HR automation is one of the hottest topics in human resources as of late, but does it matter? Is it required to improve employee satisfaction? Here we share some of the benefits of HR automation and how not leveraging HR automation might increase employee turnover and potential loss of quality employees.

The Challenge of Employee Retention

We often see in the companies, people leaving and joining (more or less frequently) and no company is an exception for this.  Employee turnover is costing companies thousands of lost dollars in productivity and wages. The truth is major companies surveyed by LinkedIn in Global Recruiting Trends survey see employee retention as their topmost priority (32%).

Challenges of Employee Retention

As we all know the challenge of employee retention is big for all companies and is tied directly to their success in the long term. The reality is every company faces its own unique challenges dependent on industry or many another number of factors. Here are a few common ones:

Continued focus on employee turnover is of critical importance, because of the direct relation of turnover to improvements in labor costs and guest satisfaction."

Finley Peter Dunne

Individual Employee Challenges

• First impressions matter (how smooth is your on boarding process?)
• Salary dissatisfaction
• Clear path to career progress
• Relationships in the office (are you fostering a team or individual workplace?)
• Positive workplace culture
• Objective and transparent performance reviews (company performance too)
• Lack of appreciation and recognition
• Job security

Marketplace Challenges

• Competitive pressures of commodity job positions
• Low unemployment rates
• Geography (how far are you from a viable workforce?)
• High demand for specialized positions
• Good employees get pursued by your competitors

While many of these challenges to employee retention success are out of your control, a little bit of attention can help you overcome most of them. The challenge of every HR professional is time; time to respond to all the emails, voice mails, or drop-ins at your office for employee management. If a large % of these HR tasks can be automated you will have more time to address employee turnover challenges.

Employee Satisfaction Surveys

As you can see from the statistics below, it is evident that “Employee experience and satisfaction” is what matters the most. The cost to your business is big when it comes to high employee turnover and figuring out how to maintain your current workforce.

• A survey of 350,000+ American respondents nationwide estimated that disengaged employees cost U.S. businesses between $450 billion and $550 billion each year in lost productivity. (Gallup Survey on employee engagement for HR)
•  “Increasing employee engagement investments by 10% can increase profits by $2,400 per employee, per year.”  (Workplace Research Foundation Survey on Employee Engagement)
•  “Employees with the highest levels of commitment perform 20% better than employees with lower levels of commitment.” (SHRM Report on Employee Satisfaction)
•  Unfortunately, 32 percent of global executives say the on boarding they experienced was poor. (Pomeroy Report on HR OnBoarding)
•  Thirty million engaged employees in the U.S. come up with most of the innovative ideas, Disengagement costing the U.S. an estimated $450 billion to $550 billion annually. (Gallup Research on  Employee Engagement )

How Not Automating Can Quicken Employee Turnover

Employee Turnover is the process of replacing a current employee with a new employee, calculating the frequency of these replacements is termed as turnover rate.   

The cost involved in replacing an employee is somewhere close to 60% of annual salary. Irrespective of all these losses, the time taken by the new employee to deliver the productivity of an existing employee is approximated to be one year. 

A research report by SHRM foundation states that, in the USA, the career job transition rate of professionals is greater than 25%. More Specifically, close to 500,000 managers prefer to get to promoted every year and jump companies once in 2-4 years. 

Over 75% of the reasons employees leave could have been prevented by the employer."

Work Institute, RETENTION REPORT, 2017

As we saw from the survey results, most of the turnover is fueled by lack of positive workplace culture and transparency in the organizational information; e.g.., performance reviews information, individual career path and so on.

Benefits of HR Automation

• Assigning onboarding documents is as simple as a click and all that employee needs to do is sign, as all other information is auto-populated.
• Payroll is auto-generated to the account provided by the employee upon approval of the manager, which simplifies HR efforts.
• The transparency of onboarding to the employee is also much higher as everything can be tracked on the custom HR portal. This way HR automation improves the onboarding process.
• Changes in an employee’s profile, data, or elections can all be completed in the same user-friendly interface.
• Each employee’s documents are all auto-saved, which saves the effort of organizing them and auto copies are distributed for employee records.
• All communications (phone, email, portal, and chatbot) with the employee will be in one location and managed through a process, not email or voice mails.
• Implementing a mobile HR strategy would help to increase HR-employee communication, productivity and deliver better employee satisfaction
• Through chatbots, HR department offers 24/7 support to employees helping them on HR policies, PTO's, employee data, answer questions, and create ticket requests for those questions they cannot answer.
  
• By having chatbots and mobile strategy in place, an employee can be kept informed 24/7 through push notifications, wherein HR teams can push sensible organizational notifications instantly.
• Running predictive analytics tools help HR to have workforce analytics data about each employee. This helps the HR to locate the performance issues and factors halting the employee growth. Based on these reports, HR can suggest training sessions or suggest ways to improve further. This increases the morale of the employees.

If you want to be an HR Hero get your HR process automated to create a stress-free, happy and memorable workplace for your employees and enjoy maximum employee satisfaction.