Why you should automate tasks that are manual and time-consuming?

A HR's perspective

Have you ever felt that you are doing redundant work?

Work that feels meaningless?

Work that doesn't add value to the larger business goal?

Work that is so time-consuming yet so meager that requires zero to minimum human intelligence?

Yes, those are the kinds of jobs or tasks that need to be automated so that you can use your workforce to do better, fulfilling and meaningful work that will grow their value and that of the company too.

In fact, in my experience, I've wondered about this a lot because most of this work is given to interns or freshers who are just starting out their careers.

One such thing is filling out and updating Excel sheets for employee insurance. It used to take up so much of my time, and I hated doing it. For me, tools like PlumHQ, Pazcare, and other similar tools are a huge boon.

Meaningful work

Everyone wants to do meaningful work at their jobs. That way, we retain all the high-performing, talented individuals. Imagine having to just update huge Excel sheets for insurance every day in and day out. Redundant work makes you demotivated and unhappy in the long run.

In my initial days doing recruitment, I used to spend 30-40% of my time manually reaching out to people using LinkedIn Recruiter. Outbound recruitment, with usually a low conversation ratio, can lead to a lot of demotivation, despite all the hours of work you put into filtering out leads and typing custom messages.

Now, many tools automate the process, help in creating templates (including ones for follow-ups), create workflows, and automate sending LinkedIn requests. These tools automatically feed into your system and land in your ATS inbox.

Your most time-consuming part of recruitment just got solved at the click of a button, freeing up more time to talk to candidates you're interested in joining your team.

Reduced time, effort, and cost

If you are going to automate manual processes, you get more hours doing focused work that drives profits. Imagine with a lot of new tools, employee insurance is no longer a mundane task of updating 10 Excel sheets. You can do it at the click of a button, more so empower the employee to add the dependents' details and then just cross-verify once. Now a whole department that was dedicated to this, will be eliminated.

Usually, as HRs, we get tons of questions about the health insurance policy, leave policy, appraisal cycle, exit procedure, etc. Most of the person's energies and time go into answering these questions, which can easily be documented and shared.

Now smart AI-driven chatbots take care of these queries so that HRs can focus on more meaningful work.

Aids in ensuring compliance

Huge piles of paperwork, lost data, pending approvals, torn sheets, and bad or non-understandable writing or printing, is always an obstacle to ensuring compliance. With computerized or tool-fed data, everything is safe, secure, and easily accessible for compliance.

Reduces error

To a major extent, automation reduces human error and increases efficiency. The chances of human error are inevitable in manual work. Every time I onboard an employee, I have to remember all the accesses that I need to provide and inform the respective departments to ensure one has a smooth onboarding. However, it is only human to miss out on a few if everything is manual.

Lot of tools have automated the whole operational part of employee onboarding with a click of a button.

Increased ability to scale

As the company grows, the manual tasks will keep increasing, you need to add to the headcount to manage these tasks for you. This isn't a viable option to scale. With all the data on cloud or automated, scalability will be smooth.

Access to data

When you automate and computerize all tasks, you also get hold of an immense amount of data which can be converted to dashboards to derive insights into processes, spending, business, etc. It helps you make data-driven objective decisions.

If you are a team leader or business owner, please do run through your processes and workflows and check for redundancies, overlaps, time-consuming work and try and rectify them for improved efficiency.