Automating and sustaining HR process improvement through dual-cycle insider action research

This paper presents a dual-cycle insider action research project in an HR shared services team at an international business process outsourcing company in the Philippines. Before onboarding, the team handled the process for managing directors entirely through manual data transfer and preparing emails. This approach cost time, produced mistakes, and triggered escalations. In Cycle 1, the team streamlined the workflow and introduced automation using Microsoft Power Automate, eliminating repetitive tasks. Cycle 2 moved to a different level of learning. Instead of only improving the process, it challenged why a capable team had left an inherited process untouched for 2 years, and it addressed the assumptions the team had about the limits of their work. Within a week of training, they designed and deployed an automation that nobody asked for. Sustainable improvement, we argue, depends less on the intervention itself than on reframing who in an organization is able to improve things.