HR work is full of tasks that lend themselves to automation. However, this leads to the temptation to remove the human element from human resources entirely. Keeping a human in the HR loop is important because judgment, context, and nuance matter. You might wonder how you can strike the right balance between automation and human connection in modern HR management.
The Value of Automation in HR
First, it is important to understand where there’s real value in automation. Broadly speaking, large and repetitive tasks benefit the most from automation. Plenty of HR tasks boil down to compliance —for example, filing lots of paperwork to cover legal and business cases. This is particularly essential for auditing.
Some common HR tasks to automate include:
- Healthcare compliance reporting under the ACA
- Tracking time-to-hire data
- Signing off on training completion
- Workers’ compensation renewals
- Filling out timesheets
- Benefits enrollment
Even in a relatively small operation, these tasks quickly become time-consuming simply because of their scale. Automation does an excellent job of freeing humans to focus on other matters while ensuring high precision in these tasks.
When Human Expertise Is Essential
Automation is often amazing right up until the moment it’s not. When factors like interpersonal dynamics, organizational knowledge, and unique circumstances come into play, it’s critical to still have human judgment in the loop.
Complex or Legally Challenging Situations
A classic example of a task that you’d want to be careful about automating is termination. Suppose a business is downsizing a division. It doesn’t want to make the mistake of terminating key personnel, especially those with institutional knowledge that may be hard or impossible to replace.
There are also major legal ramifications to terminations. Even if a termination is clearly for cause and easily legally justifiable, human review is necessary. An automated system may simply not have the necessary information to derisk the termination process. While it will slow the process, human judgment will also reduce the potential for legal blowback if a termination is deemed wrongful.
Similar issues that may call for human judgment are:
- Policy exceptions
- Restructuring, especially employee reassignments
- Granting leave
- Compensation decisions
- Worker classifications
- Designing benefits plans
Strategic Thinking
The human touch also matters when it comes to more strategic HR work. Coaching, career development, culture building, and management changes are all poor candidates for automation. People need to be in the loop to ensure that the decisions that shape your business align with your plans. Likewise, human leadership needs to be visible during these processes to assure employees that the company cares.
Achieving the Right Balance
The critical thing to understand is that good automation doesn’t replace people. Instead, it empowers your people to do better HR management work. Rather than having your HR department handle mundane tasks, team members can leave the boring stuff to the bots and focus on helping managers and employees.
Escalation Paths
One of the biggest integration challenges is that many HR tasks are well-suited to automation until there’s a hiccup. Consider a self-service benefits portal for your employees’ healthcare plans. Most of the time, letting your employees enter data into the system and then letting the system automatically handle it is a win for everyone. However, there will be edge cases that an automated system can’t address.
There needs to be an escalation path that lets your employees quickly reach a human in these scenarios. The system should be clear about where live support is available. Likewise, it must inform users of when human support will be live.
Proficient Teams
Notably, your HR management teams need to be proficient in technical matters while also offering key expertise. They should understand common services like analytics, accessibility, and information management. Likewise, the team should offer expertise on matters like employment law, conflict resolution, regulatory compliance services, career development, and organizational management.
Depending on people’s skills, training may be necessary to bring them up to speed on the new balance of automation and HR. Many companies work with PEO services to deploy their automated systems. This ensures a high level of technical expertise that complements your existing HR capabilities. In many cases, it also reduces administrative burden, provides access to better benefits packages, and improves overall compliance. More importantly, it saves you from building in-house capabilities that may be prohibitively expensive.
The Automation and HR Balance in Action
The ideal outcome is a situation where your company’s HR professionals spend more time dealing with expert issues and less time on routine tasks. Highly transactional activities can often be automated with little to no human intervention.
Consider payroll processing. There will be a small human element during the setup process for each employee’s payroll account in the system. Otherwise, much of the processing occurs in the background with no human involvement. Employees’ hours are entered into the system as they work, and pay is calculated.
However, human expertise is always close at hand for unusual situations. An employee might need to address multi-state tax issues, for example. That’s when human expertise shines. Your HR team can determine the appropriate classification of the work, ensuring that taxes for each state are calculated automatically.
Human expertise should also be highly available during periods of policy changes. If the company is moving to a new benefits provider, for example, you will want to have people available to answer questions during the changeover. Many employees will have no trouble with issues in the self-service portal, but you need answers to minimize friction and frustration.
Getting the Balance Right
With the right balance, HR management and automation are complementary capabilities that make an organization better. Automation improves speed, accuracy, consistency, and availability. It also makes your organization more scalable, as the system can grow with your operations.
Human judgment is always there to address edge cases, legal issues, and business risk. Getting the balance right lets your HR team spend more time helping people and making your organization great.
Featured image from LeoWolfert, Shutterstock.com
