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Human Resources is at the forefront of employee engagement, job satisfaction and company culture. As a result, HR professionals often feel the brunt of pain points relating to day-to-day administrative tasks. In the past, these tasks were often input manually with time-consuming paperwork and spreadsheets that frequently increased burnout.

But HR is the supportive bridge between employees and their companies. It’s essential that employers can identify what daily employee pain points affect their HR teams and exactly how to ease them. During the COVID-19 pandemic, HR teams across the U.S. continue to adjust to the new normal of hybrid and remote work setups, which makes pain points even more important to work and improve upon. The answer to many daily pain points is new HR tech that promotes efficiency using AI and data analytics.

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the suppression of HR technology spending during the pandemic will lead to renewed investment in technology in the coming year. This new HR tech can help to increase productivity and efficiency by reducing manual day-to-day workloads. With these tech improvements, HR can focus less on manual activities like spreadsheets and more time on promoting company culture and cultivating employee/employer relationships.

Identify your employees’ daily pain points

The HR tech horizon is filled with ever-advancing digital solutions and data analytics, but what use are they if you don’t know exactly what your employees need help with? Before investing in the latest HR software trend, be sure to ask HR what daily pain points are bothering them consistently. Once you have an idea of the possible problems, you can start research on the tech that supports efficiency and reduces labor costs. Read below for some of the top day-to-day pain points that are affecting HR employees and useful tech suggestions:

Recruiting new hires

The pandemic brought in-person hiring and interviews to an abrupt standstill this past year. This challenged HR professionals to find top talent in a highly competitive labor market through online platforms. Suddenly, it was imperative to source, interview and onboard candidates using only digital means.

SHRM reports that experts expect this trend to extend beyond 2021 as a permanent change to the hiring process. Experts recommend that companies invest in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) or AI tools rather than applicant tracking systems. ATS software not only help companies interact with ideal candidates but also search through applicants that are already in their HR systems. Meanwhile, AI tools can reduce and remove potential bias in future hiring decisions.

In addition, helping organizations engage with qualified, interested and available candidates from outside the organization, sourcing software is a solution to what has long been a vexing problem for companies—combing through the heaps of candidate data already housed in their HR systems.

More time spent on recruiting new hires, means less time engaging with potential and current employees. To combat the challenges of the current digital landscape, HR tech like ATS software and AI tools will alleviate the daily pressures through candidate pipelining and automated sourcing processes.

Searching for PTO information and tracking hours/schedules

In the U.S., there is no federal statute for paid time off, which means that every company has its own policies that HR is in charge of. Since all PTO policies are different, employees often reach out to their HR teams for help on their specific time-off accruals, whether they have any or not.

Tracking hours and schedules go hand-in-hand with searching for PTO information. Time management tasks can actually cost employers money when calculating labor costs since HR may spend most of its time dealing with manual entry and managing spreadsheets.

If these manual HR tasks were automated, this would save their teams significant time and money. Investing in specific time management tasks technology could reduce HR work significantly when it comes to tracking hours, submitting PTO requests, calculating PTO balances, responding to PTO requests and more.

Finding personal benefits information

Similar to company PTO information, personal benefit options are unique to each workplace. For HR teams, informing and assisting employees through benefits decisions and processes was a difficult task even when most workplaces were fully onsite. Taking the pandemic into consideration, streamlining benefits enrollment through an improved enrollment workflow is indispensable.

A fix to this problem is investing in a comprehensive online HR platform that utilizes virtual enrollment tools. These tools would not only guide employees through an easy-to-navigate system, but they would ease HR’s workload when it comes to delivering benefits education and help employees review their options comfortably on their own time schedule.

A streamlined online HR platform with personal benefits enrollment tools helps both the employer and employees. Personal benefits enrollment is a complicated process for most workers, so providing an online platform that increases accessibility and simplifies the process will not only boost employee morale but also save on HR labor costs.

The COVID-19 pandemic created an immediate burden on current HR team strategies and processes as companies were forced to switch to fully or partially remote work this past year. The top priority for teams became assessing and reducing the strain of inefficient systems.

Companies rely on HR teams to promote employee engagement and improve overall job satisfaction, but it’s also the employer’s priority to identify and assess HR’s daily pain points. These pain points hinder the capabilities of employees because they add stress and take away from the productivity of HR professionals.

Through new HR tech that automates day-to-day manual HR tasks, employers can significantly cut back on labor costs while also investing in employee relationships and retention. Tech such as Applicant Tracking Systems, AI tools and online HR time management platforms are critical during the pandemic and will continue to grow in importance in the future.

Check in with your employees regularly to recognize what the recurring issues are and keep on top of new HR trends that can enable teams to invest more time into the employee experience and less in manual HR tasks.