If you’re considering a move to the cloud for your HR systems, you’re not alone. The pandemic tested the HR profession, highlighting many weaknesses in formerly stable systems. In response, teams are engaging in digital transformation to support business resilience and employee needs in a remote work environment.

Digital transformation continues to accelerate and teams are adopting new technology, business models, and talent strategies to support long-term stability and growth. The 20s are shaping into the decade of HR, and it’s clear the future of enterprise software is the cloud. It’s not a question of if, but when and, more importantly, how and with which vendor. 

While the destination is the same, your journey to the cloud will be unique to you and your organization's needs. No matter what platform you choose to accelerate your HR cloud journey, this blog will give you a strong foundation with key takeaways for when you make the move. 

Embrace the Full Power of Cloud Solutions

Enterprise organizations across all industries are beginning to recognize the importance of shifting to the cloud but many aren’t taking advantage of its full capabilities. Many teams start their cloud journey by seeking a vendor who can replicate their existing customized on-premise systems and business process lifecycle only now, in the cloud. 

But this ignores the many opportunities to deliver new innovation, increased agility, and an exceptional employee-first experience over your peers. Regardless, the cloud can help teams cut costs through reduced infrastructure, seamless upgrades, and simple maintenance, but that only scratches the surface of the benefits. 

Optimize Your Existing HR Processes

While standardizing your business processes around industry-leading best practices is a great goal, every organization has its own systems set up and tailored to its needs. It’s important for organizations to remember this as they select a vendor. Teams should look for a solution that offers configuration options to tightly align with your existing HR infrastructure. Flexibility not only allows for more streamlined and efficient operations, it alleviates one of the biggest challenges of custom on-premise systems: lengthy, costly upgrades. 

Apply Understanding and Automation to Ensure Business Continuity and Seamlessly Transition

By now, most enterprise organizations understand the potential value automation can provide. Already, teams employ test automation heavily during migrations and even for day-to-day functionality across departments; HR is no exception. But with the speed of innovation only increasing, test automation is often only one piece of a larger network of digital solutions. 

Before engaging automated testing, teams need to recognize that automation itself has evolved beyond testing alone. Many solutions can engage automation before testing even begins, utilizing process discovery and process understanding to give teams the most comprehensive view of their business process lifecycle. With this process visibility, teams get a comprehensive view of how their business actually works, mitigating process failure risk and ensuring the organizations can make the shift to the cloud with confidence. 

Choose Vendors that Meet Your HR Needs 

It’s not about which vendor or vendors offer the most features, but rather which vendor can help you solve your business challenges and meet your strategic goals, today and in the future. When you stop counting features, you can instead evaluate which vendor’s solution will help you get to the cloud securely and on budget, reducing costs and supporting your business growth. 

Some key questions to ask your vendors: 

  • Will you be able to support and sustain a long-term investment in innovation? 
  • How strong is your data security model? 
  • Can I move to the cloud in pieces or all at once? 
  • How you address business continuity and operational resiliency?
  • Do I have flexibility in upgrade timing? 
  • Do you provide a platform to extend the functionality? 

All of these and more – especially any questions that pertain to the specifics of your business – are crucial pieces of information before committing to a test automation and HR solution. 

Prioritize Employee Experience

As was discussed in a recent Worksoft webinar, in the wake of the pandemic, teams need to prioritize employee experience just like they do customer success. Your HR system is unique from other systems in that every employee at the company interacts with it in some form. Whether your workforce is remote, hybrid, or in-office, providing exceptional candidate and employee experience is critical to teams staying engaged. 

This goes beyond a pretty interface and user-friendly HR hub. Prioritizing employee experience means delivering access to consumer-grade technology designed to be personalized, intuitive, and engaging. Applications need to be fast, simple, and socially enabled while being available anytime, anywhere, on multiple devices and empowering employees with self-service capabilities. The best applications have evolved from just automating standard HR processes to become strategic tools for managing talent and helping talent balance their professional and personal lives. Make sure your move to the cloud meets the needs of your employees. Learn how Worksoft is helping teams deliver an exceptional experience to customers and employees alike when you schedule time with our automation experts.