1. How can process automation streamline recruitment and onboarding in HR?
Gallup found that only one in eight employees believe that onboarding and orientation experiences are excellent. And, according to another study, half of employees agree that automation of the onboarding process would increase overall employee productivity.
Process automation can help connect and streamline the onboarding process – from recruiting to onboarding to provisioning. When it comes to recruiting, many open roles aren’t visible enough to prospective employees and it can be time-intensive to manually post across job boards. Automation enables organizations to instantly post job descriptions across job boards, while also storing applications and resumes stored in the same place for easy access. This can be applied internally as well, ensuring a seamless experience from posting-to-placement within existing internal mobility processes.
For onboarding, automation helps by cutting down the time people spend on manual paperwork, routing, approvals, and more. Digitized documents can be easily routed, approved, and stored automatically, which saves time and money, and cuts down on human error.
Lastly, automation helps ensure that the provisioning portion of the onboarding process is smooth. Process automation helps create a seamless welcome process by ensuring new employees have all the equipment, logins, software, and more to get started.
From start to finish, process automation streamlines and connects each step in the onboarding process to cut down on delays, costs, and more. We recognize this in our People & Culture team at Nintex. We have leveraged our own technology to connect our applicant tracking system to our onboarding and provisioning processes, which helps create a seamless onboarding experience for our new team members.
2. What are the biggest challenges in implementing process automation in HR, and how can they be overcome?
The biggest challenges for implementing process automation (or any new technology) in HR (or any part of the organization) are having clearly defined processes (not just knowing what the tech will solve for but how) and ensuring the organization is ready to embrace the change.
When implementing automation in an HR organization, it’s important to take a step back and use the implementation as an opportunity to redesign processes for the future. You want to be sure that you’re creating and redefining processes thoughtfully as you apply automation to them.
Like most technology, process automation is more impactful if the team is fully bought in, which starts with various teams understanding the end-benefit for the organization, our team members and for themselves.
3. How can CHROs effectively align individual performance goals with overall business objectives?
Numerous factors go into aligning individuals with the overall goals of a business, but I like to think about creating alignment in three main buckets: the “what” and “how” of each job, aligned contributions, and a culture of feedback.
I often see many organizations try to only focus on aligning contributions to ensure everyone’s work connects to the business’s goals, which makes sense because it’s all about connecting individual OKRs to department OKRs to business OKRs. But this step can’t happen in a vacuum.
Individuals can only align their contribution to the business objectives if they first understand the “what” and “how” of their role. If they aren’t completely clear in what’s expected in their role and the skills and competencies required to do it, it’s difficult to fully see how their work contributes to overarching objectives.
Likewise, if individuals aren’t receiving feedback on their performance in relation to their individual, departmental, and overall business objectives, they can’t assess if their contribution is aligning. Feedback is the connection between what is expected, how it was done, the outcome, and the relevancy and impact of those outcomes.
CHROs should set an encompassing approach to OKR alignment that receives buy-in from leadership and is implemented by management.
4. What role does continuous feedback play in creating a performance-driven environment?
I think of a high-performance organization as one that makes expectations clear, embraces accountability, and constantly iterates and improves. Core to all of those is continuous feedback.
I like to say the most important set of questions include the following:
· When was the last time you received feedback?
· When was the last time you requested feedback?
· What did you do with the feedback you received?
· When did you last give someone else feedback?
Feedback is core to ensuring that everyone is aligned when it comes to performance and what’s needed to meet goals. Feedback allows us to be clear on expectations at all levels. It also enables every employee to stay accountable – to themselves and to each other. And, without continuous feedback, the ability for an organization to iterate and improve is significantly reduced.
5. Can you elaborate on the key challenges HR faces in managing hybrid and remote workforces?
Organizations have had to adapt constantly in the post-pandemic era, especially when it comes to how we all work. Hybrid and remote work have offered numerous benefits to both employees and employers. It also comes with changes that HR teams have had to adapt to.
Two key challenges that HR teams have had to adapt to are related to communication and culture.
Communication in a hybrid environment can be challenging because some employees still work in a physical office and many never step foot in an office. If your hybrid workforce is distributed, you could have employees that work in different time zones. An organization may also have different platforms for communication that are preferred based on region or culture. All in all, communicating evenly and effectively can be challenging in a hybrid work environment.
However, having a strong internal communications program and strategy that partners with, or is part of, HR can help mitigate issues around communicating to employees.
Culture is another challenging area in a hybrid environment, especially for organizations that were previously a majority in-person operation. Like communication, it can be hard to maintain a feeling of culture when employees work in different ways, times, etc.
Organizations can reinforce company culture by integrating core values into visible decision making, into operational practices and communicating those values consistently. This starts with onboarding new hires through continual engagement with all employees.
6. How does Nintex ensure data security and compliance for automated HR processes?
With the rapid adoption and evolution of AI, security, governance, compliance, and privacy have quickly moved to the top of most business leaders’ agendas. This is also a critical space for the HR organization to partner on, considering the genesis of most issues relating to these areas starts with people.
Utilizing automation to enable smartly designed processes and connect data sources directly, can be leveraged to not only reduce risk but designed to meet complex security and compliance requirements.
At Nintex, we maintain the security of our capabilities under SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3 reports, ISO 27001:2013, and other privacy and security benchmarks. Nintex’s product for government – Nintex Automation Cloud for Government – is FedRAMP Authorized, meeting the stringent standards for cloud security set by the U.S. federal government.
7. What are the emerging trends in HR that are shaping the future of work?
· AI – Employees are being empowered with AI support. How do organizations effectively harness this for the good of the business? How do they govern its use to protect privacy, security, etc.? What are the new skills needed to work with AI or because of AI?
· Enabling productivity and efficiency (personal and organizational). Designing an organization and culture that is in service of best performance and best self. It must give the ability to be the best gardener, parent (pet or human), athlete, or Lego aficionado but to also bring the best work, partnership, and creativity to your work as well.
