Closing the “Growth Gap”: How Paycom’s automation can help you reclaim your work week

TL;DR

• Scaling a workforce increases administrative overhead, creating a gap between a company’s headcount capacity and actual productive output.
• Companies reported using an average of 6.17 different HCM providers,* leading to duplicated work and scattered employee data.
• Managers lose valuable time manually processing repetitive, rule-based micro-decisions like timecards and time-off approvals.
• Simply moving paper processes online doesn’t remove the workload; true automation is required to handle predictable tasks without human intervention.

In an ideal world, hiring more people should give a growing business more capacity. Each new employee also brings more payroll data, time-off requests, expenses, schedules and day-to-day administration, much of which can end up spread across different HR systems.

In a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Paycom, organisations reported using an average of 6.17 human capital management (HCM) providers to manage the employee life cycle.*

The result is a “Growth Gap” between the capacity a business has and the time its people can actually put to productive use. Automation offers one way to reclaim some of that time.

The hidden cost of routine decisions

HR administration is unlikely to arrive as one huge task. More often, it builds through a steady stream of small decisions, such as approving time off and checking timecards.

For a growing business, the volume can really add up. Managers are pulled into many of the same processes, and HR teams can spend time moving information between fragmented systems or checking data before they can act.

Repeated micro-decisions and manual workarounds can also contribute to “decision fatigue,” gradually eating into the time available for more valuable work. Many of those decisions already follow company rules but still land with someone who has to approve them manually.

Some of these decisions do genuinely need a person involved; plenty are much more predictable. Automated tools are well-placed to help in these scenarios.

Digitising work isn’t the same as removing it

Moving an HR process online can make it quicker, but the workload often survives the transition. To take one example, a digital time-off request may still need a manager to check the employee’s allowance and company policy before approving it.

Paycom’s HR and payroll tools utilize full-solution automation, built on a single database, so information entered in one part of the software can flow into others without repeated re-entry. Automated processes can draw on the same underlying workforce data.

Paycom’s full-solution automation draws on that shared data to keep processes moving across the software, reducing the manual hand-offs that can remain even after an HR workflow has moved online.

Let the rules handle the routine

Some HR decisions follow rules that a business has already set. Time-off requests, for instance, can depend on an employee’s available leave as well as staffing requirements, seniority and consecutive days requested.

Paycom’s Time-Off Requests featuring GONE® applies those criteria through automated decisioning logic. Its guided setup lets organisations configure decision criteria around their own time-off policies and coverage needs, after which GONE® can approve or deny eligible requests in real time, using AI to evaluate decisions based on capacity, team coverage, policy and more rules set by your organisation. Employees receive a decision straight away, while managers avoid another request sitting in a queue waiting for attention.

Once those criteria are in place, managers can effectively delegate predictable cases to the software as they arrive. Human attention can then stay with requests that require judgement.

Closing the “Growth Gap”

The value of this automation shows up in what HR teams and managers can do with the time it frees. HR can spend more of the week on workforce planning or direct employee support, while managers have fewer routine approvals competing for attention.

Among the organisations interviewed in a Nucleus Research study commissioned by Paycom, overall productivity gains reached up to 64%. Reclaiming that capacity gives a growing business more room to absorb the administration that comes with additional people and complexity.

Making growth easier to absorb

A company’s growth will almost always create more administration; the key is making sure it doesn’t scale at the same rate as headcount.

The more routine decisions a business can handle automatically, the easier it becomes to add employees without creating a matching layer of approvals and HR workload.

Paycom’s single database keeps workforce information connected across payroll and HR, while automation can deal with routine decisions before they reach a manager’s desk.

As the organisation grows, that leaves more of its existing capacity available for the work that growth was supposed to enable in the first place.