Businesses worldwide are experiencing the fourth industrial revolution. Thanks to the developments in artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and robotic process automation, human productivity has reached an all-time high. Today, you can experience digital transformation in all business areas, including human resource management.

HR has always been an essential cog in the business wheel, and the department's role in ensuring it runs well is crucial. The growing importance of HR function as the strategic arm of an organization made digitization vital for HR leaders.

A digital HR strategy is no longer a nice aspect to enhance your organization’s production and competition. Rather, it’s a roadmap guiding the digital transformation of the manual HR process. These strategies aim to digitize and automate, improving key HR functions, including recruitment, onboarding, and employee management.

In this article, we will discuss digitization in HR, the importance of digitizing manual HR processes, the benefits of digitization in HR, and the steps to creating an effective HR strategy.

Importance of Digitizing Manual HR Processes

With the battle for talent, human resources departments need to bat for the business community. To adopt a more proactive and strategic role in optimizing productivity, creating a culture of ethics, and minimizing risk, HR professionals are taking advantage of technology, especially HR workflow automation, that transforms manual processes into more efficient organizational operations.

If you are new to digital transformation, you might not be completely sure about replacing your current software or processes. Let’s uncover the top five benefits of digitizing manual HR processes.

• Manage processes faster and with fewer resources -  The best return HR professionals get on their digitization investment is time. When organizations replace inefficient, manual, and paper forms with digital ones, one can notice a significant reduction in errors and delays, driving substantial time and cost savings for the enterprise across processes like employee onboarding, policy and procedure management, and the like.the top HR automation software solutions offer workflows tailored to any job type, automatically specifying the stakeholders required at each stage of the onboarding process. Solutions with e-signature offer up to an 80% faster documentation turnaround. It helps HR professionals invest in more strategic matters while accelerating response times in new talent acquisition.
• Boosts employee morale - Your employees like it when you hear them. Making it easy for them to request telework requirements, business-critical travel, and performance feedback helps improve your company's morale. On the other hand, a digital audit trail keeps everything aligned for internal compliance. With requests getting submitted and processed at greater speed, organizations can automatically generate and send approval or denial notifications to employees with minimal errors and delays. If you want your employees to request business-related travel necessities, the right HR automation software would include embedded business logic, dropdown fields, and other features that would capture the following information: The primary purpose of the meeting and the client’s name, travel dates, location for departure, destination, travel routes, and method. The risks of not traveling negatively impact the client and industry relationships. Check the availability of alternative options such as teleconferencing or partner representation.
• Stay ahead of regulatory changes - In the ever-changing corporate landscape, you must stay ahead of regulatory changes for business continuity. You can consider the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance. When done manually, capturing your employees’ health status, vaccination records, and test results will be both time- and money-consuming. However, when you automate vaccination and testing programs, the HR department can easily track employees’ status through their HR and payroll systems. Therefore, your digital information database gets updated when an employee updates information or completes a procedure. Besides ease of reporting, the process allows better communication flow between employers and employees, which helps organizational leaders optimize new processes and policies with the shift in regulations.
• Effective growth planning - Having a comprehensive digital database of analytics and dashboards makes it easier to find out your employees' performance, the things motivating them, and where you need to invest in your organization. With cross-departmental visibility into performance metrics, you can gain actionable insights on bonus and promotional decisions, streamline and automate the performance review cycle with templated forms, and save your HR team time when you scale. When your organization grows, it is critical to have a solution that allows unlimited user access and makes adding new workflows easy to scale with you across departments or entire organizations without switching to a new provider that fits your organization’s growing requirements.
• Secure storage and accessibility for compliance - Amid the pandemic, compliance costs skyrocketed. Besides hurting brand reputation and performance, noncompliance increases an organization’s risk of data breaches, cyber-attacks, and insider threats. Therefore, knowing that hands-on risk compliance processes are often inefficient and prone to human error, organizations must digitize the process with a cloud-based solution, which secures sensitive information and ensures business continuity. Moreover, adopting the right HR automation software will automatically archive workflows in the cloud for secure storage and accessibility, making it easier to complete a successful audit. When your HR forms run through a centralized solution instead of emails and spreadsheets, it gives your team peace of mind regarding compliance verification.
• Benefits of Digitization in HR - The benefits of digital HR technology include faster, more accurate, and more efficient processes with better cost optimization. The following is a list of the benefits of digital HR.
• 1: Talent retention - One of the top advantages of HR digitization involves retaining high-performing employees. You can easily do the same by checking or auditing their reports on time without hovering over their workstations. Moreover, you will not need to talk to them now and then for work reports. You can simply opt for a to-do list on software for reporting managers to check and audit and use the data later to reward and recognize sincere employees. It is the best way to promise your employees the value they deserve.
• 2: Employee experience - For most people, there is a blurred line between their personal and professional lives. While they check their social media accounts during their office hours, they check their work emails during their weekends or even while vacationing. As such, they expect their employers to offer them a similar user experience to their customers, especially in the digital work environment. You can utilize various enterprise social platforms, allowing your employees to work closely together on various group activities and tasks that would keep the users updated on the latest developments.
• 3: Better decision-making strategies - In today’s business world, the talent management process is never easy. You can access various digital spheres, like recruitment engines and performance management systems, that are manageable at greater levels. HR managers now know if they are hiring, recruiting, and staffing the right employees. They can check their hired talent’s scorecards at any time using the tools. HR digitalization made most organizations’ daily decision-making skills and strategies more accurate. It means organizations can work with more trusted and reliable change-makers to push the organization’s strategic benchmark forward.
• 4: More focus on business activities - Digital HR automates time-consuming manual processes and helps you focus on more productive and important tasks. If your organization has many employees, you will find it difficult to manage their information on paper. With digital HR processes, HR departments can streamline workflow to improve work management and productivity. Moreover, HR digital transformation offers better clarity on goals and accomplishments. It allows your employees to check their KPIs and their value in the system. Adopting such a process reduces the risk of ambiguity or noncompliance between teams.
• 5: Information management - Besides simplifying decision-making, digital HR simplifies accessing all employees’ essential information, as you can access all data instantly and up-to-date. You can also control employees' access to confidential information, ensuring that the right information is available to the right people at the right time. Maintaining all your organizational data, information, and content in one centralized, secure location can ensure its accessibility and timeliness. Digital HR also helps with document management capabilities; the organization can learn what the employees are reading and improve productivity by minimizing strenuous paperwork, accessing old documents, or archiving training manuals and handbooks.

Steps to Create an Effective Digitized HR Strategy

Many leaders get overwhelmed while creating a digital HR strategy. However, taking small, incremental steps helps you build a solid plan without overcomplicating things. Here’s how you can create an effective digitized HR strategy.

1: Determine organizational goals

Besides addressing the needs and expectations of your organization’s HR department, the digitalization of human resource processes must also focus on your employees. Enabling employees to record training requests through the system is a goal in achieving digitization. Whatever you decide must align with your broader business goals; otherwise, you will focus on the wrong areas to digitize instead of those that help generate some returns for your business. Focus on high-level, impactful goals, including:

• HR Cost Optimization: Manual, repetitive tasks are expensive and time-consuming. For instance, entering HR data manually is tedious, expensive, and time-consuming. However, automating the process will reduce your organizational costs.
• Boosting HR Productivity: When you automate mundane administrative tasks, your HR team gets more time to focus on impactful initiatives, such as overhauling the training program.

You can even be a little more specific about your goals. Your digital HR strategy could aim to cut down the use of paper by approximately 35%, making your organization more sustainable.

2: Self-service platforms for employees

Nowadays, most companies maintain central management by choosing human resources software that does not allow employees to access, view, and change information about organizational processes. However, the approach is traditional and outdated. When you offer self-service platforms to your employees, they can access some information. The Human Resources department enters less data, encouraging employees to participate in various activities.

Through this approach, you will find your employees performing the processes expected from the related department, which speeds up the workflow. You can support this through human resources software, allowing management of processes such as creating leave requests, viewing payroll details, and updating personal information through a web-based self-service platform. Besides, storing and distributing documents in the system benefits your organization and your environment.

3: Digitize performance evaluation processes

Regardless of technological developments, using technology without human intervention is impossible. Therefore, the management of human resources is substantial for companies. In HR management, it has become crucial to establish a realistic and fair performance assessment to ensure that employees can work in an effective, efficient, and happy environment.

Performance evaluation is time-consuming for employees and managers. However, digitalizing the process saves time and plays a significant role in developing internal communication. Furthermore, conducting performance evaluations in a transparent and auditable organizational environment increases employee loyalty to the company.

4: Choose suitable human resource software

With many software options on the market, firms often have trouble choosing human resources software. Some of them offer integrated HR solutions, while others offer solutions that meet legal requirements. At this point, it is crucial to determine your company’s goals and expectations, especially if your organization is an MNC with employees of various nationalities. Here, your priority should be software that can readily adapt to the countries' legal regulations. Integrated human resources software requires less data entry and more advanced reporting. Since it offers a faster adaptation process, users require proficiency in more than one software.

Conclusion

With the promotion and transformation of digital HR, it is possible to understand how much technology can improve the workflow of the employees within an organization and free up time for focusing on core activities. The key to successfully implementing a digital strategy for HR involves a supportive culture that embraces new technology.

Ensure that your employees have the resources and support they need to survive during and after the digital transformation process. Help your employees comfortably onboard and utilize your digital tools with training material and support. If your organization’s non-core activities are bothering you, and you want to outsource to a well-reputed and reliable firm, search online with terms like “professional talent outsourcing services in Thailand” and speak to the experts.