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We recently spoke with an HR professional who watched an automation project spiral into chaos. His organization skipped the hard work of process improvement and simply dropped automation into the existing HR process environment. The result was a confusing tangle of duplicative workflows, inconsistent practices and new forms of waste that didn’t exist before. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. The history of automation in HR and in organizations more broadly is littered with these stories.
Mature HR teams know that you shouldn’t automate a broken process. Doing so will only accelerate problems that already exist or even add new ones.
When we surveyed HR leaders about the initiatives they are undertaking to support HR process automation, standardizing and optimizing HR processes was the most common response (Figure 1, see above right). HR functions are also working to shift HR staff to more valuable tasks after automation and developing a change management strategy.
Follow these steps before automating
Process management provides the structure to ensure that your processes are consistent, efficient and ready for automation. While we can’t deliver a crash course on process management here, this article offers a five-step framework rooted in process management to help you
