Don't automate broken processes—follow these process improvement steps first to lay a strong groundwork for automation success.
We recently spoke with an HR professional who watched an automation project spiral into chaos. His organization skipped the hard work of process improvement and simply dropped automation into the existing HR process environment.
The result was a confusing tangle of duplicative workflows, inconsistent practices and new forms of waste that didn’t exist before.
Mature HR teams know that you shouldn’t automate a broken process. Doing so will only accelerate problems that already exist or even add new ones.
When we surveyed HR leaders about the initiatives they are undertaking to support HR process automation, standardizing and optimizing HR processes was the most common response.
Author's summary: Improve processes before automating them.