SHRM 21 Recap: Top Takeaways from “Leveraging Automation to Bring the Humanity Back to HR”

Earlier this month, JazzHR’s SVP of Human Resources Corey Berkey joined our partners at Pipefy at SHRM’s annual conference – a popular HR conference – in Las Vegas.

Together with Pipefy’s Strategic Account Executive Nick Rivera and Head of Customer Success Stanley Quan, Corey led a session on the power of automation in enabling HR professionals to take a more strategic role in the organization.

Your SHRM Recap

Wish you had caught this session live? We’ve got you covered. Here are the top takeaways from “Leveraging Automation to Bring the Humanity Back to HR”:

HR is often overstretched and under-resourced

Effective HR is critical to even the smallest business’s success, but this function is chronically under-resourced. In fact, 40% of small and mid-sized business owners are responsible for all HR functions. This was a key takeaway from the SHRM conference.

As a result, HR professionals are forced to balance competing priorities in a number of different areas, including:

Planning and strategizing – (e.g. labor forecasting and assessment, retention and engagement, etc.)
Communicating across the organization – (e.g. distributing policies and procedures, facilitating collaboration, announcing organizational changes, etc.)
Analyzing and optimizing – (e.g. collecting data, tracking KPIs, analyzing trends)

Their workflows are notoriously disjointed

HR maintains vital functions that support the entire organization’s success. From recruiting and staffing to compliance to benefits and performance management, its responsibilities are varied and far-reaching.

But the processes and systems HR teams juggle in order to operate are most often cumbersome. Many teams still rely on spreadsheets to track hiring progress, send a series of ad-hoc emails to onboard new hires, and lack any centralized tool for employee feedback.

Not automating has major consequences

Not automating HR workflows can negatively impact the department, employees, and organization as a whole. From a time perspective, HR professionals who don’t automate processes lose an average of 14 hours per week.

Beyond hours lost, a lack of automation also leads to:

Loss of productivity
Data entry errors
Reduced morale and retention
Poor candidate and new-hire onboarding experiences
Lack of insight into data and analytics

Automation is key to boosting connection

The biggest takeaway from the SHRM conference was automation. While it may seem counterintuitive, increasing automation has a direct correlation with HR’s ability to focus more on the human side of HR.