What HRIS is and why your company needs it
In the business world, we are past the point where HR was only a back office mainly responsible for administrative tasks. Today, Human Resources Management (HRM) is responsible not only for transactional activities such as preparing contracts, keeping employees’ records, payroll, etc. but also for strategic activities including talent acquisition and retention, succession planning, and training and development of employees.
The key role of HRM has been continuously detected in the success of companies; therefore, it stands to reason that HR department contributes to both the administrative tasks at a functional level and the decision-making process at a strategic level. The main question then arises here: How can companies enable their HR department to be more involved in strategic planning? This is when Human Resource Management system HRIS comes into play.
HRIS is a software solution integrating HR data and processes in order to boost the effectivity and efficiency of the HR functions. By entering the data and defining the processes in an HRIS, the system will store and structure these data, which can be later tracked and retrieved. However, this is a basic function of HRIS; such a system offers more functionalities and benefits a handful of which is as follows:
Recruiting and Selection: In the staffing process, HRIS can be used as a tracking system through which candidates submit their applications. The system then eliminates the applications without the basic requirements and produces a pool of likelier hires. However, you need to be careful with this feature, as you may lose good candidates just because they didn’t use some specific keywords in their applications.
Performance Reviews and Training: HRIS gives managers and employees the opportunity to set goals and keep track of the progress towards them. Having tracked and analyzed this progress, managers are able to provide their subordinates with immediate feedback through the system. Furthermore, HRIS allows managers to precisely identify the training or promotion needs of their employees, and thus to be able to design the succession planning accordingly.
Payroll, Compensation and Benefits Administration: Given the defined organizational compensation and benefits policies in the system, it gathers payroll information on every employee, such as working times, absence or leave, tax, etc., and thereby automatically producing the payroll check for them. Completion of this process through the system, which takes almost no time, eliminates a huge amount of work for HR department.
Communication: Thanks to HRIS, many bottlenecks have been eradicated from work communication. HR employees are less likely to need to wait for their teammates to hand over paper documents. By applying deadlines and sending reminders to people, the system speeds up the HR processes.
Employees Self Service: The ESS application of HRIS enables staff to add, modify and update their personal information themselves at any time.
Better Data Management, Less Paper Consumption: Last but not least, companies can electronically store and share documents such as contracts and pay slips on their (cloud-base) HRIS as a single secured online location, which in turn simplifies the control and management of the documents, while reducing the paper usage to a great extent.
Given the benefits of HRIS and its positive impacts on organizational performance supported by many studies, any company needs to choose and implement an HRIS (considering the size, cost, objectives, etc.) for two main reasons:
Creating a more efficient HR
HRIS frees HR teams from the burden of the transactional tasks, prevents mistakes to which manual transactions are liable, provides HR with less paperwork and finally allows them to invest more time in higher-impact activities.
Creating a more intelligent HR
By integrating the data across the company, analyzing these data and generating relevant reports, HRIS gives HR invaluable insights into their organizations and workforce, which can be employed to better link HR strategies with company’s mission.