:

• Succeeding with limited HR resources—Many small and midsized businesses have limited staff and resources. You alone, or a small team of colleagues, may be solely responsible for benefits administration, payroll, routine HR administration, and more. You need better tools to track important employee information, and to automate HR and benefits transactions so that you can devote more time to your most important duties—employee relations, fostering a good work environment, and providing employees with training and career opportunities.
• Managing compliance and risk of litigation—It’s difficult to stay on top of the myriad of state and federal workforce laws, regulations, and reporting requirements to protect your company from fines and penalties. You need to communicate with and train both managers and employees so that the company is not at risk of expensive employee lawsuits.
• Ensuring accurate, timely payroll—Paychecks that are late or have errors cost your company money, hurt employee morale, and undermine your credibility with employees. Federal, state, and local payroll taxes are complex and missing the filing and payment deadlines can incur fines, late fees, and an increased chance of audits for your company.

A recent survey discovered that employee compensation, including benefits, accounts for 35% of operating expenses in a typical organization.With so many company resources dedicated to maintaining the workforce, it is necessary to identify ways to improve results, increase efficiency, and lower costs. Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) help you find such opportunities and capitalize on them.

Implementing HRMS eliminates much of the routine paperwork associated with HR. HRMS automates the most manual and time-consuming human resources functions: Payroll, new-hire processing, benefits and compensation management, employee development, internal analysis, and government reporting. This automation frees up valuable time that you can spend on employee relations, compliance analysis, or training.

Without HRMS, most HR managers rely on paper to manage employee processes. It’s a struggle to track employee information using a combination of homegrown spreadsheets and office file cabinets. Hiring information, payroll records, benefit plan elections, and training certifications for a single employee might be stored in four or more different locations. This invites errors, as information becomes lost and outdated. You must replicate each change to an employee’s data across several files. It becomes tedious, if not impossible, to create timely reports and analysis.

HRMS improves accuracy and saves time by helping you keep all employee data in one place. It also provides standardized processes that you can adopt, giving your organization more structure than you may have previously enjoyed. Because the data in an HRMS is centralized, there is no need to duplicate the data in order to use it for multiple tasks. An HRMS standardizes many HR administrative processes, including: Adding a new hire; promoting, disciplining, transferring, or terminating an employee; tracking Family and Medical Leave and Leave of Absence; assigning or changing benefits; changing salary or grade of an employee; safety reporting; and more.

Creating timely, comprehensive reports for management becomes easy with an HRMS. Most contain a number of predefined standard reports, as well as a custom report writer. Security features, such as audit trails, allow you to control and monitor who has access to sensitive employee data, or who has changed data in the system.

So how can you prepare and defend a proposal focused on automating the administrative functions within HR?  Watch our pre-recorded webinar to Build a Winning Strategy for Improving the Human Resources Function in your business by automating their outdated, overburdened, ineffective paper management systems.

You don’t have to work in a large company to know that the expense of managing benefits alone can be extremely costly. It is becoming more and more important for HR to have effective management tools for maintaining compliance and employee morale, and controlling costs. Automated systems reduce errors, provide multi-user access to critical business information, and when a system is chosen well, it can be a very cost-effective administrative processing tool.