Demands on HR professionals have never been higher. As companies adjust to new working realities, changing priorities have increased the workload dramatically. HR teams are now responsible for a wider range of wellbeing processes, for complex hybrid or remote work arrangements, and for helping to guide people-focused business strategies across the organization.
However, while employee satisfaction is rightly becoming a bigger priority as businesses seek to attract and retain the best talent and ride out a series of economic shockwaves, the wellbeing of HR professionals themselves can easily slip under the radar. In a 2022 study in the United States and United Kingdom, 98 percent of HR professionals reported burnout, 94 percent said they had felt overwhelmed in the past six months, and 88 percent went so far as to say that they dreaded work.
Luckily, HR tech automation is here to help. By improving your processes and enhancing your remote or hybrid employee experience management, HR technology can ease the burden on your teams, and support you as you create an even better work environment for everyone.
How can HR technology help improve the employee experience and relieve stress?
There are a number of ways in which employee experience technology can support a healthier HR workload, especially as most businesses adopt a hybrid or even fully remote strategy. Here are some of the key processes and programs that can be at the heart of your employee experience digital transformation.
Workforce planning
In turbulent times, your plans for your teams are likely to change frequently. Rather than relying on instinct, HR tools can help you to monitor key workforce planning metrics so that you can chart a determined strategy. Metrics such as diversity ratios, headcount, internal mobility rate, retention rate, employee engagement, attrition, competencies, and time-to-hire can all help you create and maintain an effective workforce planning strategy—and are ripe for automated tracking.
By using a modern tool, you can embrace ongoing rather than seasonal workforce planning, and easily monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place. These tools also help you keep all your stakeholders up to speed and build agile plans that help you prepare for various different scenarios.
Using automation frees up your team’s time to focus on adjusting your workforce planning strategy, identifying your business’s future workforce needs, and implementation.
Change management
For any successful business, change is a constant that needs to be incorporated into the heart of your processes. That said, it can be one of the most difficult things for HR teams to manage, as volatile external forces can throw things into constant flux.
HR tech makes it easier for managers to gather insights from their teams via pulse surveys, one-on-one meetings, and anonymous feedback. This information, tracked along with team happiness, growth, retention, and performance, can help you prepare your people for changes large and small and provide evidence on which to base your approach.
An HRIS is also a great place to build and manage your change management strategy, to organize training for your leaders, and to share information honestly and transparently with your people. To be truly ready to respond to whatever might happen, you need a clear view of how your teams are feeling, and how prepared your managers are—and HR tech can help.
Recruitment and onboarding
Recruitment and onboarding are two of the most essential HR processes, and although it’s important to lead with human interaction, automation can make a big difference to your workload. By tracking the skills and competencies of your existing team members, you can better target your plans toward individuals who will strengthen and augment your teams, and by embracing a global hiring strategy you can widen your potential talent pool.
Equally, much of the onboarding process can be automated by a human resources information system (HRIS) into easy workflows, allowing new hires to fill out and submit the relevant documentation at their own pace. These workflows also help managers oversee effective onboarding and initial training with task lists that ensure IT, HR, finance, and team managers are all aligned.
Compensation and performance management
An integrated payroll, performance, and HR system is a dream for many HR leaders. It saves your team huge amounts of time entering the same data twice, adding or removing people, editing teams, syncing attendance information, or manually updating salary or bonus data. By bringing all of these complex processes together in one simple system, HR tech can greatly streamline your team’s workflow, and make it easier for managers to evaluate the performance of their people.
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DEI&B programs
In all likelihood, your diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEI&B) programs are fundamentally built around metrics. Evaluating your performance against these takes a combination of qualitative and quantitative data—but this can be time consuming to gather and analyze.
A powerful HRIS not only makes this process far simpler, but also gives you a way of embedding DEI&B in your culture—beyond number-gathering. HR tech can help you identify gaps in your current programs, and directions in which to move your recruiting efforts in order to create a more representative workforce. It can also make it easier to personalize recognition around your people’s interests and hobbies. By reducing your HR team’s administrative tasks, HR tech can help you identify ways of making everyone feel heard, involved, and valued.
Let HR tech share the load
Modern HR dashboards, automation, and comprehensive data management are key to enabling a truly efficient HR team. Technology can simplify your processes and boost your engagement, helping people connect with their colleagues and providing your HR team with a much-needed breather.
As your HR professionals face a radically different work environment with hybrid teams, an increased focus on improving employee experience, and responsibility for helping keep the business flexible, it’s important to provide them with as much help as possible.
Thankfully, HR technology can streamline many of your core HR practices, reducing the workload, helping you to make data-driven decisions, and giving you clear, trackable KPIs. For an agile, global workforce—and HR teams under more strain than ever—HR technology is here to help you keep up with employee experience trends.
