The role of the HR department has become increasingly complex in the past few years. Even in small to mid-sized businesses, the range of areas that the HR department is expected to cover has expanded significantly.

With that increase in complexity and range has come a new problem – the need to contain costs. The areas that the HR department is now responsible for have become significant cost centers within the organization. As a result, it is important that the CFO becomes much more involved in what’s going on within HR, as it starts to have more of an impact on the company’s bottom line. 

This document focuses on the three main areas within the HR department where the need for cost containment can be easily identified and significant savings can be made.

Eradicating benefit errors Managing attendance Automating compliance

Eradicating benefit errors

The cost of providing benefits to employees has increased dramatically. To prevent these costs from spiraling out of control and start significantly affecting a company’s bottom line, it has become imperative that organizations put in place effective HR and benefits management systems. This will have the added payback of providing a more timely response to employees and will reduce the vast amount of errors that are currently an issue for benefits managers.

Managing benefits has traditionally been the role of the HR department. It’s a complex and time-consuming task, even in a relatively small company, and can soon require a disproportionate amount of the HR department’s available resources unless the right tools are made available to them.

It is also important that the payroll and HR management systems are fully integrated so that the payroll process automatically highlights any changes. If the HR management system is simply providing a data output file that then needs to be uploaded into the payroll system, it presents two problems. First of all, this is yet another task that needs to be performed by an already busy HR person. Secondly, the payroll manager is going to want to print off and review any changes before adding them to the system, rather than uploading a data file full of unknown and potentially inaccurate information.

Managing attendance

While attendance management may seem like the most basic and simple of HR tasks, it presents more problems than are initially obvious. Relying on all managers to consistently log employees’ sick or vacation time is an ideal situation, but does not always happen. This creates accruing liabilities that affect a company’s bottom line.

The main areas that can benefit from automation are time clock management and vacation, sick, and other time off policies.

Automating Compliance

Compliance is a current hot topic. It isn’t necessary to be willfully negligent to be confronted with serious and expensive problems. Even the most compliance conscientious employer who meets the variant interpretations of specific regulations may encounter unexpected litigation and find their efforts fruitless. Many companies presume that they are adhering to strict regulation guidelines when in fact they’re at fault for violating a compliance specification located somewhere in the fine print.

Compliance management comes in several forms:

Managing company documentation to define a set of policies and procedures. Ensuring that every new employee has read the company guidelines and understood the expectation to comply with those guidelines along with state and federal regulations. Training staff to maintain a code of conduct, ethics and expected behavior. Setting processes in place and ensuring careful documentation and monitoring of every step. 

Conclusion

This document has determined three areas where automating HR and benefits management processes can provide demonstrable and direct benefits to the corporate bottom line. Eradicating benefit errors, managing attendance and automating compliance will provide significant time savings and reduce costly errors and liability.

A more subtle benefit is the amount of mundane, repetitive work that will be alleviated from the HR department. By automating the minute tasks that use a significant amount of time, HR personnel will be available to focus on more complex and needed planning and management tasks that will benefit the long-term growth of the organization. 

HR automation should be a simple operation. A good solution will allow HR managers to use processes straight out of the box that mirror or improve their current way of working, without requiring months of set-up time and complex customization processes. HR managers should be able to customize and control each individual process intuitively, with minimal training and without extensive IT knowledge. The HR management system should offer seamless connectivity between all parts of the organization – everything from benefits, to time and attendance and payroll with just a single point of entry from a single individual.

By putting good business processes in place, those processes will largely manage themselves. Employee morale and conduct will improve throughout the organization with clear, defined guidelines, easy places to access information and fewer inaccuracies in matters that are truly important to their well-being. The bottom line is this will save your organization money and time.

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