How HR robotics can be good for people

Getting results from hiring

As well as helping startups, HR automation makes sense for companies that have to recruit thousands of people each year. Florida-based The Results Companies runs 30 contact centres in four countries employing nearly 30,000 people, interviewing some 50,000 every year and hiring about a quarter of them.

The ability to offer a job quickly makes it more likely it will be accepted, says chief experience officer Lori Brown. “It is key that when we find the right person, we submit the offer and get them going within our systems, because we don’t want to lose them,” she says.

The Results Companies hires staff to work for specific clients and they often have direct access to those clients’ systems, so it is important that it shuts access promptly when employees leave. So when the firm started using RPA software from US supplier Nice, it did so by automating processes involved in joining and leaving the company, which previously had been carried out manually by a team of about 12 staff.

The software now allows the company to get someone ready to start work in about 24 hours, and also means the same data is entered into different systems, helping to protect against fraud. “If you have a manual process to enter data into multiple systems, there is always the risk of fat-fingering,” says chief technology officer Bill Gardner, who adds that HR is “an obvious candidate” for automation.

The company has since extended its use of automation to other areas, such as automatically entering account numbers into multiple client systems and generating emails to clients’ internal teams to remind them to provide information for customers.

But it has also found another HR application – “adherence”, or timekeeping. Contact centre staff need to work precise hours, even in terms of when they take breaks, to ensure contracted levels of coverage. An automated process now automatically reports when an employee is “out of adherence”, something that Brown says has resulted in some improved performances on this measure.

Brown says the best processes to automate are repetitive, non-complex ones that have consistent sources of input. “If you find a unique process where it’s only one person doing one single thing in one single place, it’s not necessarily a great candidate,” she says. “But where you find an organisation like HR, which has candidates around the world doing similar processes, having to take the same information and placing it in multiple targets and having to do it with accuracy – that’s definitely an obvious place where we can make a big difference.”

Services to people with autism

Organisations with a lot of specialist staff may also have good reasons to automate HR. Autism Plus, a charity that provides care and employment support services to people with autism in Yorkshire and Humberside, spends about £900,000 a year on agency workers in addition to employing 450 people. “Our focus as a care organisation has been on meeting demand and growing,” says chief executive Philip Bartey. “We’ve largely grown based on paper-based systems, along with office software such as Microsoft SharePoint.”

Having initially looked at improving management information, AutismPlus is in the process of a general overhaul of its back office using new IT, including the introduction of Salesforce’s customer relationship management software. On HR, it is working with Belfast-based Kainos to implement software from Californian provider Workday, with its choice based partly on its compatibility with Salesforce.

Bartey says the new software should provide better management information, improved recruitment processes and greater abilities to attract and retain staff.

Specific improvement should involve asking staff why they took time off sick and whether it was related to work, says Bartey. “There’s a whole plethora of stuff we’re not catching because of this paper chase,” he adds.

It should also save time for staff, most of whom deliver care in people’s homes, as they will be able to provide and request information online, he says. “We have people now spending all day filling in paperwork when they should be caring for individuals.”

The organisation also plans to automate the production of rotas, using software from Humanity, a San Francisco-domiciled, cloud-based shift scheduling provider.

Bartey says AutismPlus negotiated a significant discount from Workday, which he sees as a long-term partner. This matters, because central government decisions on funding have made money very tight for UK social care providers for more than a decade, discouraging many organisations from modernising their administration. “Most need to digitalise, they recognise that, but they can’t find the funding for it,” he says. “You’re not making the margins you need to make as an organisation to invest in your future.”

Södertälje in Sweden

Government organisations may not have to consider profits and margins, but Sweden’s Södertälje municipality has also started using automation in HR. The local authority, which serves an area west of Stockholm, made its first use of RPA software from Finland-based provider Digital Workforce with two payroll processes for staff paid by the hour, absence reporting and ending employment.

This has saved almost all of the equivalent of one person’s time. “It’s a huge, huge difference and we’ve only just started out,” says Maria Dahl Torgerson, Södertälje’s communications and digitisation manager.

The municipality is using RPA more broadly, and is experimenting with software picking a time for staff to visit elderly people who are applying for funding for taxis to attend medical appointments, for example. Its software robot – named Ragnhild after a saint and queen of Sweden who is believed to have founded Södertälje’s medieval church – picks free times from staff calendars and prints appointment letters, although these are checked by humans before sending.

Torgerson says some processes resist automation. In some cases, including in payroll, the organisation uses old IT systems where it would be too expensive to set up automation, in which case the authority will wait for these to be replaced. In others, such as a process for providing short-term unemployment welfare payments, automation is possible, but with just 10% of applications made online, it is not yet worth the cost of setting it up. There will be a business case when this rises to 25%,.

As well as starting to use RPA in its administration of people, Torgerson sees RPA as vital in solving a massive people problem. Many richer countries have ageing populations and this means that organisations with social responsibilities will have to serve more retired people with fewer working-age ones.

“I think this is the way forward to do something about the ageing population,” she says. “Due to the demographic future, we have no other choice. Instead of software robots like Ragnhild taking over our jobs, they may help to ensure we receive the support we need after we retire.”