Eight Reasons Why Your Company Needs an HR System

Are you a manager with personnel responsibilities or an HR administrator? Do you and your colleagues spend more time on paperwork and manual routines than you'd like? Then, perhaps it's time to take the leap to a modern HR system. Here are eight compelling arguments for digitizing your HR work.

HR is becoming increasingly complex. HR departments and managers today need to keep routine administration running smoothly while working strategically and in the long term to ensure that the company achieves its employee satisfaction and development goals. Is your company equipped for these challenges, or is it time to fully embrace digitalization? To clarify any uncertainties that may still exist – here are eight reasons why a modern HR system is a wise investment for both small and large companies.

Eight Strong Arguments for Digitizing HR

1. Streamlined administration = more time for value-creating tasks

A typical day for an HR employee involves juggling various tasks – keeping information about personnel and employment updated, answering employee questions, providing managers with statistics and reports, handling employee meetings, and tracking courses, certificates, and competencies. This equation isn't always easy to balance – especially if the company lacks efficient digital tools or processes and data are scattered across multiple systems, causing unnecessary duplication of work.

To make it easier to manage the time puzzle in the HR department, it's a good idea to review all the recurring routines done manually and steal time from tasks that create real value. The principle is simple: when you digitize processes and data and consolidate them in an innovative and integrated HR system, you automate manual and repetitive tasks. This way, the company can save valuable time, and HR employees can focus on tasks where their expertise shines instead of entering data manually.

2. All employee information in one place

Each employee represents a vast amount of data that must constantly be kept up to date. Even with relatively few employees, most companies find it unsustainable to rely on spreadsheets and other manual methods.

Instead of wasting time on manual updates and navigating through an unstructured mess of files and folders, it's wise for the company to let the HR system do the job as a smart digital personnel archive – all information neatly organized and easily searchable in a single central database. Do you need access to data from an external system? No worries. For most modern system providers, there are no problems creating smooth automated data flows directly into your HR system through smart integrations and API connections.

3. Increased data security

GDPR, security, and data protection are high on the agenda for most companies today – regardless of size and type of business. Having sensitive personal data stored locally in spreadsheets, in binders, or in emails is impractical and poses significant security risks. However, with a modern HR solution, you and your employees can feel confident that you are working safely and GDPR-compliantly with your sensitive HR data.

4. Makes employees engaged

Newer HR systems often include features that enable employee self-service through role-based access. This means that the employees have access to and can maintain a selection of their own data in the personnel register, such as address and contact information, information about closest relatives, and documentation for staff appraisals and skills development. A smart way to reduce the HR department's workload and make HR information more transparent.

5. Helps you take control of your HR data

How does your company gather statistics and key figures to measure the company's performance? How do you ensure that important HR data is always up to date and available – for the right people at the right time? Many modern HR systems have smart features for compiling and analyzing data, such as a dashboard – a digital instrument panel that packages critical key figures, such as types of employment, sick leave, turnover, and reasons for departure, in an educational and intuitive interface.

The benefits are numerous: updated figures are just a click away, and you don't have to spend time producing physical reports and emailing them to the right people. Additionally, managers and leadership have a great tool for making well-informed decisions, proactively working on areas such as sick leave and turnover, and taking early action on unwanted changes.

6. Easier compliance with laws and regulations

Keeping track of the regulations within the HR area and ensuring that everything is handled correctly can be a real challenge for managers and HR professionals. Take, for example, the Employment Protection Act (LAS), which dictates what applies to employment and termination. With an HR system to lean on, you have a perfect overview of all the data related to your employment and access to a range of clever features that make the job faster, smoother – and above all, safer.

Another example is the annual pay equity analysis – mandatory for all employers according to the Discrimination Act. With system support for the pay equity analysis, you and your colleagues can eliminate cumbersome spreadsheets and confidently navigate the entire process, from mapping to analysis and documentation.

7. Gives you tools to retain and nurture your talent

Employees are the most critical asset of the business. In today's tough competition, it's important to be an attractive employer who sees each employee and provides them with the right conditions to perform and thrive in the company. Here, a modern HR system can be a really helpful tool on the way. Let's look at how!

Most systems now support competency management, making it easier and smoother for the company to map competencies and skills, ensure that you have the right person in the proper role, and work systematically with training plans and skills development.
Another important – but often demanding – task is all the administration surrounding the company's staff appraisals. By digitizing them with the help of a smart HR system, managers and employees can save a lot of time and energy in everything from preparation to execution and follow-up of the meetings.
Well-functioning onboarding ensures that your new hire quickly integrates into the work and company culture. But there is much to consider and many different roles involved in the onboarding process: it's easy to forget things. Here, an HR system with onboarding support can be an excellent help on the way. How about digital checklists and automatic reminders automatically pushed out to the right person at the right time?

8. Less paper hassle

Employment and confidentiality agreements, employment certificates, key and work phone receipts, forms for handling personal data... Managing all the paperwork that must be printed out, signed, emailed, or posted and archived can be quite a complex procedure. Moreover, it's not very secure from a GDPR perspective. Another good reason to use an HR system is that it usually comes with smart digital document management, where you can quickly generate your contracts and forms as PDFs with just a few clicks. A smart way to increase security and avoid all that paper handling, postal services, and archiving.

Want to learn more about how a smart HR system can make your daily life easier?

Flex HRM Employee is the HR system that gives you a complete toolbox for smooth and efficient management of the company's HR processes – from maintaining employee data and digital document management to support for competency management, staff appraisals, salary review, onboarding/offboarding, dashboard for important HR key figures – and much more.

Perhaps you would like to use HRM Employee as part of our complete HRM platform? In that case, you can benefit from all the advantages of collecting everything the company needs for its personnel administration in one comprehensive solution – with a unified interface and a shared database. Smart, isn't it? Contact us if you want to know more!