How to Establish Effective Workflows in an Automated Employee and Labor Relations System

One of the primary benefits of shifting form manual case tracking to automated systems for employee and labor relations is the implementation of workflows. Predefined workflows, standardized throughout an agency, can increase case tracking efficiency, minimize bottlenecks, and improve supervisor visibility into the system.

To ensure your organization receives these benefits, however, it is important that you invest time in planning workflows before implementation.

Ensuring Detail Within a Workflow

Workflow detail has several impacts on the performance of your new system. The level of detail you put into the steps of your workflow, the language used to describe these steps, and the processes by which your HR specialists manage them will ultimately determine how granular your reporting can be, and how useful it will be for your management team.

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This means investing time in evaluating the specific gaps you currently have in your manual processes. Where are you most frequently losing data or lacking insights into specialist performance or communications bottlenecks? Build your workflows to account for these gaps.

Keep Your Descriptions Short and Direct

The verbiage used to describe each step in a workflow needs to walk a fine line between concise and descriptive. The language needs to be detailed enough for everyone using the tool to fully understand the purpose of each step in a workflow, but not so detailed as to slow down the process.

There is no ideal word count to aim for when mapping these steps, but keep in mind the importance of concise verbiage that accurately reflects the purpose of the new steps in your system. What do specialists need to know to do their job?

Build a System that Supports Good Reporting

Manual systems have several blind spots. They are often unable to account for time spent communicating with outside parties and provide poor visibility into the bottlenecks that slow down a case. Does one HR specialist have too large of a workload? Does a certain type of case require more time or outside intervention to ensure efficient processing? Supervisors often do not know the answers to these questions.

An automated system addresses several of these issues by standardizing the collection of data and the steps through which a case is processed. When workflows are well mapped and representative of every point at which management needs reporting, metrics are much easier to evaluate.

Maximizing Value from Automated Employee and Labor Relations

Whether your agency is struggling to make improvements due to the inefficiency of existing systems or you want to explore options that will increase visibility into potential bottlenecks, there are several reasons to consider a workflow-based automated solution. Learn more about the key benefits of such a system in our eBook, The Benefits of Migrating Employee and Labor Relations to an Automated System or contact us directly and ask to speak with an employee and labor relations expert about our module in FedHR Navigator.