Every business process is important, but we think it’s possible to identify specific ‘top processes’ for each department. One that adds the most value to both employees and the business as a whole.
This series of blog posts looks at those top processes across the line of business and asks: What happens if we manage, automate, and optimize this process?
Check out our post on automating the top customer service process: customer communication.
In this post, we look at the top HR process: HR compliance
The Many Areas of HR Compliance
At its center, HR is about maintaining the well-being of the people within a business throughout their employment, from hiring to offboarding. HR departments will inevitably deal with the personal information of former, current, and prospective employees.
Perhaps the most important aspect of HR compliance is the responsibility of keeping personal and sensitive information private and secure. This is more pertinent than ever with new international data regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), of which non-compliance can cause severe damage to an organization.
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA): Ensuring employees are properly rewarded with overtime pay.
- Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA): Protecting employees from the loss of a job due to extended time off due to family or medical reasons.
- Federal Civil Rights: Protecting employees from discrimination when being hired or fired.
HR Compliance and the GDPR
The GDPR affects any US company (and any company in the world) that deals with the personal data of EU citizens. There are two key areas which, as well as being HR compliance best practice, are crucial to avoid significant fines.
- Accountability
It is the ‘Accountability and governance’ principles that are most important for HR compliance. Accountability states that organizations must be able to demonstrate compliance, rather than just ‘agreeing’ that regulations are being met. This boils down to stringent auditing of information. For the HR department, that involves recording all the steps individuals must take to meet requirements and to make them easily accessible when they are needed.
- Consent
Under the GDPR, consent takes center stage. HR professionals must assure organizations have explicit and affirmative consent from any subject for which they hold information. Consent can be removed by the individual at any time, as they see fit, meaning the proper archiving, deletion, and general organization of personal data is paramount.
HR departments must therefore ensure careful auditing and precise organization and management of personal data. But these tasks are made that much harder when the processes that underpin them are conducted manually (or even worse, remain paper-based).
For example: documenting each and every act of processing personal information or finding a customer’s personal information stored in lengthy email chains when they request it be deleted.
These problems can be avoided or removed completely by automating HR compliance processes.
Automating HR Compliance
At a fundamental level, automated workflows replace paper documents with digital files, which can be routed appropriately and safely to the correct location. Most businesses, though, have already moved on from paper-based processes. For digital files, workflows automation can apply the right governance policies—from archival to deletion—giving HR professionals valuable peace of mind knowing that important personal information is taken care of.
Here’s an example:
Hamra Enterprises—an owner of over 160 franchise restaurants—employ more than 5,000 individuals, all of which were still filling out hardcopy timesheets and manually sending them to HR. This labor-intensive approach was making it more difficult for the HR department to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act that affected tax regulation for employee overtime.
Using Advanced Workflows, Hamra Enterprises were able to digitally automate a critical employee timekeeping process that reduced data input errors and ensured overtime hours were accurately and efficiently captured via Nintex Forms.
Become an HR Compliance Hero
Compliance is in the limelight now more than ever, and that means there is more work going on behind the scenes to make sure organizations can keep up with the latest regulations. Workflow automation can do much of the heavy lifting for HR departments, freeing them up to focus more on the well-being of each person within the business and other tasks of higher value.
Nintex is a world leader in workflow automation. Our solutions fit the mold of every department, including Human Resources. See how the Nintex workflow platform can mitigate common problems and expedite processes around other areas of HR compliance:
- Onboarding: Hiring a new employee requires forms, approvals, equipment, and time. A workflow automation system can alert relevant departments and trigger multiple onboarding processes with clicks, not code.
- Leave Requests: Eliminate paper-based, manual leave requests that create administrative overheads and result in regulatory noncompliance.
- Performance Reviews: Improve visibility into the review process to ensure HR policy compliance.
The Nintex Workflow Platform includes many features, from advanced workflows to document generation and mobile apps. Find out more here or request a demo today.
