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The job of an HR department within an organization is fairly challenging. Right from getting new employees on board to getting their issues resolved daily, HR managers often have a tough time handling the requests of the employees. Further, the trend of working remotely has only added to the issues of the HR department. 

The traditional HR help desk is no longer relevant and adds little value to the support provided to employees. There is a need for organizations to implement new trends about the HR help desk and operations. 

Before getting to the trends that will shape the future of the HR help desk, let us understand the major issues with traditional help desks. 

Everything Wrong With The Traditional HR Help Desk

• No Centralized Support
  
  The traditional HR help desk lacks a centralized support system that provides a single-window service to employees. This results in different employees approaching different agents manually to get different issues resolved. The lack of an organized service desk often leads to unsatisfied employees, leading to lower engagement and productivity.
  
  
• Inadequate Onboarding Of Remote Employees
  
  HR managers need to understand that the normal onboarding approach is not relevant for onboarding remote employees. An organization needs to have a revised onboarding plan in place for getting remote employees onboard. The traditional HR help desk and operations are often not flexible enough to help HR professionals' onboard employees working remotely.
  
  The lack of a personal touch often results in employees finding it difficult to gel with their new teams and HR managers struggling with helping the employees feel at home.
  
  
• Difficulty In Recruiting
  
  The traditional HR help desk lacks the degree of automation required by hiring managers to hire employees in 2021. This results in them performing processes like screening applications, shortlisting candidates, scheduling interviews, and many more manually. This often leads to an unwanted delay in the entire recruitment process and increases the scope of committed errors.
  
  
• Generic Solutions To Specific Problems
  
  The traditional HR help desk often fails to provide personalized solutions to the problems faced by employees. It provides fairly generic questions to the specific issues encountered. This results in employees choosing to approach the managers themselves through calls and emails, causing unnecessary delays.
  
  
• Difficult in Using The Ticketing System
  
  In a traditional help desk, not every employee is comfortable using the ticketing system to get their questions answered. The elaborate nature of these platforms often leads to employees being confused about how to raise, track, and close their support tickets.
  
  Further, the traditional approach to ticketing system places support agents right at the first level of support. This often leads to them getting overburdened with requests and the solutions getting delayed.
  
  
• Lack Of An Organized Feedback System
  
  It is always important for the HR department of an organization to obtain honest feedback from its employees, analyze the same, and make relevant changes to serve the employees better. The traditional HR help desk lacks the approach to obtaining employee feedback in an organized and personalized manner. This often results in the HR managers not being aware of the pulse of the employees and the changes that need to be made in the HR operations.
  
  

Trends That Will Shape The Future Of HR Help Desk And Operations

The new trends that are likely to benefit the HR department and the employees within an organization revolve around implementing a modern HR help desk. AI powers these help desks to provide personalized support to the employees and automate several processes. 

Here are some of the major trends that would bring about a positive change in the way an HR help desk functions: 

• Integration With Collaborative Platforms
  
  The modern HR help desk can be easily integrated with online collaborative platforms to improve the quality of services provided by the HR department. This allows HR professionals to reach out to employees on the same platform that they work on. Moreover, it prevents employees from switching platforms to obtain assistance from the HR department.
  
  This trend is beneficial, especially for organizations dealing with remote employees. As all the processes of remote employees are carried out using online collaborative platforms, integrating the HR help desk with the same allows an organization to streamline its HR processes.
  
  
• Using AI Chatbots To Resolve Issues
  
  The new HR help desks use conversational AI to provide proactive and personalized support to their employees. The AI chatbots play the role of support managers to provide them with the first level of support. As an employee logs into the platform, chatbots would assist them if they require support. Simply by chatting with these virtual assistants, the employees can obtain personalized resolutions to their issues without looking for the same anywhere else.
  
  Moreover, if an employee needs further assistance, the chatbots would route their cases to support agents, looking into the same. As this limits the requests going to the agents, the modern HR help desk resolves delayed support and the agents being overburdened with requests.
  
  
• Automated Employee Onboarding
  
  Especially in remote employees, a modern HR help desk allows an organization to automate the onboarding processes. Based on the user persona of the new employees, it allows the HR professionals to send personalized emails welcoming them on a single platform. These emails can be added with a welcome letter, contact details of the team members, important company policies, login IDs and passwords, and much more.
  
  This trend would streamline the onboarding process across the board, allowing organizations to ensure that their employees are not lost and confused during their first few days with the company.
  
  
• Automated Ticketing System
  
  The modern service desks can resolve using a manual ticketing system by automating the entire ticketing process. It allows your employees to raise a ticket by chatting with the chatbots on their respective collaborative platforms. Once a ticket is created, the chatbots would send all relevant information about the case to the concerned support agent to provide them with context. The agent would then look into the problem and revert to the employee through the same platform. In the meantime, the help desk would keep sending updates to the employees regarding the status of their cases.
  
  Once the problem is solved, the modern HR help desk would automatically close the ticket, saving your employee time and effort.
  
  
• Streamlined Hiring Processes
  
  The modern help desk allows your hiring managers to automate almost every hiring process from the moment they receive the applications. A single unified platform can be used to shortlist candidates, screen applications, answer specific questions asked by the candidates, schedule interviews, and much more.
  
  This helps you select the right candidates for the right jobs without having to go through tedious and time-consuming hiring processes.
  
  
• Obtaining Automated Employee Feedback
  
  Instead of manually sending surveys to the employees, the modern HR help desk allows them to send automated and personalized surveys to all their employees to get their feedback. This helps the organization to collect feedback in a streamlined manner and analyze the results without any delays.
  
  Once the management can obtain valuable insights regarding the overall experience of their employees, it allows them to make necessary changes to their processes for better engagement and productivity.
  
  
• Easy Communication Of Work Policies
  
  Instead of providing employees with lengthy handbooks and manuals to go through, the modern HR help desk allows your employees to get all their questions answered by chatting with virtual assistants. Once you have all the information within your enterprise knowledge base, you can provide relevant answered to all the questions asked by your employees regarding the work policies.
  
  
• Training Your Employees Through Microlearning
  
  If you are willing to train your employees in micro-skills that would help them improve their performance, you can use modern HR help. All you need to do is add the concerned training materials into your knowledge base and allow your employees to access them according to their convenience.
  
  This trend helps an organization save money that would have otherwise been spent on hiring trainers every time it needs to be trained in micro-skills. Moreover, as this allows your employees to train themselves, your employees are more independent and confident about their skills.
  
  

The Final Word 

These were some of the most important trends that are likely to shape the future of the HR help desk and operations. Organizations should make the much-needed switch from the traditional help desk to its modern counterpart for providing the best possible support to its employees.