3 Things that can never be automated in HR (And 3 you should automate today)

The word automation gets thrown around a lot when it comes to HR, but what are we actually meaning when we say this and why should you look at automating your people processes?

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Automating your people processes doesn’t just mean moving them online (although this is a great first step!). It involves mapping them into an ecosystem that essentially runs itself based on the terms you provide (i.e. rules, criteria, dates and timelines). Ultimately, this makes your processes more efficient, easier to understand and gives you visibility over your workflows ultimately reducing the admin burden on HR professionals (yay!).

So if the powers of automation can simplify your workload and leave you with more time to get back to the people and culture side of your job, should everything be automated?

Short answer, no.

While it’s a great solution for many manual tasks that chew up your day, there’s some work that it just can’t replace.

So what shouldn’t you automate?

A good rule of thumb when you’re interested in automating something is to consider if that interaction is just a step in a process (i.e. signing a form) or if there’s an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with your team. A big part of cultivating a positive culture is to prioritize your team members and put time into understanding their struggles and celebrating their wins and this is simply done better through a conversation than automation

With that in mind, here’s three things you should never automate.

1. Your face to face check-in

At intelliHR, we recommend preceding your face-to-face check-in with a digital form that can be used to inform and frame your in-person conversation. But it’s the conversation that is the most important part of checking in with your team members.

Some responses are hard to phrase in a form and tone is difficult to convey via text. For example, personal information that is sensitive may be hard to write down in a form but easier to discuss in person.

This is why it’s so important to reserve time to speak with your people one-on-one, so that you can dive deeper into comments they may have made on their check-in form, and discuss any topics they didn’t feel comfortable raising in that format.

2. Driving culture

Driving culture can certainly be advocated for through the use of forms and policies, but nothing will ever go past the tried and true method of setting an example. Walking the talk is the key way to show your people that a positive culture is the way forward and that you’re investing your time and efforts into it.

3. Coaching and mentoring

The opportunity to reach out and provide professional support to your team members is definitely not something that can be automated. Nothing will ever replace timely advice given at the right moment, that shows your team members that you’re there to coach and support them when it matters the most.

It can also be useful to note down in your diary notes these coaching and mentoring moments to raise during your check-ins to go provide more information and provide more opportunities for growth.

What should you automate?

Automation is a way to transform your manual, menial tasks to give you more time to get back to HR-ing. We’re talking about manually sending out performance reviews, onboarding workflows, compliance recording and everything in between. At intelliHR we believe in making life simpler with automation and below are some of the common tasks we see automated regularly with our system.

1. Performance Reviews

Tired of sending out emails reminding people to complete their performance reviews, only to receive them back, have to manually print them and file them? Sounds like the perfect case for automation!

With business automation, this once tedious process can be simplified with a click to launch the workflow on intelliHR. This automatically provides the subject of the review and the reviewers the forms they need to complete and all information surrounding them conveniently in their email inbox.

This simplifies your job, as well as all involved in the review process. An intelliHR customer, Louise Ferris from McCullough Robertson had this to say about performance automation:

Our end to end performance review process used to take a staggering eight months to complete. With intelliHR we have streamlined the process from 49 clicks to just 6 clicks for staff.

2. Onboarding workflows

You’ve got a new employee starting, which means endless paperwork, right? You have to send them all the new policies, check that they’ve completed the relevant associated tasks, and obtain their personal details. Wouldn’t that just be easier if you didn’t have to manually send off each individual task and if respondents could easily complete their tasks from their email inbox?

Hello automation! intelliHR allows you to set up your onboarding process once so that you’ll never have to manually do it again. This means that you can send out your full onboarding workflow to a new employee with the click of a button, and never need to send a follow up or chase up lost forms again.

Our intuitive system follows up automatically when forms aren’t completed in the specified time frame, and when one form or task is completed, the next one is triggered automatically. This makes onboarding a dream for both you and your new hire.

3. Compliance

Are you tracking blue cards, certificates or policy completion manually? Stacking up filing cabinets with individual files and following up when updates and renewals are needed is time consuming. Automation saves you time and storing your compliance information digitally saves you needing to manually store files somewhere. Attaching dates to these when they need to be renewed and automatically informing the employee saves you having to chase up paperwork (hallelujah!).

Automation can make tracking your compliance much easier and is something you should look at automating today.

If you’re interested in how automation can help your business and could work for your specific processes, we would love to chat with you!

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