Human resources departments are responsible for overseeing the complete employee lifecycle — including recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, and termination or resignation. A lot of these tasks can oftentimes be repetitive and time-consuming. Incorporating workflow management tools for HR managers helps identify these tasks and automate them, increasing productivity in the workplace.
In this article, we’ll take a look at core HR workflow tasks and explore howadding a workflow for a human resources department is a must. We’ll also provide some useful templates from monday.com that your HR department can use for employee recruiting, onboarding, and training.
Why should human resource departments have a specified workflow?
Employees and managers working in human resources deal with an exceptional amount of often sensitive paperwork and official documentation daily. They are responsible for handling internal surveys, performance reviews, timesheets, and, in many cases, payroll. The manual process of sending out and filing all of this paperwork is time consuming and can decrease the efficiency of your human resources department.
Implementing a human resources workflow means creating a management system that saves time and eliminates the need for repetitive, time-consuming tasks. It also allows for closer communication with new hires and better organization of onboarding materials and trainings.
Workflows create a standard, straightforward system for employees to complete documentation needed to request a leave of absence or make changes to employee benefits electronically. Automating these requests makes it easier on the HR side to process them.
A workflow for human resources departments is crucial to save HR staff time and automate otherwise repetitive processes.
What types of tasks can be included in a workflow for human resources?
A workflow for human resources lets you automate tasks, saving your HR team valuable time. Key tasks that can be automated as part of an HR workflow include:
Recruiting and onboarding
The time it takes for HR managers to recruit and onboard new employees can be significantly reduced by adding individual recruiting and onboarding tasks to an HR workflow. Part of the HR process for hiring involves a lot of paper shuffling, in addition to making sure that resumes and job descriptions are given to the correct staff members.
During the onboarding process, tax forms and the employee’s personal information may also need to be shared among members of the HR department to get the new hire into the system and ready to work. Automating the process can reduce the likelihood of human error and increase the likelihood of having accurate employee records for every new hire. It can also prevent loss of information and make it easier to forward necessary details about the new employee to other departments as needed.
Time sheets
If a company uses a manual time tracking system, employees typically submit their time sheets at the end of the pay period. This might mean staff submits their hours on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis and the clock-ins and clock-outs must be manually added to accounting or HR software to calculate pay.
Adding time tracking and the submission of employee hours to the collection of HR workflow tasks reduces the chances of incorrect reporting during manual submission. This practice saves the company money in the long term. It also reduces the workload of HR professionals who would otherwise have to input the information on each time sheet into the system manually.
Employee benefits
Employee benefits require frequent updates by HR professionals, whether it’s due to life-changing circumstances among current staff members or the onboarding process. Adding benefits as a task to an HR workflow saves your company money by reducing time spent on benefits administration. Automating new signups and modification requests within the benefits process also makes it easier to educate employees about their coverage and let them make changes to their plans.
Time off and employee leave requests
When employees wish to use their PTO or need to make a leave request, they often feel as if they have to jump through hoops. HR workflow automation makes it possible for employees to initiate leave and time-off requests with a single click. Managers can receive notifications to approve and the hours used become automatically deducted from the employees’ PTO pools.
Payroll
Automating payroll as part of a custom workflow for HR helps speed up the overall process and reduce the chance of employees making data entry errors. An automated payroll system automatically calculates taxes, deductions, overtime pay, and commission earned rather than requiring a staff member to spend time on manual calculations.
Adding payroll as a workflow task also allows your company to keep employee payment records digitally, saving space on manual filing cabinets since you must retain employee tax records for 4 years.
Related templates
HR managers can save time and resources during the employee offboarding and onboarding process, payroll, and benefits enrollment by using HR templates to centralize their data and documentation. Templates on monday.com Work OS and products are fully customizable and enable your human resources department to streamline their activities with an automated workflow.
HR service template
The HR Services Template from monday.com is designed to let you see all of your HR and business processes in a centralized location. The template simplifies process management for new hire onboarding, open positions, and requests. The template provides HR teams with all the relevant information they need to be successful in one location, for everything from onboarding to tracking employee vacation time.
This template lets your staff track employee engagement based on important dates, such as employee promotions, anniversaries, or paid time off. Our monday.com HR Service Template also makes it easy to track employee meetings, training sessions, and tours in real-time to better manage the onboarding process. Within the template, you can use customizable forms to receive vacation requests and other general HR requests, and view them all in a central location.
Training plan template for employee onboarding
The Training Template for Employee Onboarding from monday.com is a document to help you outline the parameters of your training program. Within the template you can detail a basic structure for what employee onboarding within the company should look like, and then tailor that plan for each new hire. A training plan template saves you time and keeps new employees on track by providing transparency about the training process.
Within the template you can track an employee’s progress as they complete training activities and use the outline to provide support to newcomers. Integrations with other software applications such as Slack make it possible to send messages and notifications directly from monday.com to employees off-platform.
FAQs about workflow for human resources
What are the pillars of HR?
There are 5 pillars of human resources (HR) strategy. These are:
- Performance management: This is the ongoing task of identifying, monitoring, and supporting the function of an employee within the company.
- Compensation and benefits: This critical aspect of human resources deals with employee payment and benefit distribution to ensure employees are fairly paid and receive benefits, such as health insurance.
- Employee engagement: Monitoring how invested employees are in their work and their commitment to the company is an essential part of HR’s workload.
- Employee relations: Refers to developing workplace policies that enforce and dictate appropriate employee conduct.
- Employee retention: This pillar of HR requires the department to monitor and improve employee satisfaction to prevent high turnover.
What are the major HR functions?
Human resources is a critical department for any business. The major HR functions are:
- Recruitment and selection: This is the process of finding qualified candidates for open roles within the company and identifying who is well suited to your organization.
- Performance management: The function of the HR department in performance management is to boost productivity through measurable objectives.
- Learning and development: This is an HR process that focuses on improving an employee’s skills and knowledge to enhance their overall performance.
- Compensation and benefits: An HR department is responsible for determining what amount of pay is fair for each employee and which benefits they are entitled to.
- Succession planning: This aspect of HR requires the department to identify potential future leaders within various branches of the company and nurture them to take over positions when other workers retire or leave.
- Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS): HR staff must use HRIS to collect and retain personal information and data about company employees for the purpose of future decision making.
- Diversity and inclusion: HR leaders have a responsibility to drive initiatives and enforce policies regarding diversity and inclusion in all aspects of the workplace, from hiring to training and employee retention.
These are the roles and responsibilities of an HR department and its members within a company. An HR manager is responsible for developing recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, and retention processes that help create a positive workplace culture.
What are HR deliverables?
HR deliverables are leading indicators and measurements of future growth for your business. The deliverables are sometimes also called HR KPIs and are the metrics measuring the success of your business strategy. These deliverables are identified on an HR scorecard.
Any HR department can benefit from an automated workflow
Centralize your HR management processes by adopting a workflow for human resources. A workflow for your HR department centralizes all relevant data so it’s easy for everyone to view and access information efficiently.
monday.com makes it — almost — effortless to automate tasks such as manual data entry as part of your workflow to reduce the opportunities for human error and ensure all information and documentation is backed up via the cloud.
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