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Automating HR in the Cloud

Written by Drivestream Staff | 8/24/21 11:57 AM

HR is the cornerstone of any successful organization. Strong HR processes help employees achieve their maximum potential, enabling the organization to get a stronger return on investment for each person on their payroll.

However, poorly-executed HR processes can be disastrous. For example, if bonus opportunities aren’t distributed evenly among qualifying employees, it can create the impression of favoritism—which leads to resentment and employee disengagement.

One strategy for improving HR is migrating to the cloud. Outsourcing key processes to an HR in the cloud solution can help ensure better consistency. How can you automate HR in the cloud and what is the impact for HR processes?

Here’s a quick guide to automating HR in the cloud, as well as a few of the benefits of HR automation:

How to Automate HR in the Cloud

HR automation in the cloud means more than just licensing a cloud-based software and running your HR processes through it. While migrating to the cloud can be useful, that isn’t the finish line—it’s just the start.

To truly automate HR in the cloud, you need more than just a simple cloud-based tool, you need a true business process outsourcing solution that can revolutionize your HR workflows. When looking for a business process outsourcing solution, any solution you pick should be able to handle:

  • Core HR Tasks. Any HR automation solution should be able to manage personal and employment information globally for all your team members, help you establish and maintain profiles for every worker, give you a directory view of your workforce, and help you support HR tasks for local operations in whatever states, countries, or territories you operate in.
  • Workforce Rewards. An HR automation solution should have the capacity to help you manage employee compensation, benefits, payroll, and special performance bonuses with ease.
  • Work/Life Solutions. Many organizations underestimate the potential of having an automated solution for logging and managing things like company volunteer projects, social media influencing strategies, and employee wellness programs. However, automating these workflows helps make company outreach and employee work/life balancing solutions more consistent and effective—improving the enterprise’s reputation.
  • Workforce Management. From tracking employee time, administrating absence policies, or managing individual work projects, an HR automation solution handles all aspects of your workforce management. Using automated HR solutions helps to ensure a more consistent enforcement of workplace policies, greatly reducing the risk of accidentally favoring some employees over others when addressing disciplinary actions or employee performance recognition.
  • Human Resource Optimization. Using a combination of workforce predictions and modeling based on analytical data, automated HR solutions can help enterprises better manage and enhance their existing workforce to achieve greater performance. Finding an HR automation solution that provides this data can be crucial for making informed decisions.

The Impact of Cloud Migration for HR Processes

What are the key benefits of using HR automation in the cloud? Some of the biggest ones include:

  • Increasing consistency for HR processes;
  • Reducing labor hours and costs for managing HR tasks;
  • Improving your ability to track critical trends in your workforce;
  • Reducing the risk of compliance violations with regional or national regulations;
  • Being able to apply predictive analytics to anticipate fluctuations in your workforce requirements; and
  • Making important documentation easier to track.

These benefits can be unbelievably valuable for enterprises of any size. In fact, the larger the enterprise, the greater the ROI for HR automation in the cloud can be.

Planning and Budgeting Cloud-Based HR Solutions

One of the biggest challenges in migrating to the cloud is planning and budgeting for the migration process. Without a consistent and reliable process for carrying data over from your existing on-premises or cloud solutions to the new automated HR in the cloud solution, long delays and inefficiencies are inevitable.

Part of the reason why budgeting is such a big challenge for migrating to the cloud is that the costs of doing so can be highly variable—and the timelines for an enterprise cloud implementation can stretch from months to well over a year! The larger your enterprise and the more HR software solutions and databases you try to migrate at once, the more complicated the process becomes.

In addition to migrating data to the cloud, it’s important to consider the need to configure the HR automation solution. This configuration often requires experts in both the software and the process to ensure that the software is properly adjusted to your HR workflows. If either is lacking, your HR automation may not work properly.

Simplifying HR in the Cloud with Business Process Outsourcing

Business process outsourcing, or BPO, is incredibly useful for streamlining planning and budgeting cloud migrations. For example, Drivestream’s own Complete Cloud business process outsourcing solution takes the guesswork out of your cloud implementation by giving you a flat, easy-to-predict monthly fee you can budget around.

Drivestream’s Complete Cloud service covers all aspects of your HR in the cloud, including:

  • Implementation
  • Ongoing management of app licenses
  • Server and data center management
  • App configuration
  • Training your employees to use your HR automation solution
  • Security and feature patch management

With a complete cloud, automating your HR processes is easier than ever. This allows you to create a seamless, start-to-finish solution for managing your human resources in a secure system that manages all of your employee records. 

Ready to revolutionize your HR processes? Get in touch with Drivestream today to get started!