Ultimately your organisation will benefit from digital workflow automation in 3 ways.

1. By increasing efficiency
2. Ensuring compliance and reducing risk
3. Boosting employee engagement

Each of these 3 benefits has multiple related outcomes, here we provide some of those that apply to most businesses. These are the top reasons for inclusion in your business case!

Increasing Efficiency has a direct link to productivity.

Reducing administrative time means your staff can focus on delivering what’s important to your business, this also means you (in HR and payroll) have the time to value add your function so the business can deliver more again.

Compliance and Risk

Too often we hear stories of visas and licence breaches, stories of defamation, unfair dismissal, inaccurate background checks, and from a payroll perspective stories of underpayment, incorrect award interpretation or outdated payroll rules. These are all examples of poor workflow processes and practices and all are preventable!

Engagement

Employees are engaged and empowerment with easy access to their own information, communication is increased as employees are always aware of their workflow requests and changes, and organisational updates can be easily communicated in bulk boosting engagement levels and reducing turnover.

Manual (Paper) Processes Vs Digital Workflow Processes

Assuming you have a manual paper-based workflow process now, here are few things you should expect a digital process to deliver over the paper based one. Feel free to use as many as you like in your business case for change.

For employees and managers

1. Correct up to date form is always available
2. Form validation: numbers are numbers, dates are dates, etc
3. Quick availability to form via computer or phone
4. Pre-determined approval processes to make it easy to enter and submit
5. Employee empowerment with less reliance on others
6. Increase employee engagement, employee kept up to date with workflow
7. Easily involve other communication pieces in the same solution
8. If manager on leave at a conference, etc. no awareness of changes

For HR and Payroll

1. Transparency and visibility of upcoming changes – early notice of events to prepare
2. Forms are eligible
3. Formulas and calculations may be applied to automatically complete some data
4. Full control over the workflow steps and security of information
5. Data is kept online, which can provide automatic reminders and reports
6. No need to update multiple spreadsheets, reducing data entry and re-keying errors
7. Full auditing changes on what, when, and who
8. Automatic distribution lists and reminders
9. Electronic reporting available with up to date information
10. Automatic organisational charts
11. Documents stored online and easily accessible
12. Easily track both current and non-current (terminated) employees
13. Integration of data into multiple connected systems

Workflow Effectiveness

For established organisations, it’s likely you have workflow processes for most parts of your people management already. If these have not been recently reviewed, now is a good time to commence that review process, starting with the easiest and moving to the more complex.
Often, when we work with organisations, we uncover that workflow processes have evolved over a period of years to be what they are, and sometimes the reasons why workflow follows the process is no longer apparent.
Now is the time to gain approval to question the existing workflow processes to determine the effectiveness of each step.
For example…

• Why does Judy in Accounts need to know that a new person has joined the team in Marketing?
• What does Judy do with that information, and is there an automated way to accomplishing the same outcome which helps all involved?

Of course, if it’s no longer needed or can be automated – change it!

More Information

For a complete guide on HR workflow please see our page How to Transform Your Business with HR Workflow
To view what we can help you with, check out our page on Human Capital Software Solutions

About Us

Since 2003 we’ve helped hundreds of businesses across Australia with their business operational, compliance and engagement strategies by providing the HR tools to drive efficiency and ultimately make your life easier, allowing you to add real value to your business. Complete our Contact Us for and we’ll call you to discuss your needs and how we can help.