Every vendor you ever meet will tell you how much time and money your organization will save by implementing self service tools and workflow automation.\u00a0 It\u2019s definitely true that the initiative to go paperless has shifted work, but whether or not it has reduced work is another question completely.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to theorize that overall, HR doesn\u2019t actually have any less work, nor do managers or employees.\u00a0 However, they may overall be happier bout the work than in paper environments they had before.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with HR.\u00a0 Before, we had huge organizations sitting around just to process and data enter address changes, annual performance reviews, and merit increases.\u00a0 The hope is that all of this work has gone away, but the reality is that this work has created a data maintenance nightmare for HRIS.\u00a0 However, there probably is an overall reduction in the number of employee hours spent doing some of these tasks, and I think the overall trend for HR has probably been positive.\u00a0 Don\u2019t discount however, that the work of a few HRIS people is work a great deal more than the work of a dozen data entry people.\u00a0 Dollar for dollar, I\u2019m not sure we won this battle.<\/p>\n
Moving on to managers, we can take the exact same scenarios of performance reviews and merit increases.\u00a0 The fact that these are no longer paper based, and that these data points for all employees can be found in a single place has been great for management.\u00a0 Again, the honest truth is that the work has not been reduced, it has just been removed from a paper process to an on-line process.\u00a0 The quality of the implementation will determine if the manager is pleased with the new process or not.\u00a0 Poorly thought out implementations yield poor experiences that leave many questions to be asked and answered, a lack of flexibility for the managers to operate within, and a significant amount of confusion.\u00a0 Good implementations will have included a good change management process and will be defined by good adoption rates.<\/p>\n
The real coup has been with the employees.\u00a0 Again, all we did was shift the work from the employee, a piece of paper and the HR department, to the employee\u2019s off time hours.\u00a0 However, what we\u2019ve done is given the employee some empowerment to perform some of these hated tasks on their own, and for the most part, they have been very pleased with this newfound sense of control.<\/p>\n
I know there are plenty of studies out there announcing how much money you can save, but the facts are that while HR might remove manual processes, these studies don\u2019t necessarily measure the amount of work that has gotten shifted to other parts of the organization like managers, nor do they account for the support of all this new technology.\u00a0 The real measure I think is not cost, but in the overall satisfaction that you\u2019ll get from your managers and employees.\u00a0 For these technologies to be successful, not only do you need adoption, but you need positive satisfaction and the belief from users that the technology is more effective than the prior paper methods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every vendor you ever meet will tell you how much time and money your organization will save by implementing self service tools and workflow automation.\u00a0 It\u2019s definitely true that the initiative to go paperless has shifted work, but whether or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21,2,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-branding","category-hr-technology","category-tco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}