Understanding the Impact of HR Automation on the Employee Experience

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About the Author

Conner Forrest

Senior Analyst, Workforce Productivity & Collaboration

Conner Forrest is a Senior Research Analyst with the Workforce Productivity &
Collaboration team at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
His areas of focus are content management, HR tech and corporate
performance management.

Before joining 451 Research, Conner worked as a senior editor with CBS
Interactive, covering a variety of enterprise tech trends. He received a Bachelor
of Science in Communication from the University of Louisville and a Master of
Science in Journalism from Northwestern University

Introduction

Over the past few years, employee experience (EX) has moved from the back burner to a frontline priority for HR and IT. With the labor and skills shortage emerging as a top threat to sales (second only to supply chain disruptions) and retention issues preventing business growth1, leaders are turning to EX initiatives and new technology to fight attrition, attract talent, bolster productivity and protect the bottom line.

Occurring in tandem with this growing demand for EX investments is a renewed focus on workforce optimization and a shift in human resources (HR) skill requirements with a deeper interest in workforce productivity (50%), a stronger focus on winning the war for talent (46%) and an increasing need for data literacy (44%) taking the top spots.2

To adequately leverage these new skills, HR is looking to technologies such as people analytics and workflow automation, both of which are beginning to reach critical mass in HR departments (see Figure 1). Automation, specifically, has a large potential for impact in its ability to improve EX elements across the employee journey from recruitment to daily work execution and more.

Figure 1: Technologies in use in HR departments

Q. Which of the following technologies does your HR department use, if any? Please select all that apply. Base: All HR respondents (n=266). Source: 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity & Collaboration, Employee Lifecycle & HR 2022.

The Take

Workflow automation tools have emerged alongside data analytics platforms as the two modern technologies in use by a majority of HR departments. While it may be easy to imagine automation as a technology to simply make life easier for HR practitioners, its use has the potential to impact the employee experience as well. In an effort to establish itself more fully as a strategic partner to the business, HR’s priorities and skill development have shifted toward driving employee productivity, supporting recruitment and effectively leveraging people data. Automation spans these focus areas, providing HR with a tool to deepen its work in these areas while improving the employee experience in the process

In many instances, the outcomes from this investment in automation benefit both the HR professional or manager implementing it and the end user experiencing it. HR can do more with less, and the employee gets a better contextual experience with less friction. For example, automating communication with a job candidate saves HR the time of managing that communication, and the candidate may feel more engaged with the process. Better support for recruitment is just one example of the improvements employees want to see in their organization’s HR department.3 However, recruitment along with faster response times, productivity improvements and better tooling for self-service access are all in-demand changes that automation can support, at least in part.

The question then becomes what types of automation HR should invest in. According to an online Executive Discussion Board facilitated by 451 Research, HR’s trust in automation is mostly high, but some are hesitant. Automated notifications of tasks to be completed and communication of corporate initiatives are in high use among the participants, but they are also interested in automated data gathering, reporting, robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots. A majority of these HR leaders are using automation tools more widely across their core function areas (rather than for specific point solutions), leading us to hypothesize that early automation investments are primarily for extending HR’s abilities and improving the user experience across the employee life cycle.

Use Cases

To understand how automation can help HR drive a positive employee experience, it helps to know what employees want from their HR departments. Some of the demands (productivity improvements, recruitment support) align with the skills HR has already been moving toward (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Improvements employees would like to see from their organization’s HR department

Q. What improvements would you most like to see from your organization’s HR department? Please select all that apply. Base: All respondents, excluding HR (n=251). Source: 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity & Collaboration, Employee Lifecycle & HR 2022.

Responsiveness — Some 42% of HR respondents to the same Employee Lifecycle & HR 2022 survey listed HR process improvements as a key strategic focus for the next two years. Streamlining and improving those processes through automation provides double the value as automation helps HR achieve that strategic goal and also empowers the HR team to be more responsive and meet employees’ needs more easily. Automation technologies such as chatbots allow HR to respond to employee requests immediately, either by providing an answer to the inquiry or routing the request to the appropriate party.

Recruitment — Our data shows that recruitment is a major priority for HR, and non-HR employees want more support in modernizing and optimizing their strategies as well. Automation has the potential to remove two major areas of friction in recruiting: at the candidate evaluation stage and at the candidate communication stage. For instance, HR can use automation to find candidates with the most relevant skills and experience more quickly from an initial pool of resumes and weed out incomplete applications. A 451 Research Executive Discussion Board participant had this to say about the benefit automation brings to recruitment:

“Recruiting is one of the biggest time wasters in terms of the amount of time spent having to evaluate applicants, many of which do not meet qualifications. It just takes a long time to determine and not screen out a potential good candidate. I believe that automation can sort out the ‘wheat from the chaff’ better and faster.”

Vice president of HR, Oil and gas

Once candidates are in the hiring pool, automation improves HR’s response time in reaching out and securing a hire. Another vice president of HR in the oil and gas industry said that being able to connect with candidates as soon as possible “can mean the difference between filling our positions with the best candidates versus getting those that have less experience and skills.”

Automation helps keep HR competitive in the turbulent labor market and improves the beginning of the employee experience by honoring the candidate’s time

Productivity — Following a hire, a key priority is getting the new employee up and running as soon as possible. This helps drive productivity and limit the time the employee isn’t adding value. Workflow automation can help kick off the various processes associated with onboarding such as assigning a desk through facilities, provisioning tools through IT, starting open enrollment for benefits, setting up payroll through finance and assigning a corporate ID through security. The sooner new employees have the right tools and training, the sooner they can drive value.

As part of the same discussion board, a director of talent management and organizational development in the construction industry stated the following:

“I once worked at a company where we fully automated onboarding, and it was marvelous. Our goal was: meet someone in the airport on Friday and have them working in two weeks with all systems and hardware and accoutrements they need for their job on day 1. We achieved that through customized automation. That saved us a bunch of time.”

Director of talent management and organizational development, Construction

Self-service access — Access, especially to HR systems, is often contingent on what data employees have access to and what data would be most beneficial for them. Certain tools can help automate self-service access by presenting or limiting access based on the employee’s role, team, geography or other factors. A senior director of global benefits in the biotech industry said this kind of personalization and access to real time, relevant information is “key to engaging our employees.”

Conclusion

Employee experience as a concept and investment area is here to stay, and automation’s potential impact on crafting and sustaining this experience is massive. At a high level, workflow automation frees up HR employees to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time working strategically to support employees and create a compelling employee experience. This is crucial given that the top role the HR respondents identified for their function in our Employee Lifecycle & HR survey was to “keep employees engaged and build a supportive company culture.”

HR has initially been using automation to attract, hire, onboard and support employees — to keep them engaged and productive. While this will continue, we believe automation’s impact will deepen across the employee life cycle as additional use cases are identified and supported by the technology in areas such as performance management, learning and development. Ultimately, the adoption of automation and its value will look different for every company, but it’s clear from our Executive Discussion Board that HR leaders’ dream scenarios for the technology include more automation overall throughout the employee experience.