The Science of HR: full steam ahead for HR transactional automation

The Art and the Science of HR describes the two parts of the HR skill set. The Art of HR describes dynamic aspects of HR that involve problem solving, people handling, conflict management, and many other "Artful" skills. The Science of HR describes the transactional items and rules that can be easily understood, predicted, and often automated. I will use the Art and Science theme for my blogs until I get all aspects covered.

Today's HR department is a busy place. Recruiting, hiring, benefits, litigation avoidance, legal compliance, performance reviews, learning management, succession planning, employee retention, employee advocacy, corporate cheerleaders, mentoring programs, just to name a few! Also the demand on HR services is increasing. HR is expected to deliver more transactions that are more complex are required at a lower cost! Increased demands are coming from managers, employees and shareholders who want more services provided to them. Employees want self service, self selection available. Managers want employee data at their fingertips, and want automated processes. Shareholders want HR to align the workforce with the corporate strategies and goals. That is a lot to accomplish for any department! HR transactional automation can deliver on all of these goals.

High impact HR Science projects:

• New Hire Onboarding
  
  • Automate and go paperless
    
• Benefits enrollment process
  
  • New or update your benefits
    
• Employee item Requisitioning:
  
  • new cube, new computer, replace laptop, blackberry, etc
    
• Employee Lifecycle event changes:
  
  • Marriage, baby, raises, off boarding, etc.
    

Some of the benefits of HR automation:

• Compliance
  
  • get it done right the first time
    
• Cost reduction
  
  • time to complete, reduced errors, shipping, paper
    
• Error reduction
  
  • both compliance and reduce cost
    
• New Hire satisfaction
  
  • First impressions, quick paperwork, automated verified processes
    
• Green initiatives
  
  • paperwork reduction, shipping reduction
    
• Communication
  
  • automated communication really makes a huge impact on quality
    

Other transactional HR automation areas:

• Employee self-service automation
  
• Manager self-service automation
  
• Job Application/Recruiting process automation
  
• Benefits selection automation
  
• 360 Review automation
  
• Learning Management automation
  

 

Emerald Case Study: Large REIT automates transactions and delivers a great ROI, and employee satisfaction results.

Our client wanted to focus on transactional HR automation in the New Hire process. We began by automating the existing paperwork with online panels and PDF forms generated to their document management system. We also sent the data to begin the HRMS processes and approvals. This alone paid for the project, but we also automated the offer letter process, the new & existing employee item requisitioning, intern onboarding, and more. This gave us more success to allow automation of employee changes for salary, job changes, and terminations. These HR transactional projects had a great impact on cost savings and new hire satisfaction. HR got low cost, compliant, error free automation, and the employee got high speed HR! The ROI was impressive.

Summary

Processes abound in HR, and here is where automation projects can revolutionize the impact of HR for all these customers. HR transactional automation provides the basic foundation for increased efficiency and can act as a key driver for HR success. HR organizations should recognize that technology can help them deliver best practices via automations and integrations that reduce the complexity and increase the delivery of HR services. Automating HR Science frees resources for HR to focus on projects related to the Art of HR. This will be the topic of my next blog. "The Art of HR: People, participation and huge paybacks for HR"

 

 

 

The Art and Science of HR

Most people think of HR as the paper work generating hiring machine, or the benefits coach and supplier, or perhaps the big brother forcing rules or watching out for lawsuits. HR does have a lot of difficult tasks that must be repeated in every HR department. Recruiting, New Hire paperwork, Benefits enrollment, Employee changes are types of activities in what I call the Science of HR. These HR activities are well understood and can be repeatedly processed. Significant ROI can be found for HR projects here. Automated employee onboarding is a great example.

HR is also expected to employ savvy people skills and softer talents. Recruiting, employee retention, training programs, employee advocacy, and succession planning are just a few of the skills that define the Art of HR. These challenges require more internal experience, creativity, and less process to make successful. Corporate social networking is one trend in this area.

In the next several weeks, I will dive deeper into both aspects. The Science of HR is more automation friendly, and can provide a huge win for HR. The Art of HR requires more domain expertise, planning and strategy. Projects here are more difficult, but if handled well, can shift HR into a more pivotal corporate role.

How is this happening? Web 2.0 is providing a great opportunity for new HR projects and roles. New paradigm tools being developed help HR go way beyond traditional roles, into things that drive and automate HR science but an also allow HR to deliver powerful people driven HR solutions that are generating great results.

Main topics:

• The Science of HR: full steam ahead for HR transactional automation
  
• The Art of HR: People, participation and huge paybacks for HR
  

A deeper look:

• HR Science: Recruiting and Web 2.0 for the automated HR
  
• HR Science: Onboarding and the Science of transactional HR automation
  
• HR Art: Onboarding and the Art of acculturation: getting a great start with your new company, job and team day 1
  
• HR Science: HR-XML: Vendors dream of easy cross platform communication
  
• HR Art: Onboarding and the Art of acculturation: getting a great start with your new company, job and team day 1
  
• HR Art: Advanced artwork in employee retention, assessment, training, and team building through Acculturation and web 2.0

http://www.emeraldsoftwaregroup.com/onboarding/

mailto:jeff.hayden@emeraldsoftwaregroup.com

HR Onboading - My role at Emerald Software Group

Here at Emerald Software Group we are pushing the envelope in the employee onboarding solution space. We are not trying to capture the monolithic HRMS vendor space, or the Enterprise talent acquisition realm. We are trying to be the best "best of breed" vendor in-between! We convert a candidate to an employee and make it paperless! Not only that, but we take other important aspects of HR pain and solve it also: Employee Change events, Life cycle provisioning of items for employees, and more...

To accomplish this we need great software, great integration, and raving fans as clients.

My business partner and friend since 1999, Chuck Ros has stayed with me through thick and thin. We worked together in several corporate names, but together started Emerald Coast Software in Gulfport, MS in 2003. ECS was moved to Alpharetta, GA and renamed to Emerald Software Group in 2007. We grew from the 2 of us in a 150 square foot room, to over 13 team members and growing.

I provide back office support for the operation including our SaaS data center, Product Management, Professional Service and more.

This blog is meant to provide my talking post for my work realm. I hope to keep it informative for clients, non-clients, co-workers and anyone who will read. I hope it to be a place to get some good HR info out to the world.