Improve employee experience with process automation
In a world where working from home has become the ‘new normal’ and is likely to stay that way for an extended period, properly managing employee engagement has never been more important. Christian Lucarelli, Vice President Sales Asia Pacific at Nintex, explains how automation can facilitate a better employee experience.
With limited face-to-face contact and people mostly interacting with their managers and co-workers electronically, it can be easy for problems and concerns to go unnoticed and unresolved. This is not ideal for anyone, as leaving issues unaddressed can have a significant and negative impact on immediate and long-term productivity.
Thankfully, process automation can help to overcome the challenges with easy-to-use tools to automate workflows, digitise forms and to capture electronic signatures.
Following are three areas in which the automation of business processes is effective:
Scheduling regular reviews
Regular employee performance reviews are an important part of keeping employees happy and productive. As well as providing an opportunity to discuss salary and progression, check-in meetings provide an opportunity to examine and discuss any concerns an employee may be facing today or concerned about in the future.
It’s very important to schedule a regular cadence of review meetings and not let them fall through the cracks during the pandemic disruptions. Nothing says ‘we don’t care about you’ like a cancelled or forgotten employee review.
Workflow automation software is leveraged by HR departments to ensure employee reviews are prioritised by automatically reminding managers throughout an organisation to schedule review meetings and regular check-ins with their direct reports. The technology also makes it easy to create digital forms to capture feedback and route to the appropriate stakeholders, including eSignatures. This gives both employees and managers a valuable opportunity to hold each other to account for the agreements and targets they have in place.
Improved visibility and more effective engagement
When it comes to effective target setting and performance management, visibility is key. It’s important managers and employees have a record of what was discussed, the targets that were made, and the agreements put in place.
These processes often involve several highly-manual tasks which include completion of review forms before the meeting, the logging of performance targets, the processing of any salary changes, and paperwork around job description or title changes.
Each of these tasks requires work on both the manager and employee’s part to ensure that the agreements made can be followed through over the weeks and months after the review. Thankfully, process automation can help avoid this situation while also motivating employees. For example, automated forms can make it easy for managers and employees to fill out required paperwork before and after the meeting, ensuring that the information is always logged and saved in the right place for future reference.
Also, automated workflows can help ensure salary and contractual changes are not forgotten after the review, by setting automated tasks for HR or line of business managers to process the needed changes.
Eliminating bottlenecks and removing frustrations
An employee review process can often require input from a number of different people. Naturally, there’s the employee and their manager, but there may be feedback required from other people within the organisation. As well as this, they often require input from HR teams to process changes, schedule meetings, and potentially follow up on unresolved issues.
Unfortunately, this means there is a significant potential for delays and roadblocks, particularly if the process relies on paper-based forms and documents. It is easy for employees to feel disengaged when the processes that surround their appraisals are sluggish and filled with delays, but this doesn’t have to be the situation.
Automation tools can help each person in the chain complete their tasks quickly and efficiently. With an automated appraisal workflow, it’s possible to ensure each person in the chain has their tasks automatically assigned, from scheduling the review to filling out the forms and processing any changes.
Required tasks can be automatically assigned and notifications generated that remind people within the process to play their part quickly and efficiently. This is a really important way of improving engagement of employees because it shows that their employer is proactive about managing their concerns, welfare, and performance.
It’s clear that process automation tools can play a significant part in maintaining employee engagement and wellbeing. With flexible working models and remote work here to stay, having effective assessment processes in place has never been more important. Consider how your processes currently scrub up.
