Historically, an organization’s human resources (HR) function has largely been a compliance and brokerage department, acting as an intermediary between management and employees. This approach means that organizations aren’t fully utilizing the potential strategic value that HR can bring beyond administrative work. Instead, HR teams spend significant effort on manual, repetitive and tiring work.

There’s an untapped opportunity for HR to shape your organization's success and drive innovation through the strategic management of human capital. Beyond addressing compliance and risk, they can optimize workforce productivity and efficiency by introducing strategic objectives to talent management, resource allocation and workforce planning. This means helping management understand the options available for getting work done within an organization.

By embracing HR transformation, you can unlock HR’s competitive value, empowering the department to become a strategic catalyst for your success. In this blog, we go through how to unlock these capabilities through the support of a digital workforce and intelligent automation.

Why Do You Need to Transform HR?

Simply put, HR is a vital business function that faces several challenges due to the high volume of transactions, repetitive activities, paperwork and manual intervention in several of its processes. This leads to:

• Long, complicated onboarding
• Disorganized onboarding experiences
• Heightened error rates
• High hiring costs
• Payroll and admin inefficiencies
• Difficulties in accessing and updating employee data
• Lack of HR data-driven insights
• Compliance and regulatory issues
• Poor employee engagement

HR transformation efforts address these challenges by streamlining these processes, reducing inefficiencies and adjusting HR’s focus from transactional activities to strategic planning and supporting business strategy. And in a fast-evolving, digital-first world, this strategic thinking is more critical than ever for business success.

RPA enabled Raet to deliver increased value to their HR customers

What is HR Transformation?

HR transformation represents the evolutionary path of the HR function. It involves continuously enhancing and integrating service delivery, talent strategy and technology within the HR operating model to drive operational excellence and create greater business value. HR transformation enables HR leaders to reshape processes and align people, processes and technology with organizational goals for long-lasting success.

Key drivers of HR transformation

The role of HR is evolving. Employee-employer dynamics have shifted and the hunt to get and retain talent is more competitive than ever. This has led to business leaders prioritizing outstanding employee experiences to attract and keep excellent workers. As a result, the HR department is transforming to provide more people-centric experiences with HR Automation, where employees can give individual attention and support instead of focusing on administrative work. After all, HR is about the people.

How do you transform HR?

One of the best ways to start is through digital HR transformation. It involves leveraging HR technology and digital solutions, such as intelligent automation (IA) and robotic process automation (RPA), to enhance HR processes, improve employee experiences and drive strategic decision-making.

Intelligent Automation

Intelligent automation (IA) is a combination of cognitive technologies that can streamline and optimize business processes and decision-making. These include robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), business process management (BPM), process intelligence, no-code development, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML).

Robotic Process Automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to automate digital activities usually performed by human workers. You teach them to manage low-value, repetitive jobs to allow your staff to focus their time on more valuable operations.

Implementing into HR Functions

When you start implementing IA and RPA into your HR functions, you can almost immediately see the benefits:

• Operational efficiency: IA and RPA help streamline processes, automate manual tasks and reduce administrative burden. This helps HR functions become more efficient and productive as employees can focus on more strategic tasks.
• Employee experience: No longer burdened by manual, repetitive work, HR employees are empowered and motivated to produce more meaningful work — as digital workers handle the rest.
• Agility and adaptability: Digital HR transformation helps organizations adapt to their changing environments much faster as their processes aren’t held up or stalled due to manual inefficiencies.

• Cost savings: By automating and streamlining time-consuming routine tasks, HR teams can save resources and time.
• Data security and compliance: IA and RPA help protect employee data and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations. Records are also kept accurately for auditability.

Learn more about how IA helps HR functions combine people, systems and processes on a unified platform to achieve unrivaled benefits.

What Are the Strategies for HR Transformation?

There are several types of strategies the HR team should consider. The strategy or solution you choose will depend on your organization’s goals and motives for undergoing HR transformation:

• HR automation – Implement automation in HR processes to streamline workflows and reduce manual effort.
• RPA and digital workers – Digital workers thrive on repetitive, rule-based tasks. Integrating RPA will increase the efficiency and accuracy of work.
• AI and data-driven analytics – Leverage AI to gain smarter insights into workforce trends and employee data to enable accurate, data-driven decisions.
• Cloud-based solutions – Adopt cloud HR platforms and solutions to ensure secure accessibility of HR functions from anywhere.

• Self-service portals – Reduce HR’s administrative tasks by empowering employees with self-service portals to update information, request time off and change details.

At SS&C Blue Prism, we’ve automated over 10,000 cases in five months to save our business over 2,000 hours of HR tasks. Watch the video below to learn how we did it!

What stages are there in HR transformation?

To help you get started with HR transformation and leverage the full potential of your digital programs, we recommend breaking up your journey into five stages as outlined in our SS&C | Blue Prism® Robotic Operating Model 2 (ROM™2). This way, you can ensure your organization has robust HR automation capabilities.

Stage 1. Strategy

HR impacts nearly every other department. So, you’ll want to start developing a clear strategy and governance framework aligning with your organization’s vision. You’ll also need to get buy-in from the rest of the organization.

Stage 2. Workforce

Seamlessly connect HR employees with digital workers to unify your workforce. An established organizational model will help you frame roles and responsibilities and keep your transformation on track.

Tip: Set up a reliable Center of Excellence (CoE) consisting of critical thinking across the organization to upskill and educate your workforce.

Stage 3. Design

Discover opportunities for your organization’s transformation by researching, consulting and designing your operating model. Think about your organization’s requirements and consider whether hybrid solutions are valuable to you.

Stage 4. Development

Align your intelligent automation delivery methods for improved integration. Keep quality assurance top of mind by testing, introducing and monitoring.

Stage 5. Operations

Use best practices to reach a streamlined workflow and maintain control of HR operations.

Download our HR automation starter kit for step-by-step help on your automation journey, including which processes to automate first and how to strategize your HR operations with IA.

How Can Automation Transform HR?

Automation has the potential to revolutionize HR. Here are some compelling use cases:

Recruitment

The hiring process can be daunting for HR employees, who have to spend hours sifting through applications, resumes and coordinating interview resources. Here, digital HR transformation can help sift through text-heavy resumes. Digital workers can quickly analyze uploaded documents for content matching the job description and then route the relevant ones to an HR employee for further processing.

Employee onboarding

Employee onboarding can be a long, drawn-out process as it involves multiple teams and resources to coordinate. This can be made even more challenging as standards change and processes are done sporadically — making it a real headache for your HR department.

IA ensures a smooth, quick and efficient onboarding process. Through automated workflows, electronic document management and personalized onboarding portals, employees can take onboardings into their own hands, reducing manual intervention from the HR team so they can focus on other tasks.

Payroll and expense accounting

Manual payroll administration and expense accounting are time-consuming, repetitive and error prone. HR teams are often overwhelmed and don’t enjoy the task, but both are essential for a business to operate.

Fortunately, due to its nature, payroll and expenses are well suited for automation. IA and digital workers can help verify timesheets, detect anomalies and create paychecks. All this helps to create accurate payments and speeds up payroll and expense administration.

Explore more IA and RPA use cases in HR, including how to identify the best processes for the best automation candidates.

Start Your HR Transformation Strategy

By offering new solutions, like a digital workforce, to management teams across the organization, HR can become a strategic partner by providing creative and innovative staffing options. As part of your HR transformation strategy, a digital workforce offers the business new competitive options to win market share, scale operations and increase customer satisfaction, leading to higher business value.

If your organization hasn’t yet considered a digital workforce as an option for tackling common and complex tasks, then you need to look into it, because your competitors are already using digital workers to get ahead.

If you’d like to learn more about how to scale automation across your organization, we encourage learning through a broader perspective here.