At the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, HR teams around the world found themselves leading a massive and unprecedented shift to remote work. But the transition has not been easy for many companies.
According to a report by managed cloud provider Navisite, a third of employers did not have the tech stack or IT infrastructure in place to facilitate remote work during the pandemic.
And though many companies are pushing for their teams to return to the office, studies show that remote work, or at least hybrid work (where employees hop back and forth between remote work and the office), is here to stay. Gartner reports that 47% of employers plan to continue with full-time remote work and 82% will do so on a part-time basis.
This has forced many companies to accelerate their digital transformation plans. By leveraging digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and automation, you can optimise your HR processes and support new work methods.
Below are a few examples of HR processes being transformed by technology.
1. Hiring and Onboarding
Hiring and onboarding processes take an excessive amount of an HR department’s time. Fortunately, HR software systems provide solutions that enable recruiters and hiring managers to automate tasks, such as:
- Answering potential candidates’ questions about your open positions
- Screening candidates based on the content of their CV
- Conducting background checks of potential hires
- Scheduling appointments for interviews
- Guiding new hires through the onboarding process.
Apart from HR management software, HR departments can also use other cloud-based services such as HR chatbots to automatically engage and screen candidates on their website and social media channels.
2. Making Employee Support More Accessible
The normalisation of remote work means that HR departments will need to do more in order to engage employees outside of the traditional, co-located workplace. As your workers submit requests for annual leave and ask questions about payroll and employee assistance, you will need an efficient system for staying on top of these queries.
You will need to create an HR policy that accounts for your remote workforce and marry it with an appropriate cloud-based HR tool that employees can access on any device. This is where tools like BambooHR and Gusto come in, providing a simple way for employees to:
- File requests for annual leave
- Track their annual leave allowance
- Track their attendance and productivity levels
- Fill out HR requests for benefits, maternity leave and compassionate leave
- Submit expense reports after a business trip.
Because these tools are based in the cloud, your workers can perform these tasks anytime, anywhere. This is ideal for organisations with non-desk staff — think workers in the trades.
3. Conducting Employee Sentiment Analysis
Apart from providing employee support, HR departments will also have to find new, digitally-driven ways of monitoring the performance and satisfaction of both office and remote staff.
Just like customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Salesforce and HubSpot, HR management software comes with built-in data analytics tools that enable you to monitor employee wellness and satisfaction metrics, such as:
- Turnover
- Absenteeism
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Employee health index
- Production.
Predictive analytics can even detect when an employee is most likely to resign based on metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, IBM’s proprietary AI can predict when workers are going to quit their jobs.
Employers can also use chatbots to conduct quick pulse surveys in the channels and apps their employees are already using. This increases the likelihood of employees completing surveys as they can do it in platforms they’re already active in, whether that’s WhatsApp, MS Teams or Facebook Messenger.
