HR workers now face greater hurdles than ever before. A worldwide health crisis, which has resulted in layoffs, widespread financial hardship, rising mental health difficulties, and social upheaval are all contributing to a disruptive moment of significant workplace transformation. HR departments must be prepared to not only support people but also to assist the business in facilitating a smooth return to work. This is where tools that can create new automated processes can make a big difference.
Many HR departments are still wasting time and resources manually handling many procedures across vast spreadsheets, from recruitment to timesheets, payroll to performance monitoring. HR is also continually obtaining worker data in order to develop improvement programs, increase employee performance, and, ultimately, boost the bottom line. The key to freeing up valuable HR time and giving actionable insights will be solutions that enable higher process efficiency and can leverage the power of data. This time and knowledge may be re-invested in planning return-to-work scenarios and making crucial decisions, such as how to actively engage employees and create better social engagement. Alternatively, what mental health and wellness efforts are required to keep employees safe, happy, and productive?
The Repetitiveness of HR Work
HR Managers have a slew of daily issues in addition to adjusting to the effects of the current pandemic. Recruitment and employee onboarding are two of the most difficult of these difficulties, due to the difficulty of finding the right individual, identifying applicants, interviewing, recruiting, and induction programs.
From assisting new hires in understanding business culture to setting up workstations, providing training, and socialization, HR is responsible for all aspects of onboarding. It’s no surprise that HR professionals agree that onboarding should last at least three months. However, with organizations with strong onboarding procedures growing 2.5 times faster than those with bad onboarding strategies, getting it right might be the difference between keeping top talent and losing out to significant staff turnover expenses.
HRs can automate the entire onboarding process with tools like the Microsoft Power Platform, from starting initial communication to monitoring. Surveys can be scheduled and emailed at regular intervals to obtain consistent feedback, ensuring that new hires have the greatest experience possible.
Emotional intelligence can be obtained in addition to more formal onboarding surveys and pulse checks to assess how the process is going and make adjustments based on the needs of individual employees.
Beyond onboarding, Power Platform may be leveraged to improve efficiencies across the whole HR function. Employees must fill out an absence form, send it to their manager for approval, wait for approval, and then fill out a return-to-work form. Request forms can be delivered, recorded, and tracked using Power Platform from any web-enabled device. Power BI may then be used to spot trends for benchmarking and management reporting, giving managers a single source of truth for reliable and immediately available data.
The New Ways of Working
Power Platform, which includes Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents, is a powerful platform for creating end-to-end HR solutions that simplify and accelerate complicated operations. Having a single platform for your entire estate allows you to keep track of apps across all departments, ensuring seamless operations and workplace safety for workers. It also aids in the smooth transition to a new method of working by ensuring communication.
Sales – Ensure employee safety by allowing them to check-in at customer sites. If there is an emergency case on-site, HR can promptly notify the organization using the Power Platform. From here, the right team member can be notified immediately, and assistance can be provided from other members of your team if necessary.
Heads of Department – Using a Power Platform secured by Microsoft Active Directory, managers may automate checks to ensure that all workers have read the return-to-work guidelines and policies.
Putting the Health and Well-Being of Employees First
Another significant problem for HR is determining employee mood, especially when the face-to-face connection is not possible. Last year, nearly two-thirds of people (63%) said they had had at least mild anxiety symptoms, while 58 percent said they had experienced at least light depression symptoms.
With so much unpredictability in today’s world, it’s critical that employee well-being is a top priority to keep employees happy, healthy, and productive.
Managers can use Power Platform to send out a staff survey and establish feedback reminders. Simple questions like “how are you feeling today?” can go a long way toward helping employees’ mental health, particularly in larger organizations where there may be an impersonal connection with the management teams. Alternatively, including such questions at the end of each app can give an automated and consistent method of gauging employee happiness. Integrating Power Automate with virtual agents gives businesses another way to check in with employees and new hires, as well as answer basic queries like where to find specific files or how to change a password.
Newer Possibilities Have Opened Up
There’s no disputing that Power Apps has the ability to bring ideas to life, to put the user in the center of things, and to open up a whole new universe of possibilities. For HR, this may mean extra time to devote to wellness initiatives or to brainstorming new ways to help the organization and make the workplace a happier, healthier environment. Reducing the amount of time spent on manual, administrative chores frees up time for innovation – and the capacity to use the human touch where it’s most needed: addressing complicated business challenges and dealing with key personnel issues.
Digitize and automate your HR operation to intelligently streamline workflows and use the time saved to modernize your employee experience. HR leaders can use Microsoft Power Platform to move away from document-driven processes and toward people-centric decision making, improving employee engagement and creating a unique work experience that is difficult to replicate.
When you choose Veelead Solutions as your Power Platform implementation partner, you can rest assured that the best minds go into automating your HR processes. This will ultimately result in a reduced workforce, overheads and improved profits for your business.