Increasing Workplace Efficiency by Automating Repetitive Work

There are a limited number of hours in a work day and of those hours, a significant amount can be attributed to manual, lengthy administrative tasks that keep any office running smoothly. While critical, the way those tasks are performed, manually, does not directly feed into the organization’s productivity. Those tasks can range from manually signing in or out of a ledger, following up on administrative things via email or in-person, or more.

HR ends up doing a bulk of such important but inefficient work, so let’s look at how automating their daily grind can help them and the workforce in general.

The solution to improving efficiency

Productivity is just one side of the coin; efficiency is the other. Understanding how to extract the most from your resources (time, cost or person-hours) is equally as important as the amount of work being done. And wouldn’t you know it, the key to efficiency can be summed up in one word: automation.

Human resources work involves a lot of communication, data and coordination to execute flawlessly day in, day out. That is work with a lot of time overhead, and thus something worth looking into first when considering the efficiency of a workplace. 

There are various HR solutions available that can help attain that baseline level of automation to improve efficiency. Increasingly, modern solutions such as PeopleSonic are going cloud based, while also providing an integrated, end-to-end solution. Let’s take a look at how these HR products can help automate repetitive work and boost the efficiency of employees.

The Advantages of Automation

Significant Time Savings

HR tasks such as payroll management and certain core functions such as employee data management, if conducted using ‘typical’ processes, can be incredibly time-taking and error prone. Given how integral both HR functions are, it is essential to remove human error from the processes, while also speeding them up. Automating these processes also ensures that employees are happier – no one wants payroll issues!

Reduced Communication Lead Time

Functions such as leave management, or tracking employee presence in the office require some form of communicative processes, whether it be email, text or phone call. This obviously presents obvious issues: The communication doesn’t happen in a timely manner, isn’t responded to immediately, or just gets lost in transits – phone signal strength still remains an issue in many regions. 

All this means that the lead time associated with the aforementioned processes is unacceptably high, especially if HR spends half their day chasing down the necessary information (or if employees aren’t able to reach busy HR personnel). 

Automation, especially those like PeopleSonic, which are powered by the cloud and accessible everywhere and on every platform, reduce that lead time drastically, while also allowing both HR and employees to communicate their attendance or leave status in a timely, easy-to-access manner.

Speed, with Accuracy

With any task or activity, we’re often given the old adage that one must sacrifice speed for accuracy, or vice versa. A modern, fully integrated HR solution offers the third, and best, option: Speed and accuracy. 

With human error and manual paperwork removed from the equation, HR functions require minimal redoing, while also completing faster. That directly translates to greater efficiency, not just for HR, but for the entire workplace. 

 

The move to an automated HR management solution seems like a no-brainer, yet many businesses out there haven’t still not adopted newer technologies to not only optimize their workplaces, but save their employees from the drudgery of repetitive, manual tasks.

Understanding Employee Engagement as a Success Metric

Employee engagement always comes across as this important but immeasurable quality that organizations are wishing for – the reality is that while it is indeed an important metric, it’s also measurable. But before we get to that, let’s quickly remind ourselves why employee engagement is a critical factor that can determine the success of your company.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement can broadly be defined as the initiative and effort an employee puts in all their work endeavors, often as a result of job satisfaction which can be attributed to aspects such as satisfactory wages, nurturing work environment, suitable career growth trajectory and more.

Employee engagement is a metric that feeds into itself; workers satisfied with their jobs will continue to engage more at work; engaged employees will be motivated to perform even better and obtain greater job satisfaction from achievements, awards and growth. This self-replicating nature of employee engagement makes it an essential ingredient for the success and evolution of any organization.

What are the Impacts of High Employee Engagement?

We’ve seen that high employee engagement is a self-sustaining model, once the core requirement of “job satisfaction” is fulfilled. What makes it a key success metric is the impact a highly engaged workforce has on a business. A full analysis of the impacts is a discussion for another blog, but in summary, here are some major takeaways you can expect:

  •         High productivity – A motivated team is a productive team. You’ll find such employee clock in punctually, waste less time in the office and are delivering higher quality work in the same, or less amount of time.
  •         Nurturing workplace environment – As we’ve discussed a few times already, an office environment that is conducive to a positive, healthy mindset can transform the workplace. Motivated and highly engaged employees can play a significant role in promoting such an environment and mindset and assure greater success for the business and its workforce both.
  •         Increased revenue – It’s a straight line from an engaged and productive workforce in a nurturing environment to increased revenues and profits for the organization. In fact, that is a sure shot way to demonstrate to the organization’s steering committee / board of governors the true value of employee engagement.
  •         Decreased costs – The other side of the increased revenue coin is another positive! When your employees are happy and engaged at work, they won’t be jumping ship at the first available opportunity. This increases the chances of projects being delivered on time, successfully, as there will be no need to hire replacements for skilled employees mid-project. This also helps driving down the associated costs of hiring those replacements too, which is a significant saving!

How Does One Measure Employee Engagement?

By looking at the value employee engagement brings to any business, you can easily consider the inverse of those propositions and see the kind of negative financial and organizational impact a workforce with a lack of engagement would bring. That’s why it is necessary for the business, through HR, to be observing markers of employee engagement, such as tracking time and punctuality.

These trackable markers aren’t definitive, of course, but can be used, in conjunction with surveys and investigations into employee wellness, job and career satisfaction, and growth prospects: all metrics we previously linked directly to employee engagement. These surveys need to be well thought out, as the qualitative data amassed will be critical to identifying the state of the employees. We’ll be discussing the minutiae of such surveys and fact-finding investigations in a later blog.

Boosting Employee Engagement Means Business Success

The bottom line is very simple here: if you provide your employees with the requisite job satisfaction they seek, they will become engaged, highly motivated and help the business succeed to newer heights. Emphasis on providing job satisfaction, which is the fundamental way of boosting employee engagement.

As discussed above, job satisfaction can broadly be attributed to salaries, career growth and prospects, and workplace culture. The solution thus becomes apparent: By providing your workforce with adequate compensation for their work, assuring them of a better and brighter professional future and establishing a supportive and positive space in which to perform their duties, you can set your business up for guaranteed success!

Understanding The Importance of Human Factors to The Success of a Business

It is important for businesses to understand how to design their workplaces and work culture with people in mind. A planned and considered approach can reap benefits in the form of improved overall performance and nurturing an enhanced climate of creativity and innovation for workers.

While every company will claim that they put their employees first, it is easy to spot the ones that actually employ a human-centric approach to their business practices, both in terms of employee happiness and business success. Therefore, let’s take some time to understand just what human factors are, their importance and how to leverage them into a more wholesome and successful workplace.

What Human Factors Should be Considered in a Business Scenario

Whether your business is office-based or involves physical labour, factory processes or logistics, there are human factors at play affecting the workforce and in turn the organization. This operational optimization is different for various business types. In warehouses, factories or other physical-labor based work, human factors could range from their health and safety, to human interaction with machines and dangers and risks associated with them. In office environments, they could involve environmental aspects (such as office space habitability) or situational aspects (such as surrounding ambient noise and interruptions).

Whatever your business, you need to critically examine your work processes from top to bottom to effectively chart out what human factors are applicable to your organization and its employees. An excellent skill that helps with this is emotional intelligence which, as we discussed in a recent blog, is a transformative skill for the modern workplace. Emotional intelligence features here heavily, allowing leaders to apply an empathy-centric approach to identifying key human factors applicable to their workplace.

Why These, or Any Human Factors Are Important

In a nutshell, human factors directly affect the efficiency, effectiveness and even the safety of your business workplace. Organizations can keep relevant human factors in their purview often design optimally – for instance, installing some sort of soundproofing in the walls if the office is located in a busy metropolitan area, or, providing regular safety training for on-site work at a dangerous facility.

Consider the outcome of sub-optimal human factors: Workers in a noisy environment aren’t productive, employees in an unsafe location may be injured and feel unenthusiastic in committing to activities that may harm them, even an office that is too cold may impact productivity and therefore becomes a valid human factor. A pilot in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft needs a certain level of comfort (environmental human factor) to be able to focus on their critical task – the importance of this factor is self-explanatory.

Only when you are able to chart the negative effects to your business resulting from a lack of consideration for human factors, can you understand their true importance.

Leveraging Human Factors For Your Operations

Referring back to emotional intelligence here for a moment, if the approach to leveraging human factors for business growth or development are from a bottom-line perspective, you run into the same issue as every business that only uses numbers and statistics to determine such outcomes. Human factors are complex and complicated, impacted by non-technical things like culture, behaviours and personalities, all things that are lost when reduced to mere numbers.

The goal of leveraging human factors must be to combine the best characteristics of human beings (skills, creativity and collaboration) with the best characteristics of your business pipelines/systems/processes in a way that eliminates excessive and unnecessary work which can lead to mistakes. For instance, any system that reduces data handling steps will reduce the chance of human error in critical operations such as accounting, finance or payroll. Any employees using such a system would have the peace of mind of reduced errors, and would therefore be productive in more ways than one: working faster because of the optimal system and working faster because of the optimal human factor (reduced stress of mistakes).

 

Human Factor study has been a topic of investigation in various worldwide industries for quite some time, yet even now merits careful examination before implementation. There are immense benefits to getting it right, so long as you tackle it appropriately and with the right objectives.

 

How Emotional Intelligence Can Help Transform the Workplace

Emotional intelligence has been listed as one of the top 10 skills required to succeed in business by the World Economic Forum. Today, let’s discover just why emotional intelligence is so sought after in transforming your workplace and subsequently, your business.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Psychologists define emotional intelligence (previously known as emotional quotient or EQ) as a person’s ability to identify and understand emotions in themselves or the people around them. While historically, emotions and intelligence (aka logic) have been seen as opposite to each other, scientists and researchers exploring the impact of emotions on our brains, personalities and behaviour have been using emotional intelligence as the defining variable.

A person’s emotional intelligence can impact their empathy (understanding and reasoning with the wide spectrum of emotions) and their people skills (managing emotions during interactions and decision making). 

These abilities are what can potentially play an important role in business settings, if such people and environments are nurtured.

How Can Emotional Intelligence Improve Your Workplace?

Nurturing people who display high emotional intelligence can act not just as a motivational and morale booster for the workplace, but it can end up facilitating higher quality work as well.

People who display characteristic behaviours associated with emotional intelligence are attributed with higher interpersonal skills, superior stress management and leadership ability – researchers agree to a high degree on this correlation. 

For a business, such employees are highly sought-after. Not only do such employees act supportive to colleagues and help each other succeed, but they are able to motivate themselves as well. That is because their high emotional intelligence helps them self-regulate their emotions, and to also understand them in their colleagues and act accordingly. 

A workplace that is boosted by the presence of such people becomes a more wholesome environment to work in, where everyone is highly motivated, adept at communication and more driven. A business that can harness that emotional intelligence will see a definite uptick in the quality of work done by the employees.

How do you measure the impact of EI in your workplace?

While emotional intelligence has finally been quantifiably measured by researchers, there is no immediate tangible test that can take the findings from one individual and extrapolate them to determine the impact on a business. There is no doubt that the transformation exists, and in the absence of direct measurement, there are indirect ways of seeing the uptick as a result of a workplace filled with high emotional intelligence people.

As determined above, employees with good emotional intelligence scores are driven and self-motivated. It stands to reason that such people would be proactive in the workplace and punctuality is a clear sign of that. Their work output would be greater as well. Such things can be quantified and measured, and business-ready tools like PeopleSonic can help managers, HR and senior executives observe such trends in their business. If your employees are clocking in punctually, not skipping work unnecessarily and demonstrating their value in measurable work output, it can directly be attributed to their emotional intelligence. 

Emotional intelligence is something that impacts someone’s professional and personal life both. It is something that can only be effective if everyone implements it. That is why for it to succeed in any business setting, it must become an attribute for everyone from the youngest employee to senior management and leadership. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to state leadership and employees with high emotional intelligence are what are crucial to building a more successful workplace.

 Integrated HR Platforms are the Essential Boost Your Business Need

 

As more and more businesses move HR from a pen and paper department to a web-based smart operation, those left behind have a choice to make: do they stay in the past or do they take that necessary step into the future?

To add to the decision-making worry, there are two major ways HR is managed digitally: Bespoke services that manage a singular aspect and nothing else, and HR platforms where all aspects are managed and integrated into each other to provide an end-to-end solution.

Let’s resolve any lingering doubts you may have about the efficacy of these integrated HR platforms by taking a look at just how they excel over ‘traditional’ HR management.

You Get Centralized Core Services

A major complaint that arises with the sheer breadth of scope of most HR teams is the fact that data gets scattered far and wide. Collating that data when it is requested can become a hassle when it is divided across several apps, systems and files, there’s also the additional possibility of errors when combining said data into a singular report.

An integrated HR platform basically renders every such problem moot. Most integrated HR systems provide an all-in-one dashboard for managing employee data, such as:

  • Employee contact and personal information
  • Job designation
  • Department / Team within company
  • Employee documents / contracts

Additionally, these dashboard enable HR to manage data permissions and privacy controls to every employee in the company, and store all this data to the platform’s secure cloud servers, from one convenient location!

You Get Additional Services Like Payroll and Leave Management

Most HR functions beyond employee data management and onboarding are lengthy, tedious and no less essential. Payroll and leave management are two of the biggest and most demanding of those functions – ‘traditional’ HR management structures have multiple people tasked specially to fulfill these functions, making them a major manpower sink. Being human-driven also leaves these critical services prone to errors and mistakes.

Modern integrated HR platforms such as PeopleSonic pride themselves on providing turn-key solutions to the looming problems of payroll and leave management. These integrated solutions provide dedicated applications within the platform which exclusively manage payroll and leaves, while fully exposing their data to the central dashboard to enable analytics, tracking and updates.   

You Get Instant, Detailed Analytics

As mentioned earlier, the biggest boost that integrated HR platforms provide businesses comes in the form of analytics. The modern business world is exceedingly data-driven, which refers to understanding data and using those analyses to inform decision making. Knowing how to make sense of the data collected becomes far more necessary than the act of collection itself, and that is where your business profits from these platforms.

Rather than having an employee gather data, run it through their performance metrics and guidelines and create a report from that, HR platforms use their integrated nature to call data from the relevant application, analyze it and generate the required reports, all from one button click! Harnessing the computing power of the platforms also provides thorough analyses that would otherwise take HR days to produce.

You Get to Save Time

It must be evident by now that if your business still executes its HR functions through personnel only (and using paper rather than digital), you are wasting a hefty chunk of your employee’s time on things that integrated HR platforms now do instantly, or automatically on a schedule. By removing the burden of menial tasks, HR teams get freed up to tackle higher value goals for the business. The same goes for time saved each month on processing payroll, and especially the time saved in following up on leave approvals, statuses and accruals.

While the difference in time efficiency gained when using an integrated solution to using several solutions for HR management is not as dramatic as that between analogue and digital, it is still significant. That is especially true given how highly competitive today’s industries are, and even a minor advantage becomes critical in the long run.

You Get Increased Productivity 

A consequence of HR systems that doesn’t get enough spotlight is the increase in employee productivity through time and attendance management. By observing and understanding employee behaviour, managers and HR can best formulate ways to motivate teams to arrive on time, which would in turn boost and elevate the work culture of that organization. 

Time is money may be a cliche, but it is one that is painfully important to businesses, whether they’re small or even multinational. That’s why managers and team leads are always looking for data on employee attendance and how to maximise it. By analyzing this data, a more productive work culture can be created, one based on trust with the employees.

 

While the idea of using exclusive, specialist software to look after various HR functions can sound enticing, getting those applications to play nicely with each other can prove to be challenging, sometimes even futile. That’s why an integrated HR platform that is essentially an end-to-end solution for managing HR will always appeal more to businesses, and with good reason. What’s more, modern HR platforms even allow a lot of customisation features that can tailor that platform to your business’s specific needs, one which can easily augment the benefits you gain by moving your business from ‘traditional’ HR management to an integrated, all-in-one platform.

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