A human resources manager holds a vital position within their company, as their role directly affects the lives of employees in significant ways.
In a large company, a manager may direct activities in a specialized area, but in small to mid-sized companies, the job often requires a “jack-of-all-trades” approach. While the majority of the work week is given to handling things like pay, benefits, compliance issues and the like, even the most skilled HR manager can find themselves dedicating countless hours to repetitive and mundane tasks. Luckily, new technologies make is possible to automate many of these tasks.
Here are three everyday tasks that you can easily automate:
1. Posting on social networking sites
Probably every HR professional has used or is currently using LinkedIn to find and recruit new employees. In addition to regular job posts to a company site, recruiters will leverage their own LinkedIn connections to find potential candidates.
In order to minimize the need to spend hours a week posting and checking messages, an HR manager can automate these posts to LinkedIn, or just about any other social networking platform, via scheduling apps such as Buffer or HootSuite. The best part is that many of these platforms offer free plans for individuals.
Know you’re going to have a few job openings to post about? Log in once, schedule the posts, and they will automatically post at the exact date and time you plan – it’s that easy. You can check off another tedious, everyday task off your list.
2. Internal communication emails & reminders
Does it ever feel like your company has something going on every day? That’s probably because, as the HR manager, you’re the one sending out the forms and reminders about these events. Whether it’s the holiday party at the end of the month or conducting 360 reviews with managers, HR is responsible for communicating these important events and dates to the rest of the company. It’s often difficult to juggle the communication of all the different things going on – especially when there’s other work to do.
With a workflow automation software, you can set up several emails and subsequent reminders to be sent out without all the rush. Similar to automating your social networking posts, simply schedule the emails and reminders and let the software do its magic. Email templates and workflows only need to be set up once and can be reused on a host of different occasions or tasks, such as open enrollment deadline reminders or year-end reminders like address or beneficiary changes.
Automating your internal emails and reminders will help take these cumbersome daily tasks off your plate, so you can focus on bigger tasks at hand – like hiring the best new talent.
3. Time off requests
Okay, so you might not get these every day, but there’s almost always someone taking a day off. Automating this task not only speeds up the time off request process, but also creates transparency. With HR workflow software, a time off request can be properly processed by the right people as soon as it is submitted. Whether that be the requester’s direct manager or the HR manager, the entire process takes care of itself.
If an employee submits a time off request, it gets sent off to the supervisor for approval. Once approved, the HR manager is notified to accurately track the time off, while the original employee is updated with the status of their request. Automating this task save HR professionals a lot of time and money, both of which would be better spent elsewhere.
So, what now? Deep dive into your HR processes and start automating! As technology advances and HR roles expand, the “jack-of-all-trades” HR professional can greatly benefit from the elimination of repetitive, everyday tasks and newfound free up time to focus on what matters most in their organization – the people.