PEO
HR's admin overload is an ownership gap, not a software gap
By Anthony Beck, . Insurance Wire.
HRO Today this week ran a piece built on the case made by Kristin Latimer, Nintex's director of global rewards, that the mounting administrative load on HR departments is at root a matter of murky process ownership rather than too little technology. Nintex is a workflow automation company.
The diagnosis is specific. According to HRO Today, Latimer describes HR as having become a "traffic controller" by default: the team that keeps every cross-departmental process moving because no single person or function owns the full chain. Approvals stall, IT provisioning waits, manager sign-offs go unchased, and HR fills every gap because employees have nowhere else to turn. That invisible labor, as Latimer frames it, never appears on a dashboard, which is precisely what makes it dangerous.
The technology critique is pointed. Organizations typically meet friction by purchasing yet another tool instead of asking what caused the breakdown to begin with, Latimer tells HRO Today. The result is a patchwork of point solutions that leaves the handoff problem untouched. An HRIS manages records, she notes, but it is rarely where the disruption originates.
Her proposed remedy is structural rather than personal. Rather than issuing reminders to managers, she argues for redesigning the handoff itself so that accountability is built into the workflow: each party is automatically notified when it is their turn to act. That approach, she tells HRO Today, also reduces compliance and security exposure by creating a consistent, auditable trail, which matters wherever regulated processes are involved.
For HR leaders trying to gauge how exposed their teams are, Latimer offers one specific warning sign: once a team is no longer doing strategic work, burnout may already be in progress. Her advice to chief people officers is to start from visibility instead of headcount, which means a candid internal audit of where the hours are going, then automating a single process end to end before scaling the approach further.
For employers inside a PEO arrangement, the ownership problem Latimer describes can be sharper than it is in a conventional HR setup. When HR functions are divided between a client company and a PEO, the handoff question is not just internal; it runs across a contractual boundary. Who owns the approval chain for onboarding? Who is responsible for IT provisioning notifications? Who chases the manager when a step stalls? If those questions are not answered explicitly in the service agreement and the day-to-day workflow, the client company's HR contact typically absorbs the gap by default, which is exactly the dynamic Latimer is describing. The audit she recommends is worth running with the PEO relationship in view, not just the internal org chart.
What HRO Today's piece does not establish is how widespread the ownership gap is across organizations of different sizes, or whether the automation approach Latimer describes produces measurable reductions in HR time spent on administrative tasks. The argument is practitioner-level and qualitative. Employers looking for benchmarks on how much time HR teams lose to administrative coordination will need to look elsewhere.
Source: https://www.hrotoday.com/news/current-features/reducing-hrs-admin-burden/
Insurance Wire provides news and information, not insurance, legal, or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific needs.