How Single-Database HCM Automation Beats Decision Fatigue

No matter how simple or complicated an action seems, all of them require choice. When faced with too many tasks, the resulting decision fatigue — or our tendency to work less effectively as we make more decisions throughout the day — keeps us from investing time and cognition into high-value work.

In HR, even the most routine tasks yield choices, or even a series of microchoices, just to:

• check employee accruals
• route approvals to the correct person
• fix timecards
• verify compliance requirements
• mediate disputes between managers and their reports
• and many, many more

While an HR professional might get used to making high-volume decisions, they’ll never be more effective than when they don’t have to make a choice at all. And no, this isn’t about minimizing or eliminating HR. Rather, it’s about freeing those in the field from the burden of microdecisions, so they have a greater capacity to focus on choices that add meaningful value to the organizations they serve.

To better understand how routine tasks drain HR, let’s dive deeper into the negative impacts of decision fatigue and how it harms professionals who don’t effectively automate the most recurring and mentally taxing tasks. Afterward, we’ll see how HR automation fueled by decision logic within truly single-database HR software has the power to transform HR professionals and position them to make the highest possible impact for employees.

What is decision fatigue?

Decision fatigue is a cognitive state that occurs when the quality and speed of making decisions decline after repeated choices. Unmanaged decision fatigue can lead to:

• errors
• delays
• not making an important choice outright

In an organization’s regular operations, decision fatigue can emerge and proliferate across payroll, scheduling, communication, time-off requests, compliance audits and more.

For example, think about a manager who rushes through (or “rubber-stamps”) PTO approvals late on Friday without verifying how their rapid choices could affect coverage and staffing levels. Or consider a payroll administrator who, without the support of single-database HCM software, postpones fixing an error because that would involve the annoying process of switching between multiple systems.

Both scenarios have the potential to harm employees, compromise compliance and ultimately hinder an organization from meeting its goals. And situations like these could pop up in your business every day. After all, when was the last time you assumed something was accurate because the manual work it’d take to confirm it for certain was too much?

If this happens more often than you’d care to admit, it doesn’t mean you need to find a new career. Instead, it suggests that the tech you’re using that should make your job simpler is actually working against you.

How decision fatigue shows up without full-solution automation

Full-solution automation refers to HR automation that streamlines and simplifies all tasks related to workforce management by working within a truly single database. Keep in mind, while certain tools may automate aspects of individual HR processes, this doesn’t constitute full-solution automation, as those tools may not accurately communicate with each other to ensure a seamless flow of data across your organization.

To understand how full-solution automation helps you overcome decision fatigue, let’s examine how the phenomenon emerges in organizations that rely on disjointed, multisystem HR software.

Uncertainty from fragmented tech

When your HR tech is spread out across multiple disjointed systems that require manual workarounds, it’s not always obvious which specific tool you need to complete a task. In some cases, like when attempting to import new benefit elections into payroll, you could find yourself logging in and out of different platforms. Even if you’re fully familiar with how these tools are supposed to work together, you ultimately serve as the middleman, assuming all the liability if something gets incorrectly entered from one system to the next.

For employees outside of HR, using multiple HR systems makes it even less clear where they should go to enter or address an action item. So much so, they may expect their manager or HR professional to handle basic tasks like accessing personal data for them. This uncertainty yields inefficiency, raising hurdles for everyone in an organization.

Manual gatekeeping and rework

In an attempt to keep data straight in the absence of single-database software, an organization may turn to manual workarounds like:

• email chains
• inconsistent spreadsheets
• manual verification

None of these has the power to ensure consistency or accuracy. But they do compound the cognitive load and decision fatigue that those who have to wade through them could encounter. Think of when you’ve had to dig through emails to find one key piece of info or meticulously pore over data because something wasn’t adding up.

Using multisystem HR tech, annoying, repetitive, exhausting and ultimately manual workarounds can become the norm.

Slow and redundant feedback loops

“Did I do what I thought I did?”

Reverifying your work and ensuring it was completed properly may be one of the most common decisions you’ll face with multisystem HR tech. Since the data for each major process lives separately from the areas it could impact, this software can’t ensure consistency and identify discrepancies.

If making thousands of low-level decisions wasn’t enough, multisystem HR tech could result in making the same choices repeatedly.

Policy variance and exceptions

In the absence of HR automation powered by decision logic, rules can’t be consistently followed. By extension, exceptions to those rules multiply, potentially creating a microdecision tree in and of themselves. Simple tasks become unnecessarily complex as an organization’s policies become increasingly less meaningful. And when a lack of consistency weakens a company’s policies, it can also harm your ability to mitigate bias, favoritism, inconsistency and other issues that spur noncompliance.

Overcoming decision fatigue: Full-solution automation in a single-database HCM software

To help manage and eliminate the sources of decision fatigue, single-database HCM software uses decision logic to fuel automation and pull HR professionals — along with leaders and even entry-level employees — out of a seemingly constant stream of recurring choices.

Decision logic works by relying on rules an organization sets to automate approvals and denials for everyday tasks and ensure companywide consistency. For the most effective, accurate and automated workflows, however, decision logic demands a level of clean data across all HR tools and processes that can only be achieved through a truly single database.

To help better understand how automation, decision logic and single-database HCM software work in tandem with one another, consider these tangible advantages they produce.

One record, one truth

When workforce data exists in a truly single database, it eliminates the confusion and potential decisions created by attempting to find the “most accurate” source. Seamless, real-time data flow ensures any info you access within that single database is as up to date as possible.

No separate systems for specific HR processes means no need to reconcile potential discrepancies between those systems. This allows HR professionals to know the data they operate from is uncontested in its accuracy, so they can work confidently without second-guessing their progress.

Policy-driven workflows

To automate certain choices, decision logic within a single-database HCM software requires an organization to establish rules for the tech to cite. Once established, these requirements auto-apply to create policy-driven workflows. In turn, this allows for decision logic to automate common choices around processes like:

• time-off requests
• benefit and employment eligibility
• expenses
• compliance-impacting decisions

This helps eliminate aspects of company policy and needs that are potentially left to interpretation.

For example, a retail manager facing a busy holiday shopping season doesn’t have to wonder about how much time off they can safely approve without sacrificing scheduling coverage. Instead, their single-database HCM software deploys decision logic to ensure they have the coverage the leader needs and automatically denies requests that could compromise staffing.

Default paths and guardrails

Like policy-driven workflows, automation and decision logic help cut a clear path to ideal outcomes, eliminating ambiguity, choices and manual workarounds that HR or a leader would otherwise need to manage. And since single-database HCM software ensures the seamless flow of data across all HR processes, that path is never interrupted or muddled by the error-prone transfer of data across multiple systems.

Real-time visibility

Since any change or update made within a single-database HCM software automatically reflects across the entire organization, HR doesn’t need to constantly vet or cross-reference data to ensure accuracy and consistency. Likewise, leaders gain the insight they need to take confident and decisive actions, rather than lose time reconsidering choices they’ve already made.

Fewer (and better) human decisions

To be abundantly clear, full-solution automation powered by decision logic doesn’t eliminate the need for HR and leaders to make any choices. Rather, it shields them from repetitive and lower-value choices related to basic operations, so they can instead focus on the decisions that potentially have the highest impact. In this way, decision logic isn’t so much about reducing judgment as it is about preserving it for choices that matter most.

Our cognitive load is finite. This isn’t necessarily an issue to fix, but a natural part of being human. Decision logic — like much of the most convenient tech you’ve likely used in your personal life — doesn’t literally accelerate our cognition. It does, however, expand our potential by freeing us from the choices that limit it.

Processes improved by automation

While we’ve looked at a few scenarios where decision logic pushes the boundaries of HR automation, let’s briefly dive into two areas that are uniquely susceptible to issues created by decision fatigue.

Time-off management

Without automation, decision fatigue infests time-off management, leading to inconsistency that can detrimentally impact staffing, employee engagement and operations as a whole.

Using policy-driven workflows and decision logic helps eliminate the mental drag that otherwise accompanies the time-off process. Verifying accruals, coverage and the appropriate prioritization of requests can all be easily automated, so HR and leaders don’t have to deliberate over every implication of approved time off.

Read this blog post to learn more about how HR automation and decision logic alleviate the mental drag of time-off management.

Payroll

You likely use some form of automation in your current payroll process, but single-database HCM software and decision logic truly transform the process with not just automated calculations, but also:

• self-starting functionality
• self-service verification, troubleshooting and approval for employees
• real-time flags to help identify and address possible errors

Read this blog post to learn how decision fatigue emerges in payroll — and how full-solution automation fueled by decision logic reduces it.

The impact of effectively managed decision fatigue

Decision fatigue may feel inevitable, but the impact it has on your organization doesn’t have to be. Employers who deploy full-solution automation with decision logic in single-database HCM software can expect to see greater:

• speed, because automated decisioning and a seamless flow of data help ensure instant responses to employee requests and faster HR processes overall
• accuracy, since data doesn’t need to be manually transferred or vetted between separate systems, because all of it exists seamlessly within that truly single database
• experiences, as employees enjoy clarity and visibility into the processes that affect them most, and managers benefit from less decision fatigue and cognitive clutter
• compliance, which decision logic enforces by automating spontaneous decisions that could spur bias, favoritism, inconsistency and ultimately noncompliance

How to identify and project the advantage of decision logic in your organization

Not sure how decision logic could transform your workforce? Take the following steps to help you better gauge its impact and see where it could allow your organization to make fewer and better decisions.

1. Map your “decision hot spots”

It’s likely your employees and managers make hundreds — or even thousands — of decisions at work that could be automated with decision logic. Identify the areas where people make the most choices and outline what those decisions entail.

For example, when it comes to managing time-off requests, your managers may routinely speculate and check upcoming schedules. Or in payroll, you might find administrators routinely importing and double-checking data from separate systems. Both scenarios and more could have a high potential for errors that could be alleviated with automated decisioning.

2. Automate your most routine (and manual) tasks

You, perhaps more than anyone else in your organization, should be able to spot your workforce’s most common and annoying tasks. Determine which tasks those are and separate them from those that would actually need to be handled by someone in your organization. You’ll probably find more manual workarounds that could readily become automated workflows than you think.

3. Consider how single-database governance would benefit you

While a seamless flow of data across all HR processes will unlock a higher level of automation, it’s wise to consider how that would impact your organization. It may be uncomfortable, but look at a situation where a lack of automation created an issue for your business, such as an untimely audit or an unintentional compliance violation.

Once you’ve gathered a collection of pain points, begin to identify the choices that led to the problem. This will help you identify what could and should be automated, as well as what actions were truly unavoidable.

4. Measure cognitive-load proxies

Think of this as a broader extension of the previous step. Rather than looking at specific examples, account for where your organization likely experiences the highest level of decision fatigue. You can make this easier by tracking:

• how long it takes for managers to respond to a time-off request
• how many separate systems it takes to onboard an employee
• how many people it takes to finalize a decision around a basic or routine process
• how much time HR and managers are putting in after hours to address administrative tasks

From fragmentation to focus

Ultimately, full-solution automation is only possible through single-database HCM software. This doesn’t just ensure the seamless flow of data, but also creates a path for decision logic to automate the choices that give decision fatigue an opening in your organization.

Explore Paycom’s truly single-database HCM software to learn how it can help you overcome decision fatigue.

How single-database HCM automation overcomes decision fatigue: FAQ

What is decision fatigue in HR?

In HR, decision fatigue refers to the decline in decision-making quality after making too many choices throughout the day. Repeated microdecisions, limited dataflow and manual workarounds across routine tasks related to payroll, time-off approvals, compliance and more slow HR’s momentum and increase the likelihood of errors.

How does automation reduce decision fatigue for HR teams?

With full-solution automation in single-database HCM software, organizations can apply policy rules, route tasks and flow data automatically. These automated workflows free HR and managers from making recurring, low-value choices that weigh on their cognitive load, so they can instead focus on key decisions that move the needle for their organization.

Why is a single-database HCM better than using multiple systems?

Single-database HCM software allows for a seamless flow of data across all relevant HR processes, helping reduce decision fatigue and the unnecessary manual work often created by transferring and vetting data that travels between separate HR systems.

Which HR tasks benefit the most from automation to prevent decision fatigue?

Overall, time-off management, payroll and scheduling benefit greatly from automated workflows powered by decision logic. Keep in mind, these areas don’t represent the full spectrum of operations that could benefit from automating recurring choices. They are, however, likely the biggest sources of decision fatigue in most organizations.

What measurable improvements come from reducing decision fatigue?

Just a few of the benefits of reducing decision fatigue in your organization include:

• faster response times for employees
• less manual work and fewer recurring choices to make for HR and managers
• fewer corrections due to fewer errors
• stronger compliance due to greater consistency in processes
• higher employee satisfaction from more visibility and prompt attention to their requests