An integral part of any company is the Human Resources Department. We know that human comprises the most important asset a company could ever have and ensuring that these assets are well taken care of is of paramount importance that you should not overlook.
The Human Resources (HR) Department is a company's division that takes charge of finding, screening, recruiting, and training applicants. HR also administers employee benefits and other people-centered programs.
The Human Resource Department plays a vital role in making companies competitive in ensuring every employee is the perfect fit for their respective jobs and is given due attention and care, so they are always satisfied with his work, which makes them productive and efficient.
The 21st century is all about the battle of strategy and techniques. After years of watching startups become corporate giants, other startups may be targeting some established corporations in their best practices.
As most companies try to be as efficient as the others, it would come to a point where they need to adapt to some new ways to stay strong and not just barely thrive. Today, many companies are abandoning traditional human resources management responsibilities and are considering outsourcing some issues such as payroll and other administrative ones.
Everything needs to embrace modernization
Employees play a key role in a company’s growth. It is with utmost importance that the Human Resource department of any organization would have to align its strategies with recent trends. Technological trends have advanced and continue to fine-tune business processes as a whole.
You can just imagine that organizations nowadays would have to balance their human resources with their robot acquisition that provides several automatizations for better production and manufacturing outputs.
Businesses need to automate repetitive operations to let their employees focus on more important business activities for enhanced productivity.
A looming fear building over the horizon
While it’s true that automating your HR system can help gain tons of benefits, it’s true as well that convenience has its price. Allow me to highlight the good things about automating your HR system.
- When you automate your HR system, it can’t be denied you will cut down a lot of administrative costs. Oftentimes doing things manually leads to errors. But deciding to automate and allow an AI to do some menial processes will reduce errors and promotes efficiency.
- A ton of HR tasks would become super easy in a snap of a finger. We can’t deny that dealing with tons of paperwork can hinder productivity because it is very cumbersome. Redundancy kills off productivity. Automation is the way to go.
- Recruitment and selection would become much easier when an AI pre-programmed to help you solve issues and concerns about choosing the best candidates the fill the vacancies. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can significantly cut off a lot of manual operations, which can be broken down and streamlined into smaller and simpler tasks.
It’s hard not to be persuaded with HR system automation. I am sure that most managers and managers will follow this example and choose the best solution that will help their organization be more efficient and work at the lowest cost.
Convenience and making everything simple have also its downsides. The price of making something super easy for everyone in the office is a bit costly for some humans. Since we will be relying on AI and bots to do the menial and repetitive tasks for us, it’s hard to deny that there will be some staff whose services will no longer be required.
It means some people will be laid off from their positions: if the management realizes they are no longer suitable. It will result in savings, which is quite hard, especially in these challenging times. I agree that HR systems automation would change the HR landscape. But it’s a Midas touch like some people would think.
Shifting to HR automation requires training. And we all know that training people would entail cost and investment. On the onset of implementing automatization, organizations may find it the hard way that up-skilling their staff is costly and time-consuming.
I’m sure a lot of companies were attracted to the idea of having fewer people doing or accomplishing lots of tasks, but they may face a rude awakening that training fewer people to do tons of work can be a very costly investment because equipping them with skills entails not only investment in finances but also investment in time. A time that flies is money lost.
Having robots working in a human resource department may seem cool it may even have a touch of futuristic sense in it, but you need to realize that your new robot colleague may mean some of your buddies won’t be returning for work tomorrow.
And it’s not going to sound great robots evaluated you to be unfit for the work you’re applying for or the promotion you’re heading based on the robot’s algorithm you’re unqualified.
And for the worse part, after the robot has appraised your performance, upon its algorithm’s recommendation, that you have not made the grade, the robot will recommend for your termination. And the management could not do anything about it because it’s company policy, strictly business and no hard feelings.
Embracing technological advancement is exciting, no doubt. But the H, in HR, means HUMAN. I think it would be fitting that despite the automation and robotics in place, a large part of the HR work should have a human side and touch.
Automation would curtail human interaction in the HR processes. The HR department is meant taking care of the human side of the organization and having a machine, doing that can be a little bit off.
HR automation would certainly dehumanize HR processes. An AI is dependent on figures and data, while a human looks at a situation in a multi-faceted way.
Human HR staff looks not only at numbers and figures but also at other nonverbal signals. A robot could only stick-on numbers because it’s very limited, despite its efficiency in tons of performing tasks.
The human resource department is an integral part of any organization. It’s hard to imagine that a company would survive, if there is no competent HR department handling it. Automation undoubtedly leads to impressive results, but you need to be wary also of its pitfalls and shortcomings.
Before deciding to go full steam ahead with your direction of automating your HR department, try to think about everything very carefully weigh on the pros and cons because I’m telling you, there will going to be very plenty.