What HR processes should be digitised first?
Prioritise the processes that are most manual, most error-prone or most important to the employee experience. Common starting points include onboarding, leave management and performance tracking. The right priority depends on your organisation's specific situation.
Not all HR processes benefit equally from digitisation. The processes that are most manual, most error-prone or most visible to employees are the best candidates for early digitisation.
Onboarding is a common starting point. A manual onboarding process is time-consuming for HR, inconsistent in its execution and visible to new employees at the moment when their impression of the organisation is being formed.
Leave management is another. Manual leave tracking is error-prone, creates disputes and requires HR time that could be better spent elsewhere. A simple leave management system pays for itself quickly.
Performance tracking — goal-setting, mid-year reviews, annual appraisals — benefits from digitisation when the organisation has a defined performance process. Digitising a broken process makes it faster but not better.
Payroll integration is often the highest-value digitisation. Disconnected HR and payroll data is a common source of errors, compliance risk and management time. Connecting the two systems reduces errors and frees up HR capacity.
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Talk to Kriate HRCommon questions
Should you digitise HR processes before or after fixing them?+
Fix the process first. Digitising a broken process makes it faster but not better. The discipline of documenting a process for digitisation often reveals problems that should be fixed before the system is built.
How do you get employees to use a new HR system?+
Training is necessary but not sufficient. The system needs to be easier to use than the manual alternative. If the system adds friction rather than removing it, employees will find workarounds.
Jacob Raj Rajendran
Principal — HR & Organisation Development, Kriate HR
23+ years in business and operations HR. Prior roles at Ford, General Motors, TVS, Crompton Greaves and Cognizant. Six Sigma Black Belt; Strategic HRM, University of Michigan.
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