6 Things HR Departments Can Automate with Workflow Management

Even today, automation is a scary word with negative connotations for some people. They believe that automation = losing jobs, which is absolutely not the case. The point of automation is not to save on human labour, but to make it more effective, efficient and successful.

It’s not a way of machines taking over the world – it’s actually a way we can stay away from mundane, repetitive tasks and focus on what makes us human: creativity, critical thinking skills, differentiating right from wrong…

As a response to increasing demands of the market coupled with ultra-rapid technological development and innovations, HR managers have started automating particular things using workflow management systems. Like any other new technology, its possible applications are not yet fully discovered, so we’re looking at some of the main things that can be automated with workflow management:

1. Team Communications

As an HR manager, one of the most important tasks is to provide your staff with effective ways to communicate with other team members and employees within an organization. Productive communication channels enable higher productivity and allow them to use teamwork and collaboration to focus on their work.

In workflow management solutions, there is a functionality that serves to aid team members to collaborate and communicate with each other in different points throughout the process. For example, the workflow management solution can notify members that a section of the project is done or a task has been completed, instead of employees manually communicating that to each other.

2. Customer Support

CRM software solutions (Customer Relationship Management) are one of the most useful and successful practical uses of workflow management automation, which helps boost the productivity of the customer support department.

When employees enter the software, they will receive an in-depth overview of every contact with a particular client, along with their responses, comments from other staff members and all other feedback that was made along the way.

This customer support automation is also great for identifying issues in the customer support workflow by analyzing the rate of successfully solved tickets, the average response time, the average number of back-and-forth communications with customers, etc.

3. Marketing

Just like customer support, marketing is another department that can be significantly improved with automation. The basic principle is to connect your actual marketing efforts to automated workflow management systems or connect these systems to your overall digital marketing strategy.

This type of automation will ensure that your personalized, individualized and targeted campaigns are always carried out at the right time to the right audience.

“When you automate digital marketing, you’ll already be miles ahead of your competitors, who are likely not doing it yet and won’t start in the next year. Take advantage of this fact before it’s a given and differentiate your company and brand with automated digital marketing workflow”, says Chloe Richter, a marketing consultant at TrustMyPaper and WowGrade.

4. Sales

If automation can help ameliorate the communication among your team members, as well as the communication between the company and its customers, naturally, the same can be done for leads (prospective customers).

In an automated workflow management system, you can set up touch-points to ensure that a prospect does not leave your sales pipeline and increase the chances of conversion, retention and up-selling. Sales management software maps out the customer journey and prepares a ready-made communication pattern that can be sent out in a specific time during the acquisition journey.

Automated sales workflows are especially useful in analytics because they can give you a more detailed overview of successful contact points and bottlenecks than any other human-made report.

5. Transparency & Task Assigning

For many managers, one of the main issues in running their teams is the lack of transparency on who was assigned the task by whom, when, and how long did it take them to finish it. The progress within a given task or a project is also hard to measure if you are not directly involved with the team.

In these cases, an automation project management system can help tackle these issues. During every point of the workflow, these systems will add information of any changes that have been made to the project, tasks or documents. As a result, managers, team leaders and executives have a crystal clear overview of what’s going on within any given project.

For HR managers, these project management solutions also help identify top performers through task analytics and reports, as well as spot some team members who are under-performing.

6. Billing and Accounting

Long gone are the days where we had to write up every offer, invoice or another form of payment document manually. Now, there are awesome workflow management systems that can do it for us! In automated billing systems, not only is the room for human error drastically reduced, but the system also ensures prompt delivery of invoices.

For any type of payment structures, processes and communication among accounting team members, automated systems can do wonders to clear things up and provide a convenient overview of all the actions taken both by employees and the program.

As a result, you can expect faster payments from your B2B clients, which translates to better cash flow. This will also reduce some of the burden on your Payments and Accounting staff members and enable them to focus on sensitive tasks with more focus and energy.

Conclusion

As an HR manager, your goal should definitely be to implement workflow management automation in all of these processes and think of uses beyond them that can help your business make a profit, succeed and grow.

The most important thing to keep in mind is the cost-benefit analysis of quality: if something turns out to be of lesser quality than when it’s carried out by a human (such as invoicing), either consider switching back or tweaking your program. In any case, you should always monitor the performance of your workflow management. It’s also recommended to always listen to feedback from your team members who are working with these systems on a daily basis.