Dive Brief:
- A new Paychex survey found that 20% of small businesses lack confidence in their organization's ability to keep up with HR compliance. The HR functions that small businesses have the least confidence in are onboarding (38%), employee handbooks (36%), and background checks (26%).
- Paychex points out the consequences of non-compliance, such as costly penalties and fines. The employers polled cited the following top three employer regulations they're either not abiding by or not aware of: employing youth (42%), employee classification (37%) and overtime (36%).
- According to the study, only 30% of small businesses use technology for onboarding, and 38% are still tracking attendance and time manually, rather than using technology for the task. Automating HR functions would likely raise small employers' confidence in keeping up and complying with employment laws.
Dive Insight:
Automation is freeing up HR professionals for more strategic functions. It's appropriate, given HR pros' role in their organizations has extended beyond clerical and administrative tasks to long-range planning and aligning HR goals with organizational goals.
New and improved tech platforms have made it so that employers can handle its tons of data without errors — and unfortunately common side-effect when such processes are completed manually. Technology can cut down on errors for more accurate record-keeping, but until recently, most tech platforms were largely inaccessible for most SMBs.
Now, with a recent boom in HR tech innovation, SMBs have seen the light, for the most part. And that innovation will only continue. Artificial intelligence, for example, has made gains in recruiting that can help small businesses speed up the process and attract high-quality candidates.
Automating HR functions has been identified with increasing employee engagement. Small businesses on tight budgets with limited resources can benefit from newly offered platform tech with good user experience. Such offerings are much more common nowadays.
