Workflow automation offers so many new opportunities, in general, and People Workflow Automation is no different — businesses need to grasp the implications of it right now.
As a leader, I know that opportunities are everything. They can help set your company up for success, and can drive growth in a host of ways. That’s why People Workflow Automation to me is so exciting: because it’s set to help HR realise many new opportunities.
How? It starts by automating people processes, across your entire business, to help HR go beyond itself, but I want to peel back the layers a bit and talk it through in more in-depth. Here are the four key ways I think People Workflow Automation is set to change the way work is done.
1. By removing delays across the business
Attention fragmentation is a massive issue for so many organisations, and many may not even notice it. But, while delays like these may feel minor at the time, they have a distinct effect that adds up and ends up being a huge drain on productivity.
Studies have shown that each involuntary distraction costs people a delay of more than 47 total minutes of lost time switching between applications and getting back into the flow of work. So, for each vacation request, paperwork submission, or signature, you’re losing valuable or value-adding business opportunities (and what could be achieved with them).
And the last thing you want is for unnecessary delays to get in the way of work, or to get in the way of opportunities for your people and your business.
The course of the pandemic hasn’t made it easier of course, with an explosion of tooling leading to the average HR team needing 6 different applications, on average, to get their work done (as per a study conducted by Personio and Opinium across Europe).
People Workflow Automation’s emphasis on reducing and removing delays, across apps and teams, is a transformative element here. It’s a way for businesses to focus on helping employees perform, without being held back by delays that get in the way of opportunities.
2. By putting productivity in the spotlight
People processes, and all the potential delays involved, add up to hold back productivity and may lead to missed opportunities. Simply put, for all the time spent trying to simply keep up, you lose out on possibilities to make your work even better and to focus on a host of other things. That might reveal itself in dwindling employee satisfaction or engagement scores. Maybe it makes it more difficult for employees to recharge and take breaks, or at worst it could be a security risk or result in a lack of compliance across your entire organisation.
Productivity, not only how but the way people work, is in the spotlight more than ever.
Think of it like this: People Workflow Automation offers an integrated workflow, where one click triggers a flow across applications and teams, all to achieve the goal of hiring, managing, and developing employees from day one (and even before then).
It’s achieved by deep integrations to applications that span across the business, but it’s also giving your HR team the time and ability to focus on overall workforce productivity like never before.
3. By reestablishing and refocusing on people processes
Whether onboarding a new employee, provisioning them with the applications they need to get the job done, or allowing another to easily call in sick or stay up to date with their team’s absences, people processes happen across your business all day, every day.
Simply put, your people processes need to be able to make your people, and your company, successful. They should keep things running smoothly by reducing delays, and they should facilitate the great work that needs to happen for businesses to grow.
It’s a refocusing and democratising of enterprise automation that, after the pandemic, is due for SMEs.
Especially when it comes to onboarding, provisioning, or helping employees reach new levels of performance, now is a great time to revisit the work that goes on around people.
4. By enabling HR to go beyond HR
I have always tried to discuss and emphasise how central strategic HR needs to be and the position it needs to take within a business.
Basically, HR needs the time to focus on strategic initiatives and tasks to really help power an organisation (and to help them scale).
People Workflow Automation, based on the concept of people processes that touch every level of business, opens up this conversation and the opportunity for HR teams – building on and powering organisational velocity in every way.
Most importantly, it helps achieve organisational velocity. That’s a concept grounded in frictionless business operations and a better state of work, designed to help organisations achieve their ‘need for speed’ without sacrificing quality.
So, all of a sudden, your people processes are not only easier, but your HR team can keep track of them, alter them, optimise them, and learn from them. All in an effort to bolster business.
Don’t miss out: people workflow automation is here
While things may be working at your company today, there’s a whole world of opportunity at your doorstep. The fact is that People Workflow Automation is helping take things not only to a new level, but an entirely different one, too.
To sum up, People Workflow Automation changes the way that people work by getting your apps and your people ‘talking.’ And, from a business and organisational perspective, that is the beginning of an endless world of possibilities.
By Ross Seychell, chief people officer at Personio, Europe’s leading HR software company for small and mid-sized businesses