Human resources as a business function is entirely critical to the success of your organisation & the bottom line, but often Senior Executives don’t see it this way.
They are therefore unwilling to invest large amounts of budget into HR, considering it to be more of a cost center that a core strategic asset.
This is just one of the many struggles which HR faces on a day-to-day basis, that could be easily solved by investing in HR technology.
Did you know that a whopping 72% of HR leaders don’t have HR tech as part of their people strategy, but that 47% say that it will become so in the next 12 months? That’s because the success of the 38% who have invested has proved the ROI of their endeavours into the world of HR tech.
Cloud technologies provide HR with a means of reducing the costs which give Human Resources a reputation as a cost centre, including the cost of endless administration, and the to-ing and fro-ing of employee requests which can become cumbersome and difficult to maintain control over.
Below are the five key difficulties that HR are facing in 2018, and how HR technology helps to remedy each one.
1. Compliance
I’m sure this has been on your mind as much as ours these last few weeks, with the General Data Protection Regulations coming into effect last month. Compliance ties directly into costs, too, because slipping up here could land your business with a large fine, or worse.
Employment tribunals are also on the rise in number since the scrapping of tribunal fees last year. It has therefore never been so critical to protect your business from compliance risk, and this is one of the struggles HR will be feeling harder than normal in 2018.
How can HR tech help? The right cloud HR technology will provide you with documentation, guidance & workflow processes that offer protection against these risks, as well as empowering your managers to take employment law into their own hands.
2. Time-consuming administration
“Recent HRIS research has shown that the most popular reason that companies implement an HR solution is to increase efficiency, and a big part of this is reducing the administrative burden on HR staff. Freeing up your team to perform higher-priority tasks not only enables them to be more effective, but there can be significant reductions in time-per-transaction for HR processes, reducing organisation-wide headaches and illustrating a clear ROI on your HR software,” said Megan Meade, Marketing Specialist at HRMS World.
Not only is administration a costly exercise, but it also takes the focus of HR away from what should be the most vital parts of their day-to-day roles.
There is often a lack of time available to devote to HR projects because too much time is consumed by day-to-day administration, managing records, helping managers etc.
How can HR tech help? If you want to ensure that HR executives are supported in carrying out their duties so that they too can add value to a company’s development plans and bottom line performance, HR tech is the way to go. It acts as a support system for every single senior executive, HR professional, manager and employee that a paper or excel-based system has no chance of competing with.
3. Decision making
Driving change in your company from the perspective of HR can be difficult, if not impossible, without access to key HR metrics & analytics.
There’s no way for us to back up potential decisions without access to this data, as we have no evidence to support our claims, and trying to plough through endless spreadsheets searching for specific absence types can be exhausting and demotivating for HR professionals.
How can HR tech help? HR reporting & analytics is developing all the time, and it’s picking up speed as HR professionals and executive teams start to reap the rewards. Displaying this complicated data, so large in quantity, in a graphical manner can simplify the entire decision making process from start to finish.
4. Communication
Email can only get you so far as an HR department – there’s no guarantee that your employees will read the emails you send them, download the new employee handbook or read your updated policies. It can be frustrating putting the time into these communications only to feel as if they aren’t being appreciated by the rest of the business.
On top of this, ever-changing employment law needs to be communicated to all line managers (and employees) which can be a difficult task without clear methods of communication.
How can HR tech help? By providing you with the option to host all your company documentation in one easily-accessible place, you give your employees and managers the ability to take the power into their own hands – it becomes that much easier for them to access all relevant documentation and for communication between HR, managers and employees to be streamlined.
5. Accountability
Accountability can often be forgotten about until something goes wrong – then blame kicks in and tensions build internally. This is where HR is responsible for creating accountability for individuals and also for teams within your organisation.
Confusion as to who is accountable for what breeds chaos within a business, and without a clear organisational structure it’s all too easy to fall into this trap.
How can HR tech help? Cloud technology allows for expectations which were previously implicit to become explicit, simply by allowing all members of your organisation to have access to this information with ease. Online documentation & descriptions of each job role allows for clear accountabilities to be established and maintained.
