HR Automation: Real-Life Examples of How Automation Can Boost HR Teams

The future of work needs a new breed of HR that knows how to keep up. Human resources departments must embrace two crucial disruptive trends to retain and develop talent: 

• They need to become digital-native instead of merely applying digital solutions.
• They must transition from organization-driven to employee-centered systems.

These trends need automation to work fully. Using the cloud, data science, artificial intelligence, and robotics, HR automation enables employee experience to be the center of activity and insight. 

This is especially important for the increasingly complicated workforce, which thrives on streamlined, transparent, and efficient tools that support their skills and career objectives. 

⚙️ What is HR automation?

‍HR automation uses a host of digital tools such as software, dashboards, chatbots, and cloud-based platforms to achieve a balance between self-service and effective collaboration. 

What if onboarding and offboarding processes can be done remotely via apps? What if training plans can be mini-journeys that are engaging and hypercustomized based on profiles? 

Four main areas benefit the most from HR automation:

• Recruitment/hiring. This includes software that collects, organizes, scans, and analyzes candidates’ data. In particular, applicant tracking systems (ATS) save recruitment teams hundreds of hours of going through high-volume applications and professional resumes.
  

• Payroll/benefits. This is perhaps the most repetitive and error-prone process that can be easily automated. Salary and benefit calculations and deposits can be streamlined because of their predictability.
  

• Employee portals. These tools are often a one-stop shop for employees to check their performance evaluation, annual objectives, healthcare benefits, investments or retirement plans, bonuses, and compensation. 
  

• Workflow and training. These performance-centered systems can help employees and their managers to check their training progress. Project dashboards also help consolidate tasks and establish a clear reference of assigned roles and responsibilities.

📊 The benefits of HR automation

Consultancy firm McKinsey considers "customer service" as the heart of talent retention. It is cultivating professional and value-driven relationships that make employees want to stay, not endlessly filing paperwork and talking to multiple people to get one task done. 

However, HR automation is not about programming human relationships. It’s about eliminating repetitive, manual tasks so that employees can focus on building meaningful partnerships.  

Essentially, there are 5 major benefits:

• Provision of immediate and comprehensive customer support to employees.
• Overall increased efficiency and productivity, including eliminating manual and overlapping tasks.
• Error reduction, especially for significant but repetitive tasks such as payroll.
• Enabling HR professionals to move on to higher-value work.
• Big data collection or digital records that can easily be visualized and organized for decision-making.

🏢 8 HR automation examples

✉️ Preboarding

Preboarding is the crucial stage where companies proactively engage with new employees to make them feel assured, welcomed, and included. This is especially important since 65 percent of employers reported that they experienced new employees not showing up on the first day. 

The week before the first day is often a time of jitters for new joiners, who might still be second-guessing their decision. Even sending a welcome package can go a long way. 

How automated preboarding works

Remote-first companies often invest heavily in an online preboarding system that integrates well with the rest of their onboarding process. Integrating into a company culture is less straightforward when you never meet your teammates. This is the challenge that Austrian scaleup Storyblok managed to solve using Zavvy’s preboarding software. 

Storyblok expanded its headcount by nearly 270 percent in 12 months by focusing on a crucial goal: take away Day 1 anxiety by preparing new employees beforehand. 

The checklist includes:

• Get to know the founders and other team members
• Get the equipment
• Login and email details
• Prepare for the first day: Contacts and location
• Introduce yourself on Slack a couple of days before the start date

The result: The team saved nearly €2,500 of repetitive work per month and cut down 2 hours from preboarding.

➡️ Read the full case study here

🚀 Onboarding

A successful preboarding experience smoothly transitions into onboarding. Traditionally, onboarding is the process of introducing new employees to the corporate mission, culture, policies, and daily tasks. 

However, this orientation method is often impersonal, tedious, and can lead to information overload. Today’s employees need a simplified, experience-based onboarding that keeps them excited and organized.

How automated onboarding works

An experience-based onboarding creates a streamlined yet flexible program for new employees. They know exactly what they can expect from the process and can easily track their journey at every stage. Munich-based startup Alasco used Zavvy’s employee onboarding software to create an engaging, customized experience that enabled employees to be productive within two weeks instead of four.

Here’s how all their concerns were addressed when they automated employee onboarding:

• It gave them a centralized tool for a systematic, organized, and consistent experience across all employees.
• The onboarding process can be customized depending on the needs of each team or department.
• Zavvy was able to collate and combine all the company’s existing tools in one place.

The result: 67 percent employee growth within 12 months and a 4.7/5 average employee rating.

💵 Payroll and benefits management

A good payroll system is accurate, reliable, and transparent. An error-prone payroll system, however, can lead to overpaying or underpaying tax, late payments, and litigation. 

Underpayment (intentional or unintentional) is a serious issue, with the US Department of Labor reporting that the average wage owed to employees (back wages) in 2021 was over USD$1,200. Employees need a system that helps them track their wages accurately.

How automated payroll works

Automated payroll systems can save companies as much as USD$24,500 annually. Companies can encourage employees to track their attendance and file their leaves accurately by having a user-friendly centralized system. This will also make it easier for employees to avail of benefits like the US’ 401(k) plan, which is a company-sponsored retirement account. Employees have the option to match their companies’ contributions via salary deduction.

To encourage their employees to take advantage of their benefits, Boutique hotel company Martin Resorts partnered with Illinois-based payroll firm Paylocity. They revamped the payroll dashboard to integrate seamlessly with the government’s 401(k) system, removing the hassle of logging into different platforms.

The results:

• Sign-up rates for 401(k) tripled
• Spanish-speaking employees easily understood the platform and finally participated in 401(k) 
• 10 hours saved by eliminating paperwork

👬 Enabling human connections

There are many benefits to remote work, but few focus on the isolation and loneliness that come with it. In a study conducted on remote workers by social media management firm Buffer, respondents stated loneliness, collaboration, and communication as the greatest struggles they face.

Keeping employees connected and engaged can be challenging for remote-first companies, and nothing beats an occasional team lunch to establish rapport. However, this doesn’t mean that completely online jobs have to be contactless and impersonal.

How automation enables human connections

As early as 2014, Kickstarter created a lunch roulette computer program that randomly paired employees to have lunch together. Additional requirements included lunch pairings not belonging to the same sub-specialty and no more than one executive. Kickstarter shared the open-source code with the public, and coffee/lunch roulettes were soon picked up by other companies.

Zavvy has made coffee/lunch roulettes easy for everyone. As part of the Connection Programs feature, we have created templates within Slack and Microsoft Teams for scheduling casual meetups and meaningful conversations between colleagues. Examples of templates are coffee roulettes, walk and talk, and meetup rituals.

Other ways that automation can facilitate meaningful connections are:

• Organized buddy systems (especially for onboarding)
• Team online activities, such as games and celebrations
• Scheduled one-to-one mentorships

About 67 percent of organizations that supported connections and collaboration saw a productivity increase among their workforce.

👋 Offboarding

Offboarding oversees the systematic and orderly departure of employees while reducing risks to the company. At least, that is the idea. In reality, however, many companies have offboarding processes that are disorganized and confusing, not to mention difficult to track. 

This is what happens when there’s no automated system that strictly enforces offboarding policies. A manual offboarding process is extremely risky. According to cybersecurity firm CyberArk, 88 percent of IT workers steal sensitive data and passwords when they get fired.

How automated offboarding works: 

By having an offboarding system that automatically kicks in as soon as the employee resigns, companies can be assured that nothing is overlooked. Some crucial steps include:

• Termination approvals that follow the correct chain.
• Performance evaluation and employee records (including memos and other disciplinary action) are properly recorded and stored.
• Access to premises and tools are deactivated according to schedule.
• Surveys and exit interviews are conducted and analyzed.
• Other departments (such as IT and finance) are immediately notified.

Just as Zavvy facilitates an orderly and engaging onboarding experience through our software, we also enable HR teams to create an offboarding system that is painless and can be easily tracked. After all, an excellent offboarding experience can lead to highly skilled employees returning in the future.

A case study conducted by software company ServiceNow showed that fully automated offboarding saves as much as USD$200,000 (and 4,400 hours annually). 

🌱 Employee training & development 

Employee development includes learning and training, performance evaluation and feedback, and mentorship. Traditionally, employee training was done through live or classroom sessions. However, the pandemic has forced companies to re-think personalized, individual training.

Training is crucial for employee satisfaction. According to a survey conducted by business process outsourcing firm Sitel Group, 37 percent of respondents said that if their current employer doesn’t offer them the opportunity to learn new skills, they would likely quit. Additionally, nearly 80 percent said that a formal training program is important to them when they decide to join a company.

How automated employee training works: 

An example is when fitness company Freeletics partnered with Zavvy to automate their learning program. Their main challenge is that their employees rarely have enough time to sit down and learn. 

Additionally, knowledge transfer wasn’t effective because there was not enough opportunity to practice what they learned. Zavvy addressed these concerns by providing three programs:

• Microlearning, short sessions that are based on a practical framework.
• People Manager Roundtable, which encourages peer-to-peer sharing of leadership challenges and best practices.
• Leadership Onboarding, a kind of boot camp for new leaders to absorb crucial processes and principles.

The results were new people managers had more time to discuss their unique challenges with their mentors and peers. More importantly, an in-house and flexible leadership program saved Freeletics from costly traditional workshops.

➡️ Full case study: "Creating a leadership training program at Freeletics"

How automated employee development works

An automated development program handles all the components needed to run a cohesive career development program.

This includes things like

• Career development frameworks incl. pathways
• 360 feedback
• Employee development plans

To make sure all these things are running without having to manually remind managers or manage scattered spreadsheets, development software handles the repetitive tasks involved and enables stakeholders to get more out of the process.

If you're curious how that works, check our people development tool here.

💳 Reimbursements / expense management

Reimbursements can become problematic if not filed correctly. Client-facing industries often have a lot of travel and entertainment expenses. Additionally, as remote work continues to become the norm, employees now have additional allowances for Internet and home office furniture as part of their benefits.  

However, many companies don’t have any clear guidelines or policies on what can be considered reimbursable expenses. As a result, the expense filing procedure is often confusing and tedious. Additionally, according to a survey conducted by cloud computing firm Oracle Netsuite, 46 percent of respondents still use manual spreadsheets to manage expense reports.

How automated reimbursement works: 

An HR system with integrated reimbursement capabilities can make filing easy and intuitive. Expenses can be clearly categorized and queued to the right approval line or department. Managers can easily track their teams’ expenses and analyze what types of transactions occur the most.

For companies that are always on the field, automated expense filing is a lifesaver. Engineering railway firm Holland LP had about 800 monthly field expense reports that they automated. They also wanted a system that could be customizable for types of expenses that are unique to the company.

The results were:

• 6 hours of labor saved every month
• Minimal data entry and errors
• Reimbursement turnaround time was cut from 5 to 3 days

🧾 Tax filing and documentation

Filing employee and company taxes is repetitive and laborious – from gathering data to filling up forms to actual payments. Some government initiatives, such as Making Tax Digital, aim to simplify the process for taxpayers, but it still takes a lot of manual work.

Additionally, even the smallest calculation error can lead to disastrous consequences.

In the US, for example, tax laws can differ by state, and late payments can have a maximum penalty of 15 percent. To help avoid errors and simplify the process, your people can use tools like the quarterly tax calculator from Keeper.

Complying with employment tax filing includes accurate wage calculation (including overtime), ensuring the correct amount of taxes withheld (Social Security taxes, for example), and timely deposits to the appropriate tax agencies.

How automated tax filing works: 

Most companies automate tax filing through robotic process automation (RPA), which is software that’s coded to complete rule-based tasks. Rule-based tasks are defined by basic, repetitive steps, such as copying and pasting, filling out forms, and making specific calculations. 

RPA is the perfect automation tool for tax filing because it is highly accurate and can standardize the process. According to Deloitte, tax automation can reduce costs by as much as 90 percent. 

An in-depth study on tax automation by consultancy firm PwC showed that RPA can streamline the following steps in tax filing:

• Pulling raw data from HR records
• Cleaning up and reconciling accounts
• Organizing data by legal entity
• Analyzing account changes (tax adjustments)

The result is a reduction of manual work by up to 25 percent, improved accuracy, and effective organization of financial information.

✨ Does automation mean sacrificing experience?

This needs to be emphasized:

Automation is not about eliminating human interactions; it’s about giving workers the tools to work better together and excel in their roles. It’s removing the tedious processes that lead to overworking and having less time to network and build connections.

Automating systems to promote a positive employee experience is worth the time and investment. According to HR experts, there are 3 components to a positive employee experience:

• Having the right resources and tools to do their tasks (less confusion and frustration)
• A sense of belonging (successfully integrating into team/company culture)
• A sense of fulfillment (having flexibility and feeling valued)

🏢 Examples of automated HR systems

The best way to start your HR automation journey is to identify the processes that you need to streamline. Here are some of our suggested tools.

Hiring / recruitment

• Applicant tracking: BambooHR / Personio
• Automating contracts: DocuSign
• Preboarding & onboarding: Zavvy

Process management

• Admin: Personio, Rippling, Hibob
• Payroll processing: Gusto
• Custom automation: Zapier

Employee engagement:

• Employee experience: Zavvy
• Attendance tracking: TimeClock Plus
• Employee scheduling: Payco
• Employee development & feedback: Zavvy
• Employee training: Zavvy

➡️ Build smart, automated workflows with Zavvy

With Zavvy, you can run all things experience on autopilot:

• Preboarding
• Onboarding
• Feedback
• Development
• Training

Plus, with our smart workflow builder you can develop up any program you can think of.

Not sure where to start?

No worries, we have templates that can serve as a guide and inspiration. On top of that, our system can be integrated into your company’s existing tools, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Notion. Our dedicated customer success managers and support team are also on standby for any queries.