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Once you’ve started to scale up your business, there’s no going back. You need to keep progressing from automating production to digitizing the HR processes. While it’s comparatively easier to automate the production process or data analysis gradually, for HR–that affects the whole organization–it can prove to be challenging.
Despite that, you must take the leap for the sake of your employees and organization. Here are 4 things that you must take care of before transforming your manual HR system to a digital one.
1. What is HR Digital Transformation
Human resource (HR) management is the process of recruiting, hiring, deploying, and introducing employees to an organization’s payroll. The organizations that have been long in the business have already transformed their HR processes to digital.
But, the small and medium businesses–that don’t have dedicated automated systems for their HR team–go around doing employee onboarding, filling timesheets, and exit interviews manually in spreadsheets.
The approach of transforming all or most of the HR process to digital means is termed as HR digital transformation.
2. Benefits of HR Digital Transformation
Several benefits are associated with HR digital transformation. Such as:
Leave and Time Management
When your organization has hundreds of employees who you don’t have a personal connection with, managing their leave applications and filling their timesheets can be disastrous. Digital HR and HR management software can automate the processes to leave you with additional time to focus on other business aspects.
Information Management
HR management software helps manage employee information effectively. With ample real-time information available, the decision-making capabilities increase for the HR team manifolds. Digital HR can also track employee status to understand which certifications they are doing and where they can improve from a centralized location.
Easy Recruitment Process
Talent acquisition and recruitment are the most important jobs for any HR team. Manually scrutinizing talents and asking them to apply for the job may not be the best approach for your organization when your competitors have already moved their operations to digital means.
Automated HR management software is already replacing HR jobs and in future, they’ll be more prevalent.
Improved Employee Experience
Lately, employees have been compelled to mix their professional and personal lives. As they kept surfing social media during work hours, they started checking office emails at weekends. Which raised the demand for ambiguous platforms like Slack and Teams that work in professional setups without being too formal.
If nothing, pay for performance model that HR management software offers. From employee compensation & reward to performance management, you can benefit through digital HR in many ways.
3. Challenges Faced in Digital Transformation
The primary challenges you’ll face when trying to Digitalized HR management are:
Digital Culture Adaptation
If your company is not quite adapted to digital culture and thrives on communication between employees, the transformation from manual HR processes to digital might present adaptation problems for both managers and employees.
As your employees are more used to talking to their managers about leaves and work-related issues, adapting to a digital HR might present integration and adaptation problems.
Training Employees
Your employees are required to be trained again from the scratch for the digital HR system. As HR is a role that needs to collaborate with every other department, you need to train every employee to use the latest digital means at the same time. Which can take days depending on the functionality of your system.
Not being able to use your resources completely for that time being can hamper the business operations.
Major Digital Overhaul
Only digitizing HR isn’t the solution. If you are a manufacturing sector that doesn’t even need employees to have their work devices, digitizing the HR processes is futile. To make the most out of your digital HR management software, you need to go through a major digital overhaul for all or most of your systems.
4. The Ways to HR Digital Transformation
The benefits of digital HR transformation far outweigh the challenges that you need to face. But to implement a successful Digital HR system, you need to check certain things first.
Establishing a Clear Goal
You must have a business goal that’s making you consider digital HR systems. Either you need to scale, or you are overdue with business operations. Whatever the reason is, set a clear goal when implementing digital HR solutions.
In the process of HR transformation, the focus should always be on employees. Treat them as your customers and try to solve their issues within the company with digital HR.
Get Everyone on Board
Transforming HR to digital should be an organization-wide decision. As HR transformation is something that’ll affect the whole organization, you must get the stakeholders, employees, and managers on board. It might be difficult if your present HR process works just fine and the parties involved are all very comfortable with it. Make them understand what your visions are for the future of the company and how a digital HR system can help.
Keep Things Simple
The transformation process might be tough, but you don’t need to make it more complicated than it already is. Start with digitizing something as simple as automated payrolls and then go through more challenging ones like onboarding and recruitment.
Prioritize What’s Important
The list of what needs to be automated in your HR department is going to be a long one. Just as we discussed, you don’t need to go through all of them at once, but you must prioritize them according to their relevance for now. Your priority list should also be considered according to your budget and the infrastructure.
Gathering Data
Keeping the business goals in mind, it’s important that after you’ve transformed to digital HR, you keep assessing the progress to see if it has brought positive results. By starting with the priority list, consider implementing each functionality and gathering data to progress to the bottom gradually.
The Bottom Line
It’s evident from this discussion that as challenging as it is to transform the HR processes, it’s not impossible. The benefits of HR management software easily topples off the hardship that you need to face. From time management to employee management, the benefits are outstanding. You just need to keep things simple and prioritize what’s important to get the most out of your digital HR system.
You may also like: Efficient HR Management: 7 Tools You Should Invest In
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