The sign of a good HR is usually seen in how seamless a team works. However, with technological advances, the role of the modern HR is changing. It’s shifting from just hiring and managing teams to engaging them and setting up systems that keep your team productive.
With this blog, we want to simplify what HRs do and take the busy out of a modern HRs tasklist. Let’s dive into why HRs are important in an organization, how you can automate HR processes, and top tools that simplify the modern HR’s work based on the type of work they have.
Why HR is Essential in Every Organisation
In many companies, especially startups, the role of an HR is left empty. With more employees working in a self-managed manner, new companies are forgoing this crucial role. But, HR manager is a crucial figure within any team larger than 10 people.
The HR helps you look at the larger picture, understand what’s needed to pull off the goals that you have in the next 6 to 12 months. They manage employees to ensure they are satisfied with their role, engage them for team building activities, and provide training to get the employee well-versed in how the company works.
Resolving conflicts falls directly on the HR’s plate and any issues can be escalated quickly and safely with the HR. HR is responsible for hiring new employees, planning for future changes, onboarding new hires, and managing employees to keep them productive. All these determine the growth of your company and ensure you can be profitable.
Why Automate Your HR Processes?
With so many responsibilities on your plate, it just makes more sense for a modern HR to automate the processes that they can. By automating your HR processes, you can:
- Process data and share reports quickly.
- Generate reports about employee performances, expenses, attendances and leaves without manual entry.
- Increase employee engagement with automated messages.
- Avoid printing and paper costs by going digital.
- Make hiring processes more efficient with an automated recruitment platform to monitor the hiring pipeline.
- Get insights into different aspects of your work and identify patterns in performance, expenses, etc.
- Set alerts to keep employees on track and monitor issues like missed deadlines, high number of leaves, etc.
- Set up workflows that will run HR tasks without errors or manual inputs.
- Create a positive team culture by setting up automated team activities.
Tools to Automate Different Roles of a Modern HR
Let’s look into what the roles of a modern HR entail and what tools you can enable to manage and automate your work.
Broadly speaking, there are 4 areas of responsibility for modern HR.
1. Strategic planning
Strategic planning is a way for businesses to make changes to their organization and predict future needs based on their goals, needs, and issues. HRs are an integral part of this planning process.
Managers need to work with HR to set up systems for the team to manage them in a better manner. Setting up systems within your team can make it more efficient to manage work. This may be introducing new project management tools and monitoring how your employees adapt to the tool or it may be an automated attendance tracker that simplifies employee time tracking.
One of the most important aspects of strategic planning the team’s future is to plan the roadmap for the work ahead and predict workload. You can understand how work will be managed in the future months and understand whether you need to hire new employees for the upcoming work or need contractual workers for a temporary period. This way, you can help your team function better and manage the workload without having employees burn out or work overtime.
Tools to Manage Strategic Planning:
Since planning your work is a more dynamic task, it’s tough to automate this task. You can, however, use tools that help you manage your roadmaps and strategies in a structured manner. Here are 2 tools that we highly recommend.
1. Notion
Use Notion to document your ideas and plan your roadmap, tasks, and more in a structured way. The app is built to manage notes and allow you to document your ideas, tasks, and plans in one place. Organize your future plans based on timelines or as a dashboard so you can tackle your work in a smarter way.
Teams can collaborate over files, create wikis for company information, and manage all your tasks and tools in one place.
2. ProductPlan
If you’re looking for a planning tool that focuses on product strategy planning, ProductPlan is the best. You can build your roadmap in a visual manner with a drag-and-drop feature to change your milestones and tasks. This app simplifies high-level planning. It also allows you to come back to future opportunities by letting you “park” the idea in a virtual parking lot within the app.
2. Recruitment
For large companies, recruitment is a year-long process while for smaller companies, recruiting new candidates is based on requirements that come in as the team scales or when an employee leaves the company.
Recruitment is a vast role that may even take multiple HRs to manage. The first task is marketing the role and posting the job listing on multiple recruitment platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, Angel, and Glassdoor. Once you’ve got a pool of candidates, it’s time to screen the candidates. From a first-touch phone call to giving them an assignment to a phone interview, your candidates will be on different stages of recruitment and you must be able to track each of these candidates and have a system to note down details about them. Candidate management is simpler these days with tools built to manage and even rate the candidates.
As HR, you also need to be careful to maintain diversity within your workforce. As a diversity officer, you need to ensure you are recruiting people of different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, disabilities, and sexual orientations. Diversity is also about differences in education, personalities, skill sets, experiences, and knowledge bases.
Tools to Automate and Manage Recruitment
1. Recruitee
Recruitee is built to manage your potential candidates across the pipeline, making it easier for you to monitor and manage the recruitment process. It automates tasks, manages notes and details about the candidates and shows the flow of recruitment activities neatly.
The recruiting app sends notifications straight to Slack so that you can get real-time updates about where candidates are on the hiring process.
3. New Hire Management
Once you’ve recruited your candidates, it’s important that you provide them with a thorough onboarding experience. Use the first few weeks to help new hires to adjust the team, introduce them to the processes used in the company and help them understand their department better.
Tools to Automate and Manage New Hires
1. ChiefOnboarding
Often times, the onboarding you provide your new hires is a time-consuming task. But, onboarding can easily be simplified with an automated tool. ChiefOnboarding adds structure to your onboarding, allowing you to create a flow in the onboarding. Set up automated messages to be sent to the new hire to welcome them, assign them their first task, give them information about the company, and check-in with them for any doubts they have.
These messages can be automated within your Slack and email accounts. Once set up, your own task will be to step in when the new hire has any doubts.
4. Employee Management
There are many aspects of employee management that a modern HR has to look at. HR has to monitor and manage employee attendance and leave, ensuring they are spending their time at work wisely. Managing your team often means having a system to process issues within the office in a smarter way. Many HRs create office wikis that document frequently asked questions so employees can find their way around the workplace.
Performance recognition must be a priority for every HR. By recognizing good work, you can boost your employee’s motivation to work better. Besides that, HRs must evaluate and help employees to develop their skills, sponsoring any courses or workshops they want to do in their spare time. A yearly employee appraisal system is crucial in every HR’s calendar, helping employees to grow within their role.
Another part of managing employees is building a positive team culture. Ensure employees feel safe and welcome and there is no bias that hinders the growth of employees. Building a good culture is an everyday effort, from your micro-interactions with employees to setting up rules that make the work environment one that employees look forward to being a part of. Building a good team culture also includes providing benefits and perks that keeps the employee satisfied with the work.
The job of conducting team meetings on a monthly basis falls on the HR. If your company runs demo days, HRs need to be navigating the flow of the meeting, ensuring each team member gets time to present their work.
Lastly, HRs also have the responsibility of offboarding the employee and helping them transition out of the company smoothly.
Tools to Automate and Manage Employees
1. AttendanceBot: Time and leave tracking
Traditionally, time tracking your employees is usually done either using a manual spreadsheet or biometric scanners. Such systems are time-consuming and don’t take into account employees who need to travel for work. AttendanceBot makes time tracking easier, automatically recording attendance and leaves in the dashboard. Employees just need to send a message on Slack or Microsoft Teams checking in when they arrive at work and checking out when they leave.
The bot records this in the dashboard to let you monitor late check-ins and check leaves taken by employees. Automate your time tracking and leave management system and save time.
2. Lattice: Employee performance
Appreciating your employees is important to building morale and boosting productivity. Use Lattice to set expectations, provide frequent feedback, and give performance reviews to your employees. The tool is built to help you simplify how you evaluate employee performance.
Publicize praise for employees through Slack automatically to ensure employees feel valued and motivated to deliver their best work.
3. OfficeAmp: Office wiki and issue management
Avoid back-and-forth between employees by setting up a helpdesk using OfficeAmp. The app allows you to answer all frequently asked questions about the office so that employees can search for answers right within Slack or Microsoft Teams. OfficeAmp’s issue management system lets any employee raise a ticket and the HR can assign the ticket to someone and monitor and clear them within a clean dashboard.
4. ExpenseTron: Automated reimbursement filing
Filing reimbursements for multiple employees and then approving and clearing these expenses is a monthly task that just takes too much time. ExpenseTron makes your expense filing easier with their expense management system. Have employees upload their reimbursements as they come up and make real-time updates to expenses.
The app allows you to upload reimbursements within Slack and allows you to set up an approval workflow so that assigned managers can approve it easily and the expense is filed in the backend automatically. ExpenseTron’s advanced dashboard allows you to see your spendings and identify trends to help you cut costs.
5. Donut: Company culture
Building a positive team culture is an everyday effort. Donut makes team building a weekly activity, setting up employees to grab coffee with each other on a weekly basis. This simple activity helps the team to bond with each other, even when they don’t work with each other or are from different departments.
Donut aims to strengthen team relationships and builds bonds even among remote workers.
6. ScrumGenius: Team Standups
If your team runs daily stand-up meetings, this app is for you! ScrumGenius makes stand-ups more time-efficient, reducing unnecessary emails or long discussions that traditional stand-ups usually cause. With ScrumGenius, you can also go back and check the work done by the team and understand what blockers your employees usually have to deal with.
7. Doodle Bot: Plan meetings
Planning a meeting often takes multiple rescheduling. Large teams, especially deal with this issue regularly. DoodleBot tackles the issue of finding the right meeting time by letting you schedule a new meeting by suggesting a time. Attendees can pick the time they prefer from the poll based on their availability, ensuring the meeting happens at a time that is convenient for everyone.
8. Lunch train: Plan team lunches
Coordinating a team lunch can be annoying. Having to message every employee and ensuring each person is on time isn’t the task that a busy HR should bother themselves with. Use Lunch Train to plan and automate team lunch reminders. Each employee will receive a message about the lunch when the time nears so that you don’t have to run around coordinating.
Ready to automate your HR processes?
We hope this helps you put your repetitive tasks on autopilot and lets you make the most of your time. With so much to do, it’s important that you are employing new tech to delegate your tasks and focus on the larger tasks.
What tools do you use to automate your HR tasks?
