5 HR processes you should automate

As we head into 2024, one human resources trend that’s still going strong is that HR managers are under more and more pressure to help drive business outcomes. And as HR professionals strive to do more with less, one way to free up valuable time for your team to focus on high-level, strategic work is to automate some of your most common HR tasks.

There are other benefits of HR automation, too: It helps reduce human errors, promotes better collaboration between your HR department and other teams, and helps create smoother and better employee experiences.

If HR process automation is on your team’s goal list for 2024, you’ve come to the right place. Below, you’ll find five HR automation examples to show you how you can streamline some of your most time-consuming manual processes. Without all this tedious, administrative work on your plate, what will you accomplish? The sky’s the limit.

5 HR processes you should be automating

With the right HR automation tools, your business processes—from onboarding to offboarding—can undergo a digital transformation that saves time and creates a better employee experience. Here are five HR operations you should be automating.

1. Onboarding new hires

With employee onboarding automation, a hiring manager can set up a new employee with everything they need, from devices to benefits enrollment to corporate cards, in just minutes.

Different types of HR automation software offer different levels of automation. While the exact capabilities will vary depending on your software, a robust workforce management platform like Rippling can automate the entire onboarding process from start to finish.

An automated employee onboarding workflow can:

• Generate the new employee’s offer letter and employee handbook
• Run their background check
• Add them to the payroll and prorate their first paycheck based on their start date
• Automatically set up their payroll tax accounts with the right agencies, based on where they live—and begin calculating and remitting taxes to the proper authorities
• Enroll them in their health insurance plan, 401(k), and other employee benefits
• Assign them any required training, like anti-sexual harassment training
• Send them their company devices
• Assign them their app accounts, like Gmail, Zoom, and Slack

You can even set up workflows to only trigger under certain conditions. For example, not every employee gets a corporate credit card. However, you can set up your automated onboarding workflow to assign and mail one to new employees only in specific roles, like finance team members or managers.

2. Employee relocation

When an employee moves to a new state, much of the HR work required centers around compliance—an area ripe for automation.

Once the relocation workflow is triggered, the employee moving states should:

• Receive updated compensation that complies with minimum wage laws in their new state
• Be enrolled in any new benefits plans, if needed
• Have their payroll tax withholding updated automatically, with accounts created in their new state and taxes automatically withheld and filed with the proper state and local tax authorities
• Be enrolled in any new state-required employee training programs

Compliance violations can result in fines, penalties, and even legal trouble. Automating your compliance work means protecting your business from costly mistakes before they happen.

3. Employee promotions

When an employee is promoted, there are plenty of opportunities for automation.

Here are just a few ideas for things your HR team can include in an automated workflow for promotions:

• Adjusting the promoted employee’s position in the company org chart
• Updating their direct reports
• Adding them to management groups or director channels on Slack and other apps
• Automatically updating their compensation in payroll
• Applying the right expense policy to their corporate card (or issuing one to them if needed)
• Assigning them to management training

You can even trigger an email notification for the promoted employee’s new team members to remind them to welcome their new colleague on the first day of their role.

4. Employee milestones

Employee milestones can be tricky to keep track of over time, especially as the size of your team grows. But, celebrating them can be essential to increasing employee engagement and retention and building your image.

Instead of trying to keep up with every milestone manually, automate them. You can set up milestone-related workflows to:

• Automatically sync employees’ career milestones to your company calendar
• Send out celebratory emails
• Select and send employee appreciation gifts well ahead of time
• Add milestone notes to company all-hands agendas
• Send notifications of important milestones on Slack, either to stakeholders or the entire company

When your HR team doesn’t have to spend time manually keeping track of milestones for every employee, they can instead focus on more strategic aspects of the employee experience, allocating more effort toward initiatives that help your business succeed.

5. Offboarding

Your employee offboarding process is another area full of workflows that can be automated to save time and increase company security. Offboarding mistakes can pose a serious risk—like when an employee who has exited your company retains access to confidential information, app accounts, or systems. Automating offboarding tasks reduces your HR team’s administrative workload and the likelihood of errors that could create security risks for your organization.

Offboarding workflows can include automations for:

• Generating separation agreements
• Scheduling an exit interview
• Calculating, cutting, and issuing an employee’s last paycheck
• Assigning offboarding tasks to their manager
• Revoking access to company systems and deactivating their app accounts on their last day
• Removing them from company benefits plans
• Administering COBRA

If it’s in Rippling, you can automate it

Each of the automations we’ve mentioned so far relies on your HR team having access to integrated systems. There’s just one problem: Most HR technology stacks are actually siloed, meaning they can’t access all the systems and data they need to fully automate HR processes and workflows.

But with Rippling, all the systems you rely on to hire, pay, and manage your people sync to a single source of truth for employee data—a unified workforce management platform—so information can move freely from one system to another, enabling comprehensive and powerful automation. This is because all of Rippling’s apps and systems are built on top of a Human Resources Information System (HRIS), a central hub for real-time employee data like roles, compensation, and more. 

With Rippling, your employee data isn’t trapped in a specific app or silo—it syncs across payroll, time and attendance, learning management, performance management, and all of our other apps. A single source of truth for up-to-the-minute employee data means your HR team never needs to reenter information when an employee gets promoted or moves to a new state. Instead, the software automatically triggers the workflow, and every downstream change happens in a single flow—from changing your org chart to updating the employee’s PTO and other benefits to enrolling them in state-specific training—like a ripple effect.

Rippling allows you to automate virtually anything—simple, one-step tasks or complex, multi-step processes with conditional, daisy-chained workflows. You can trigger actions across Rippling’s core HR, IT, and Finance systems, as well as third-party apps and integrations like Slack and Zendesk. And with Rippling’s Workflow Studio, anyone from an HR Director to a CFO can build the automated workflows they need without knowing how to code—all it takes is a few clicks.

Let’s use an employee relocating to a new state as an example of how Rippling removes manual tasks from your HR functions and makes them faster, more efficient, and less error-prone compared to other HR technology solutions.

With Rippling, each automation is triggered automatically, so your HR team can spend less time on repetitive tasks like data entry, freeing them up for more strategic work. Rippling comes with hundreds of pre-built workflow templates that you can use out of the box or customize to meet your exact needs.

Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for tax, legal, or accounting advice. You should consult your own tax, legal, and accounting advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.