Gone are the days when planning to pay for HR software brought apprehension to those working in human resources. “They are about to replace us with computer programs,” one paranoid staffer might have thought in the old days. More often than not, though, new technology works to become an enabler for people, and creates more opportunities than it reduces.
Today, it is well accepted that HR, like many other workers in the digital era, will use new tech to make their work easier—allowing them to focus on issues where their support is most needed.
According to a 2022 survey by the IT market intelligence firm IDC, 23% of HR leaders expect double-digit growth in their department’s tech spend. This shows how top management in HR recognizes the value of investing in new tools and systems. Further, most CHROs are eager to pivot to a workplace model known as “back to human”.
One crucial ‘human’ issue is mental health, which continues to get more attention as global events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Eastern Europe, and intractable inflation, have upended workplaces and affected workers’ well-being. Here’s how investing in a Human Resource Management System (HRMS) can bode well for mental health in the workplace.
How Investing in an HRMS Can Pay Off
Improving the employee experience
HR leaders placed top priority on employee engagement, especially during those long stretches when most workers were working remotely. If the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic and pervasive uncertainty weren’t enough, being physically separated from colleagues and peers hurt worker well-being. HR leaders needed to ensure that workers continued to get a good experience in their jobs.
But how would your HR professionals know in definite terms, whether employees were doing okay, or feeling down? Should they send out regular surveys? Should they collect secondhand feedback from managers during staff meetings?
Having an HRMS in place doesn’t mean your HR team can do away with those traditional methods—instead, they will have more tools at their disposal. Furthermore, they can leverage data from the HRMS to enable a more personalized employee experience.
Having a centralized information base
Data silos are gradually becoming a thing of the past. An overwhelming majority, or 77% of US employees, are done with legacy HR tech. Companies are moving toward having a platform that integrates data across multiple departments. While HR continues to play a transactional role in the workplace—managing attendance and payroll, scheduling, recordkeeping—they have great potential to evolve into a strategic partner in workforce management.
When employee data and administrative processes are integrated into a single platform or application, your HR team can leverage AI and analytics to know in real-time what the most pressing issues in the workforce are, such as staffing shortages and patterns in absenteeism. Knowing these trends in attendance allows HR to make informed decisions.
Digging deeper into all that pooled data, HR could also unlock insights on workers who need more support, especially on their well-being. With most HRMS having a self-service portal feature, HR can, in some cases, even automate prompts and referral mechanisms for employees who have often taken “mental health days” or have called in sick for non-physiological reasons.
Using active listening tools
In the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends report, over 83% of business leaders believe that leveraging employee data to benefit both employer and employee, is crucial to their organization’s success. Traditionally, company-wide data on specific issues is gathered through surveys—which can be prone to bias and inaccuracy.
Some organizations find a way to extract more objective responses, through active or ‘intelligent’ listening tools. Using these built-in features in an HRMS, HR can actively monitor employee preferences and sentiment with more timely data collection. Some tools use advanced language processing to analyze trends in employee comments. These features allow HR and team managers to heave a sigh of relief. Through automated monitoring, they won’t always need to perform manual review to come to a conclusion about employee perceptions.
Evolving into outcome-led HR
The end goal in digitizing and automating HR processes, is to go from a transactional maturity level (focuses on administration and compliance) to a level that is “outcome-focused”.
Outcome-focused HR, according to Sapient Insights Group Managing Partner Stacey Harris, “shifts the focus from reaction, policy, and processes to a discernable vision of the future. Outcomes are definable, measurable expectations for what the customer, employee, and stakeholders achieve from the work of your organization.”
In other words, becoming an outcome-led HR means evolving from a mere support team, and into a strategic business partner. “To achieve value, an HR function needs to understand the outcomes expected from its stakeholders and break the standard approach to HR,” Harris writes.
Employees, as HR’s stakeholders, now expect their workplace to prioritize mental health. According to a survey by the American Psychological Association (APA), 81% of workers said that employers’ support for mental health will be an important consideration when they look for a job. An organization that has reached the maturity level of outcome-led HR is in the best position to support their employees’ needs.
Making time for reskilling and upskilling
Moving toward digitization saves time and energy for HR staff, who would have otherwise been knee-deep in manual processes. They can instead be able to invest that energy to the company’s efforts in either upskilling workers or realigning them to new roles by means of reskilling. These training initiatives have their own implications pertaining to mental health.
According to a study by the University of Manchester, staying at a bad job can be worse for one’s mental health than not having a job at all. These findings reinforce the idea that HR professionals must also be responsible for making sure that the jobs that are to be worked, are ‘good quality’ jobs. Being able to equip employees with additional skills can help steer organizations away from stockpiling talent that’s prone to job dissatisfaction.
With an HRMS, a company can manage talent better not only by making workflows and approvals seamless, but by also having a comprehensive database for worker competencies. Learning management systems (LMS) have also emerged as another area where top leaders put their money in—with the global market size projected to grow from $18 billion in 2023 to $47 billion by 2030. This is all to say that going digital with HR can only mean deeper interdependence between people management and people development.
How Payruler Can Help You Focus on The Things That Matter
While a comprehensive HRMS and payroll system like Payruler can help your company attain its goals on mental health, it can also become a reliable tool in achieving business goals. One helpful way to attain these goals is to utilize local HRMS in such a way that it becomes rooted in a strategic position.
At the end of the day, business goals are what really matter. More often than not, HR becomes an underutilized ally in strategic planning. With the transactional nature of their work, they are left to focus on operational goals, such as making processes more efficient and reducing bureaucracy.
It doesn’t have to be this way for your organization.
Payruler collaborates with your company’s HR in great detail to customize solutions that suit your requirements. Its Software as a Service (SaaS) model facilitates data storage and backup through the cloud.
If your company aims to go paperless, improve data security, and demand accurate computation and reporting, then Payruler is the HRMS platform for you. Payruler seeks to help your company optimize your HR management system, and pave the way for outcome-led HR.
Transform your HR team. Elevate them to become focused on the outcome, and not just on the transaction. Redefine what it means for HR to be ‘business partners’ and invest in the best tools available. Book a demo here.