Business is taking off and you’re ready to scale up. But before expanding, you’ve got to lay the operational groundwork and look for ways to make your HR processes efficient and smooth. You might be contemplating: Which HR tech can help scale your business in 2024?
Between recruiting and onboarding a growing team, ensuring compliance with employment laws, and keeping your team’s performance, scaling can be overwhelming, to say the least. Even if you are financially ready to double the size of your business, operational issues can quickly get out of hand and stop growth in its tracks.
That’s why having the right HR tools is crucial for scaling your business. This article goes through a list of HR technology features to look out for to help you narrow down the right solution. Additionally, we’ll go through the benefits of using HR technology and how to use it to maximise your business growth.
Table of Contents
HR Tech 101
What is HR Technology?
Essentially, it refers to the software and systems organisations use to manage and streamline their HR processes. These processes include everything from recruitment and onboarding to performance management, payroll, and benefits administration. For that reason, many businesses are adopting a large variety of HR technology for their teams to benefit from, with survey data from the International Services Group (ISG) discovering that 46% of organisations use HR technology. But what is that benefit really, and is it worth incorporating HR tech into an organisation?
There are countless HR tech companies and kinds of HR technology available, but which software are commonly used by scaling businesses? Generally speaking, there are two kinds of HR tech solutions to be aware of:
- All-in-one HR Saas Software – The perfect HR tech solution for scaling small to mid-sized businesses looking to manage several HR operations simultaneously. The majority of Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) are Saas cloud-based web apps. You can use them to store and access important files, employee documents, and management tools from anywhere.
- Specialised HR software – Integrations and tools that address specific areas of HR and work better for larger companies that have specialised roles for each HR function. Examples of these tools include Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Learning Management System (LMS), or payroll management software.
HR Tech Features for Scaling Business
The best kinds of HR technology can help you maximise efficiency and gain insight into your team. Additionally, some HR management software can be used to ensure legal compliance with payroll and time-tracking laws. Here’s an overview of features that fit the bill for scaling businesses:
- Organise and file employee data – Certain systems can help you create employee directories to categorise and access employee information quickly.
- Automate processes for key HR functions – All-in-one systems help you to manage talent acquisition and the entire employee lifecycle.
- Improve performance management – With the use of HR technology, you can gain insight into employee productivity, satisfaction scores, and quarterly or yearly performance evaluations.
- Measure key metrics and HR analytics – Tools with built-in HR reporting features are especially advantageous for scaling businesses. You can make more data-driven decisions using HR analytics and reports and quickly find ways to optimise your processes and maximise your growth potential.
- Stay on top of compensation and benefits – Some HR tech helps you to ensure consistency and compliance while managing employee benefits and payroll. Depending on the HR tools you use, you can streamline how you manage perks like employee healthcare, or payment of commissions and pay for performance variables.
- Systematise time tracking and time management – Well-developed HR management software helps you manage employee vacations and digitise timesheets to know who is working and when. This is especially crucial regarding staying with overtime pay laws and unpaid/paid time off policies.
- Improve internal communications – Certain all-in-one HR management software programs have internal communication tools that allow you to publish important messages to an employee dashboard.
How HR Tech Will Help Scale Your Business
Scaling your business also means that you’ll be scaling your HR operations. If your operations are without the right team, your growing business could easily fall apart.
Save Money
Time, money, and growth all go hand in hand. But specifically, how does HR technology help you save?
Firstly, you can save on labour expenses by automating time-consuming business tasks, such as employee time tracking and time management. While Excel time and attendance tracking templates can be useful for keeping records of employee working hours, they are not the most efficient solutions.
Additionally, you can eliminate unnecessary email communication. With HR management software, there’s no need to chase employees down and waste hours sending out reminders to sign and date timesheets. Employee clock-in/clock-out is a completely automated, one-step process.
Last but not least, you can save by reducing expensive and time-consuming errors. Mistakes are part of human nature, and they are bound to happen, especially in start-ups and scaling businesses. However, errors can be expensive and time-consuming, neither of which exactly coincide with ambitious growth plans. HR technology helps you to catch mistakes before they become bigger problems.
Improve Employee Experience
As you take on new team members, HR processes and operations can easily get out of hand. This can lead to excessive stress, frustration, poor communication, and increased turnover rates. Rapid growth without the right tools and procedures can ultimately send your company backwards. HR technology can mitigate the strain of taking on new employees by:
- Providing employees with access to important documents, like pay stubs, performance records, and company policies. Making these documents accessible allows employees to troubleshoot their problems before contacting HR.
- Automating employee clock-in and empowering employees with autonomy. This is especially valuable for agile teams and scaling organisations in today’s working landscape.
- Building a more unified company culture for remote teams. No matter your team’s time zone and location, you can easily keep them in the loop and updated with cloud-based HR software for remote teams.
Most importantly, technology liberates people teams and HR professionals from getting stuck with mundane, repetitive tasks. Instead, they can dedicate their work and focus wholeheartedly on more important areas, like making strategic decisions and creating a stronger company culture.
Make Smarter Business Decisions (With Data)
Whether it be performance feedback scores or recruitment metrics and analytics, centralised data allows you to visualise information in new ways and make more astute business decisions. With the right HR tech solution, you can place data at the forefront of your organisation and support your strategic planning with numbers.
This is especially true for scaling teams, as your business’s change and growth will correspond to your operations’ growth. Creating dashboards and seeing analytical trends will help you quickly compare and contrast your findings. In a nutshell, you can make the best possible moves in the least amount of time.
Enhance Your Data Security
Paper employee files involve much more risk than storing employee information on a secure cloud app. In recent years, GDPR has grown increasingly strict and regulations surrounding employee data are tighter than ever before. This has caused more and more companies to make the switch and invest in paperless employee databases.
With HR tech and software, you can rest assured that employee data is safe and that you stay up-to-date with data processing laws. Much cloud-based software works to encrypt and automatically back up data. This provides extra layers of protection and prevents other problems from occurring due to malfunction or misuse.
Save Time on Repetitive Tasks
When growth occurs, time is gold. There are not enough hours in the day to manage repetitive Slack messages, sign employee documents one by one, and communicate time off requests through email.
Using tools to optimise HR processes is key to the digital transformation of your growing business. To focus on more pressing concerns and watch your business take off, you must have a reliable means of automating tasks that keep you tied up.
Improve Recruitment and Onboarding
Your team is your greatest asset. And the new team members that you incorporate determine the fate of your growing business. That’s why recruitment and onboarding shouldn’t be pushed aside and only given a sliver of your time.
With burdensome administrative tasks out of the way, you can put time into elaborating your recruitment strategy. Using talent acquisition software, you can make hiring more efficient and create a talent pool of qualified candidates. Specifically, recruitment software will give you an overview of your business’s hiring pipeline, making it easy to detect and eliminate any problems.
The same applies to employee onboarding, especially during digital onboarding for new employees. Employee onboarding often makes or breaks an employee’s first impression of a company. And you’ll want to do everything possible to retain team members that you worked so hard to recruit and want to stay on board for the long term.
Innovative HR Tech Trends
Moving into the future, workplace technology continues to advance, and with it come innovative HR tools that can revolutionise managing a workforce. Much of this technology is being well received, with research by Deloitte showing that over 90% of HR leaders believe technology will play a crucial part in improving work outcomes and team performance for the future of all workplaces. So let’s take a closer look at some of these new technologies emerging and see how they can help drive productivity in the workplace.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is an emerging technology that enables machines to perform tasks that typically require people. In the context of HR, AI introduces automation to many of the repetitive tasks associated with recruitment, such as CV screening and candidate matching.
AI systems can be trained to recognise CV patterns, making identifying candidates who meet specific requirements easier and matching candidates with job openings based on their skills, experience, and other criteria. Moreover, AI can also analyse employee data to identify patterns and trends in employee behaviour and performance. This can help organisations make more informed decisions about training and development opportunities and identify areas for improvement in their HR processes.
Machine Learning (ML)
ML is a subset of AI that involves algorithms that learn from data and improve over time. In HR, ML can help identify patterns in employee behaviour, like which workers are most likely to leave or are most engaged.
Through these workforce analytics, ML systems can identify patterns in employee behaviour that may not be immediately apparent to HR managers. For example, an ML system could identify that people who work in teams are more likely to be engaged and productive than those who work alone. This allows employers to make more informed retention, engagement, and productivity decisions by identifying these patterns.
Chatbots
Chatbots are AI-powered tools that can introduce automation for many repetitive tasks associated with HR, such as answering employee questions and handling leave requests. Chatbots can also be used to provide personalised support and assistance to employees, such as on-demand training and development resources based on their needs and preferences.
Using chatbots, workers can get quick and accurate answers to their questions without waiting for an HR manager to respond. This can save time and reduce administrative burdens for HR managers, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
VR and AR allow organisations to create immersive and interactive experiences. In HR, VR and AR have the ability to improve onboarding, training, and development processes. For example, you could use these technologies to simulate a realistic customer service interaction, allowing employees to practice and improve their skills in a safe and controlled environment.
In addition, VR and AR can also be used for remote training and collaboration, creating virtual environments where people can collaborate with colleagues and participate in training programs from anywhere worldwide.
How Factorial Can Help You in 2024
Scaling your business isn’t just about growing bigger; it’s about building a bigger, stronger, and more transparent team. Having the right HR tech to help you with all your HR functions and administrative tasks is essential for your scaling business.
That’s where Factorial’s all-in-one HR management software comes in. Our comprehensive HR management software tremendously reduces the workload for a myriad of HR functions, including:
- Time tracking
- Time management
- Payroll management
- HR reporting
- Talent acquisition
- Employee onboarding
- Performance management
- Remote internal communications
- And much more.
If you are looking to scale your business, look no further. Book a free demo of Factorial and open the next chapter of business growth in 2024!
