When it comes to managing human resources, automated runbooks can be a huge help. They can automate common tasks and processes, making it easier for HR professionals to manage their workloads.
Some popular runbook use cases for HR include:
- Recruiting: Automate candidate interviews, hiring decisions, and salary offers
- Performance Management: Automate the review process and promote top-performing employees automatically
- Talent Acquisition: Create a streamlined onboarding experience for new hires.
- Benefits Administration: Manage employee benefits requests, including filing insurance claims automatically.
- Organizational Management: Automate new-hire paperwork and remove a few irksome manual tasks from the HR to-do list.
Some runbooks in this category even go a step further. They can be designed to combine multiple processes into a single, streamlined experience for the HR professional and the employee alike.
Once an automated HR process is in place, it\’s much easier to add features down the line. Runbooks are highly configurable – you can add or remove processes, trigger different actions for different users, link runbooks together to create a seamless experience throughout the onboarding process – anything you can imagine.
However, implementing runbooks to help manage your HR department isn\’t always easy. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind:
- • Structure your runbook directory well. You need to make it clear and organized, especially if you work with a lot of different scripts.
- Decide on integration and workflow processes. How do you want your HR runbooks to interact with other systems?
- Make sure your runbook versioning is in order. You need to be able to roll back changes in case an update causes a problem with another system.
- Determine how you want to monitor runbooks. Will you monitor them through email notifications? Automated chat messages? How will they integrate with other systems you use for monitoring purposes?
- Arrange access levels. You need to determine who will be allowed to make edits and updates to runbooks, and how restrictive you want their permissions to be.
- Understand your organization\’s HR needs: How much time do you spend on HR-related tasks? Which ones would runbook automation eliminate or reduce, and which could it not feasibly be used for?
Think about these things before you begin actually implementing runbooks to help manage your human resources department. If you take the time to do this legwork now, it will make things much easier later on.
