A Guide to Streamlining Your HR Process Mapping

Key takeaways
- HR process mapping can be defined as the process of documenting tasks, workflows, and activities involved in a process that is managed by human resources professionals.
- HR process maps help standardize your work with everything documented you can easily identify changes when the process is disrupted due to personnel changes.
- HR process maps that you create can act as templates for mapping employee onboarding and termination, communicating about projects, updating candidate information, and much more.
- Cflow’s intuitive workflow management software allows you to easily create, automate, and streamline your processes.
Still, using sticky notes? Time to ditch them and embrace business process mapping.
What is business process mapping? Process mapping is seen as an effective way for businesses to understand how each department communicates and works together to achieve common business goals. This cannot be done using pen and paper so having a process mapping tool is a necessity.
In any business organization, the human resource department handles some of the complex and sensitive business processes – recruiting the right people for the business. Starting from screening to onboarding them, it is a long process that involves help from multiple departments.
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The HR department in your organization needs to be proactive to play a strategic role in enhancing your business. The success, effectiveness, and efficiency of your organization highly depend on the quality of the people that you hire. If you don’t have a solid HR process mapping it will have a serious impact on the candidate experience.
But don’t worry there are plenty of tools to simplify your mapping process. In this blog, we’ll see in detail what an HR processing map is, why is it important for your organization, and how it enhances your organization’s efficiency.
HR Process Map – Defined
Before defining HR process mapping, let’s take a look at some of the operational departments that come directly or indirectly under the control of your HR department. It includes:
- Job Classification
- Recruitment
- Hiring
- Onboarding and offboarding
- Probation management
- Resignations and terminations
- Employee records management
- Payroll
- Time and leave reporting
- Career planning
- Training and development
- Performance and appraisals
- Project management
- Client management
- Resources Scheduling
- Positions budgeting and control
- Compliance
- Healthcare planning
In a broad perspective, the above list indicates the role of HR in taking care of some of these business processes. If not done effectively, it might pose some serious risk to organizational performance.
HR process mapping can be defined as the process of documenting tasks, workflows, and activities involved in a process that is managed by human resources professionals.
So before settling into doing HR process mapping, you need to ask yourself certain questions:
- Why is it imperative for an organization to execute various HR business processes/functions?
- What advantages and financial returns does an organization benefit from the comprehensive implementation of HR business processes?
- How does organizational performance get affected when only a subset of HR business processes is carried out?
- What measures can the HR department adopt to overcome obstacles and address the factors preventing the complete implementation of all HR business processes?
To answer the above questions you need to have certain analysis tools:
- HR Business Processes Performance Impact Relationship Matrix: with the help of this matrix managers can easily understand the relationship between different HR processes and their consequential impact on each other.
- HR Business Processes Risk Analysis Matrix: this matrix helps managers identify risks and potential consequences when certain processes are not conducted correctly.
- HR Business Processes Deployment Cost Matrix: as you can see this matrix helps managers to know the cost of deploying each process and how useful it would be for organizational performance.
The combination of these matrices will help managers to develop a comprehensive HR business process map which they can use to demonstrate the importance of having HR business processes, their impact on organizational goals and objectives, revenue, and other KPIs to the senior management.
Signs of a Failing HR Department
Have you ever asked yourself at work what the HR department is doing or thought if something is wrong with the HR department? Well, it is the first sign of a failing HR department.
A well-run HR department in a company can make a huge positive impact on the employees. Legal problems will be taken care of, financial issues can be avoided, candidate experiences can be improved, employees can feel productive and help them grow in their careers and also clients will notice the improved organizational culture. But in reality, not all HR departments are as successful as they should be. Some of the failure symptoms include:
- Reduced employee engagement – communication is the highest level of management in any organization and if it is ineffective, then it can cause tons of problems. Employee engagement is crucial for any business to be successful. A failing HR department lacks communication and transparency which will lead to disengagement and lack of appreciation increases employee turnover significantly.
- Increased employee turnover – if employees are frequently fired or leave the organization, then it is a sign of a bad HR department. This affects work culture as new employees are not properly onboarded and not the right people with the skills suitable for the job.
- Faulty decisions – poor hiring decisions seriously affect business performance. Employees are the assets of the organization and it is highly essential to choose the right talent. Poor hiring decisions can lead to increased turnover, reduced employee morale, and reduced employee engagement which affects the business’s overall reputation.
- Finally, inefficient HR process – with the world getting digitized and AI taking over everywhere it is important to switch to digital over manual processing at the earliest. Since the HR department is responsible for hiring, onboarding, performance management, and employee relations inefficient HR business process leads to a waste of talent, money, and productivity.
To overcome the above-mentioned failures you need a powerful business process management tool like Cflow. With Cflow you can effortlessly streamline and standardize your HR processes effectively.
Benefits of HR Process Map
There are several benefits of HR process mapping such as:
1. Ensures standardization
HR process maps help standardize your work with everything documented you can easily identify changes when the process is disrupted due to personnel changes. This helps managers maintain and provide a positive experience for their employees.
2. Compliance
With proper HR processing in place, you can ensure compliance is taken care of. These act as compliance tools helping standardize the employment procedures and providing the best candidate experience.
3. Accountability
With everything documented accountability increases as it becomes simpler to see who has been assigned with responsibilities and tasks.
4. Eliminating organizational silos
This is one of the many challenges that the HR department faces in an organization. Having a standard HR process mapping procedure helps overcome organizational silos and ensures better collaboration and communication between departments.
5. Seamless progressing
With process maps visualization becomes simple which helps new hires and stakeholders understand how a particular process works. This improves knowledge sharing and communication and enables seamless progress in terms of workflow. Sometimes process map diagrams illustrate the relationship between data, systems, people, document, and their activities to orient employees to the process effortlessly.
6. Process duplication
HR process maps that you create can act as templates for mapping employee onboarding and termination, communicating about projects, updating candidate information, and much more. Workflows can be simplified as HR can simply use the template to explain things better to new employees on how to complete the projects.
7. Process improvement
Process maps give a bird’s eye view of the process from start to finish which helps people to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and other weak points and overcome them effectively. Once they are identified they can be ensured that issues are taken care of for future processes.
Getting Started with HR Process Mapping
The HR process mapping is a detailed and structured process that enhances all your HR operations. These are the steps that you need to follow:
The procedure starts with planning. You need to identify what process that needs to be improved. Whether it is onboarding recruitment or leave requests? You need to ensure that the process that you pick is mappable and it needs absolute optimization.
After picking the process you need to discuss it with the team members and ensure that all are on par with it. When you discuss it with the relevant team members and stakeholders you need to provide them with clear instructions on the process mapping. In addition to this, you need to collect all the necessary information required for the process mapping to avoid unnecessary delays.
To avoid failures make a list of all the steps involved in your process map. This list will provide clear instructions to the team members and also sets a clear outline giving a visual understanding to the stakeholders. This list should also tell each member that are accountable for their respective tasks.
Once all is set now start the mapping process. You can begin by creating a flowchart with the beginning and ending points. You can always fill out the rest of the gaps in the flowchart one by one after each discussion and finalizing the decision.
Once the flowchart has been completed, it’s time to review it. This will help you to identify any inaccuracies if any information is left out. Reviewing it will help map out the sequence of tasks easily and also give the team members a sense of confidence in proceeding with the newly created workflow.
Upon reviewing and discussing you receive a lot of feedback from your team members and stakeholders. All this feedback should be taken into consideration and necessary changes should be made to the process map. This will ensure that all the team members are on the same page with the workflow and that the workflow is getting optimized for a better outcome. Upon making the changes you need to submit the workflow for approval.
When the workflow is finally approved by every single approver it is time to test the modified workflow. This is a crucial step as it reveals how effective the new workflow is with the employees and what should be improved in the future. Testing it in a controlled environment gives a sense of better understanding of what needs to be changed and how it can be optimized for better performance.
When you test the newly created workflow in a controlled environment you will receive a lot of feedback and comments from the test team. Making the necessary changes will enhance the efficiency and usability of the workflow for real user experience. Once you fine-tune the the process by implementing the comments from the test team the newly created HR workflow will become the standard practice in your organization. This will help your HR team to achieve your goal effectively.
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How Workflow Automation Helps HR Operations
Most organizations stick to document document-driven approach when it comes to managing their human capital and resources. The approvals must pass through several hierarchical levels which impacts the decision-making process. Though these checkpoints reduce the decision-making speed it is done in the best interest of the organization as a whole.
This approach will not always be handy and reduces your game before your competitors. Therefore, it is highly essential to automate your HR processes. HR workflow automation will eliminate any existing complexities and help develop an automated structure.
To automate your HR processes, you will need a robust tool like Cflow. Cflow is a cloud-based no-code workflow automation tool that offers complete automation and customized functionality to increase the efficiency of your HR operations.
It comes with tremendous benefits and thousands of templates with complete customization options which can be used by any user even without extensive technical/coding knowledge.
To simplify your HR operations, Cflow offers a number of predefined templates including –
- Employee onboarding
- Leave application process
- Timesheet approval process
- Recruitment
- Vehicle Request
- Team activity planner
- Employee data change
- Expense reimbursement
- Performance improvement
- Asset check-out
- Employee exit process
- Academic training
And many other customizable templates based on your organizational needs. For instance, Cflow offers a great predefined template for onboarding your new employees.
The template comprises fields that can be modified using the drag-and-drop option. You can initiate this workflow by simply importing it where the candidate details will be filled automatically and can be stored in the cloud. This template can be used with other HR workflows to create your process map where all information can be stored and be given access control to approvers and stakeholders.
HR Process Mapping with Cflow
Take control of your workflow today with Cflow! If you are ready to evaluate different workflows and evaluate different HR workflow solutions, we’ve got you covered. Cflow’s intuitive workflow management software allows you to easily create, automate, and streamline your processes.
Using workflow automation tools like Cflow simplifies process mapping as it offers comprehensive functionality to do things with a simple click. Cflow is a cloud-based no-code workflow automation software that offers limitless and robust features to perform specific tasks that optimize your organization’s performance.
Conclusion
The HR department in your organization needs to be proactive to play a strategic role in enhancing your business. The success, effectiveness, and efficiency of your organization highly depend on the quality of the people that you hire. If you don’t have a solid HR process mapping it will have a serious impact on the candidate experience.
Be it a small, medium, or enterprise, Cflow is the best process mapping tool that can be leveraged. Get your hands on it by signing up now!
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