More and more companies including small and medium-sized businesses are investing in digitalizing HR processes. Moving from scattered Excel sheets to a dedicated HR platform is a big step forward for any business. However, the HR digital transformation process doesn’t always go as smoothly as planned.
To be truly successful, digital transformation should deliver these three key outcomes:
- Free Up the HR Teams: The HR department should be freed from repetitive low-value tasks, allowing them to focus more on strategic and people-focused activities—taking better care of employees and candidates.
- Better Data and Insights: The company should gain access to more comprehensive information and high-quality data on both candidates and employees.
- Boost Engagement and Satisfaction: Employees and candidates should experience greater engagement and satisfaction through smoother, more efficient processes—whether it’s applying for jobs, requesting time off, submitting expenses, updating personal details, accessing pay slips, attending training sessions, or navigating performance management systems.
Achieving these goals becomes much easier by adhering to these five key guidelines.
1. Don’t Configure Your HR Platform Alone
Unless you’re a micro-business with extremely simple processes and minimal data, it’s essential to choose an HR tech provider that offers professional configuration services.
Here’s why:
- Focus on What Really Matters: The goal of HR digitalization is to free up time for HR professionals to focus on their core responsibilities—people. That’s hard to do if you’re spending all your time setting up a platform. Even if you’re familiar with the tools and the software is intuitive, configuring processes like attendance tracking or performance management can be time-consuming, especially when company rules are complex.
- Let the Experts Handle It: Configuring an HR platform isn’t your job. Just like your IT team handles systems or you call a plumber for specialized tasks, setting up the platform should be done by the provider’s consultants. They know the system inside and out and can configure it faster and more accurately.
An HR professional who focuses on mapping employee skills and planning for reskilling and upskilling should understand better than anyone the value of delegating tasks to the right experts.
While it’s entirely possible to learn how to customize your platform—most providers offer training for HR teams to do just that—the bulk of the initial setup is best left to professionals.
The benefits of investing in professional configuration are substantial. Not only does it ensure your processes are perfectly customized to fit your company’s needs, but it also prevents the HR team from becoming overwhelmed. In the long run, this approach saves time on daily tasks and maximizes the return on investment, making it well worth the initial investment.
2. Eliminate Manual Interventions Wherever Possible
When digitalizing HR processes, it’s always best to go all the way and automate every step. A mixed approach—where some tasks are automated and others still require manual intervention—often leads to inefficiencies and oversights.
These problems usually arise when companies opt for “standard” platforms that lack the flexibility to adapt to specific company rules, policies, or needs. This can be due to either technological limitations or a lack of service support.
For very small companies, it might make sense not to fully digitalize every process. For example, a company with fewer than ten employees might decide against investing in a costly integration between its attendance tracking system and payroll software. Instead, they could simply download the attendance data at the end of the month and email it to their payroll consultant. In situations like this where the effort is minimal, this approach can be practical.
However, if your attendance system is generating daily anomalies because it can’t accommodate your specific rules—such as flexible hours, premium calculations, or ticket allocations—the risk of costly errors affecting both business expenses and employee paychecks becomes much higher.
Additionally, you’ll still be spending time on repetitive tasks you thought digitalization would eliminate.
Investing in a fully customizable platform and working with a provider who is willing to adjust the software to meet your specific needs offers much greater confidence in the success and long-term sustainability of your HR digitalization project.
3. Choose a Provider with Reliable Support
HR processes are mission-critical, and any technical issues or uncertainties with the systems that support them require swift, effective resolution.
Problems that impact payroll, bonus distribution, or the hiring process can’t afford long, uncertain response times—they need fast, decisive action.
Before selecting your HR tech provider, be sure to ask the following questions about their support services:
- What channels are available for contacting support?
- What are the guaranteed response and resolution times?
- Where is the support team located, and which languages do they support?
- What types of requests can be handled by customer support?
- If we require configuration changes that we don’t want to handle internally, is there a service available to assist us?
- Are there any support KPIs you can share with us?
4. Choose Complete Solutions
As mentioned earlier, one of the greatest benefits of HR digitalization is increased access to data along with powerful tools to analyze it.
However, harnessing HR analytics becomes far more complex when information and documents are scattered across multiple platforms, each with its own interface, technology, and logic.
For SMEs especially, opting for standalone software solutions and then integrating them is becoming a less viable option. This approach not only inflates the costs and timelines of the digitalization process but also complicates data analysis. Even larger companies are increasingly moving away from fragmented tech stacks, favoring comprehensive HRM suites like Altamira.
In addition to data volume, data quality is just as essential. A single unified platform reduces the risk of inconsistencies across different data sets, ensuring accuracy and reliability throughout the entire system.
Similarly, self-service solutions also offer significant advantages. Employees and candidates are often the first to spot any discrepancies in their personal data, and with a self-service platform, they can easily update their information in real-time, ensuring that records stay accurate and up to date.
5. Choose Solutions with Customizable Mobile Apps
To truly elevate the employee experience with HR processes—especially administrative tasks like clocking in, submitting time-off requests, and approving expenses—companies should prioritize solutions that include a native app for both Android and iOS.
Today, smartphones are the preferred and most commonly used interaction tool for most people. Not every employee has access to a computer at work, and some may not even have one at home. A smartphone, on the other hand, is almost always within reach.
Providing mobile access to HR systems means employees can easily clock in while on the go, request time off in just a few seconds, create expense reports the moment they incur a cost, and access their pay slips from anywhere.
This not only speeds up processes but also enhances the overall employee experience, contributing to stronger retention.
The same principle that applies to software holds true for mobile apps: when they’re tailored to your company’s specific workflows, the experience for both managers and employees becomes even more streamlined. Unlike web-based platforms, customization at this level is rare for smartphone HR apps—but that’s exactly what Altamira’s mobile app delivers.
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