Automation. Remote work. As HR professionals, you’ve heard these buzz words a lot since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The need to step away from administration and focus on the big picture has never been more critical for HR teams. In the last three months, you’ve moved entire offices into a remote workforce, made difficult decisions to close or reduce operations, and supported your employees through the emotional rollercoaster of the first global pandemic of your lifetime. 

In the wake of the coronavirus, the importance of automating processes is becoming more and more apparent. As a primarily remote workforce, it’s no longer an option to walk down the hall to ask your team member to sign a contract or lean over and ask managers for assistance on hiring tasks. As a small to medium-size business, how do you manage your extensive task list? You can find the answer in automated HR workflows. 

Specifically, it’s time for HR teams to build automated workflows to streamline the onboarding and offboarding checklists, and create better employee experiences.

Employee Onboarding and Offboarding Process 

As an HR professional, you know that onboarding and offboarding processes are crucial tasks for your role. A successful onboarding process does more than make a great first impression on new employees; it can impact the entire lifecycle of the employee at your organization. Offboarding processes, while often overlooked, are just as critical. The impression you leave on former employees is a reflection of your brand, and exit interviews can provide valuable insights into the organization’s gaps. More practically, you want to protect the company from both a compliance and security perspective. There are many tasks involved in both processes, such as:

These HR onboarding and offboarding processes can be incredibly time-consuming and hard to follow when completed manually. While the checklists above are not all-encompassing, they demonstrate the number of moving parts and the commitment required for each step. 

As with any multi-step process that involves many stakeholders, there are critical risks or failure points. Manual HR onboarding and offboarding processes may bring on issues including:

• Losing employee forms and having to redo tasks
• Risks of human error on the employee side
• Frustrated employees as a result of continuous back and forth communications in manual processes

During a time of heightened stress like the present,  signs of burnout can start to appear, which translates to an increased risk of human failure in a manual process. As a result, it’s more important than ever to consider automation. 

Benefits of Automated HR

Streamlining your onboarding and offboarding workflows can create a much smoother experience for your HR team and your employees. Here are a few benefits:

• Save Time. The onboarding process can take from days to months when managed manually — automating your workflows in one place takes the burden off of your HR department. Once you enter a new hire into the HR system, the automation magic begins and will trigger a series of actions for the new hire and the appropriate internal teams.
• Save Money. The professionals at iCIMS found that employee turnover is three times higher for new employees who are onboarded manually, compared to those who are onboarded automatically. With that being said, the money spent on recruiting, training, and onboarding new hires could be reduced greatly if the processes are streamlined.
• Reduce Error. Let your digital HR platform facilitate the onboarding and offboarding tasks so you aren’t stuck with manual, error-prone, repetitive tasks.
• Facilitate Collaboration. From your IT department to Accounting and HR, automated workflows allow you to easily manage and assign tasks to team members across the company.
• Improve the Employee Experience. Your new hires or former employees will naturally be less overwhelmed if they can follow along easily with any tasks required of them

There are many ways to automate HR onboarding and offboarding workflows. By using an HR system like GoCo, you can even collaborate on creating workflows. You can work directly with IT, security, payroll, and other contributors in the process to develop HR workflows that are scalable and functional. Ultimately, this will save you time and money that you’ll be able to spend on other priorities. 

Final Thoughts

The COVID-19 pandemic has overhauled many industries. Behind every organization is an HR team that has been at the forefront. As a society, we’ve transitioned to a remote workforce that is utilizing technology in a way that we’ve never done before. 

Now is the time to make the investment in technology to elevate your HR team’s priorities with HR workflow automation. By utilizing an HR system like GoCo, you can collaborate, save time, and create customizable workflows for your organization. By automating operational tasks into workflows through an HR management software, you will allow your HR staff to focus on what really matters during this unprecedented time—your people.