HR People !!!! You are in deep S**t

RPA, a term you will be hearing too much onward, it is whispered among CEO's and business owners, while eye bowling you from behind the glass.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) a booming technology founded to replace the day to day tedious tasks a workforce does in order to fulfill functional activities, and it will mostly impact departments engaged big time with data entry that requires minimal focus & intelligence.

An example of a nominated victim will be HR folks, sparing no one from Head of the department to the last personnel. Shall your CEO decides to have you replaced, it will be with RPA bots, unless your Organization values the emotional culture/employee part, then you will be safe to a certain extent and your title will become "The shrink of the Company".

Here is few examples of how the HR department will be impacted by RPA technology, and I hope it wont create a vicious cycle of scary thoughts related to the future of your Job, knowing that it definitely will.

• Payroll Processing

Payroll processing refers to the actions that companies take to pay their employees - keeping track of their presence, of their salaries, bonuses and taxes. Payroll processing needs manual intervention month after month, every year. An RPA system can be used to extract the details that are required from handwritten time sheets and calculate the pay from their stipulated contracts and pay them as well (by even ordering the necessary bank transactions).

• Resume screening and candidate shortlisting

You no longer need to ask your employees to spend a lot of time going through many resumes and application forms received for open positions. Software robots can easily gather all the files and compare the information with the list of job requirements. These requirements can be viewed as predefined rules which guide the selection procedure. The best candidates will then be notified and called for interviews, while those who don’t match the rules can be sent rejection notifications.

• Offer letter administration

The content of offer letters must comply with different sets of regulations (company, law, etc.), and also, they must be well-tailored to the particular selected candidate. These regulations are normally stored in various systems and databases, which makes manual verification and cross-checking not only time consuming, but also prone to error. Software robots, on the other hand, can quickly gather all the needed information, create the offer letter, send it, and eventually monitor the appropriateness of returned documents.

• On-boarding new hires

When a new colleague joins the team, data from several systems must be coordinated in order to create a new user account, email address, access rights for applications, IT equipment, etc. Data integration capacity is necessary in order to find agreement between the employee’s profile and preferences, and typical company procedures. With RPA, the user account can automatically activate a particular template for the on-boarding workflow, and this streamlines the whole process. The bots can then make rule-guided decisions as to which credentials to assign the new employee, which on-boarding documents to send, etc. RPA thus makes a significant contribution to helping new employees dive immediately into their work, find their place in the team, and feel ‘at home’ with it. Bots make processes such as employee ID creation much faster.

• Travel and expense management

The manual processing might involve issues like late expense submissions, missing receipts, unclear expense justifications, etc., which negatively impact compliance as well as employees’ satisfaction. Software robots can make the process more efficient by checking individual expenses against both company regulations, and external expenditure norms.

• Employee data management

‘Employee’ refers to current and past employees, applicants, contractors, and new hires. ‘Data’ covers company regulations, payroll and benefits. These specifications are meant to emphasize that employee data management requires orchestrated, consistent actions across several databases with different data formats. Moreover, if you also consider the need to keep the constant flux of employee data in order, it should be easy to understand what a nightmare it is for manual performance. Robotic process automation can easily handle this, minimizing the risk of incorrect data entries. By regular performance of data cleansing tasks, it ensures data compatibility across multiple databases. 

• Attendance tracking

Something like ‘learned carelessness’ might stand in the way of proper use of the absence management system by employees themselves. Size also matters at this point, in the sense that the bigger the company, the more difficult it is to accurately review time records. Software robots can cross-check self reports against time logged in the company record, and report inconsistencies. They can also recommend reallocation of workforce resources when confronted with major absenteeism due to epidemics, for instance, and thereby prevent workflow disruptions.

• Compliance and reporting

Labor laws are among those that suffer most frequent modifications, given the need to adjust to changes in the workforce socioeconomic status, and to provide workers with adequate health, safety and welfare conditions. A dynamic environment makes it rather difficult for HR representatives to adapt and prepare compliance reports. Leveraging RPA in HR facilitates organisations’ adherence to constantly changing compliance regulations, and preparing accurate reports by integrating data from multiple systems.

Conclusion:

The future is definitely offensive for HR people, and Cost/Time efficiency and outcome effectiveness are definitely a Business owner mindset, however such risk looming in the horizon should push HR community to put itself together, start coping with changes and take HR industry from being highly relied on a functional mindset, into a strategic one supported by Technology.