Employees are the foundation of any business. Anyone who has a long history in the business world will tell you this. Your employees meet clients, clean the office, and market the product. Without them, nothing gets done. But who looks after your employees? That would be the Human Resource department. HR departments have a lot of jobs, not limited to hiring people, onboarding new talent, training workers, and throwing birthdays. So the people who work in Human Resources will always have to wear many hats. While an HR department is a tremendous help, there are ways to make anything better. When it comes to best practices, it is essential for your HR department to have a set of processes and protocols that will help steer it and your company in the right direction. Here are 4 key areas that your company’s HR can improve and reach its potential.
HR Process Improvement #1: HR Administrative Workflows
Probably the first thing that any company can do to improve any aspect of their company is to manage and improve workflow. Workflow is how tasks pass through your company and from one employee or team to another. This makes workflow a critical part of your business since any breakdown at one point (pain point) can cause a series of cascading problems. Fixing or improving your company’s HR department’s workflow can help them be faster. More proactive and better at managing and directing the company. Some ways that they can do this is by implementing a set of best practices that are well established in your industry and with HRs everywhere. These protocols will give your Human Resource department better control of their workflow and increase their confidence in knowing that they are using the best possible methods to improve their working situation.
HR Process Improvement #2: External and Internal Compliance
A second way you can improve your HR department is through compliance. Compliance is a set of rules that they have to follow that can be set through legislation or by being part of an organization. No matter which type of industry yours is in, there will be some type of regulatory framework that you will have to abide by. These rules do not act purely as a constraint but rather give your company a framework or a rule book that they can use to define what activities are acceptable and which ones are not. Human Resources can help your company comply with these compliance regulations and keep your business or organization in good standing and out of trouble.
This is not only about external compliance though. There will also be internal rules and regulations that your company has. The Human Resources department helps to educate and in some cases enforce these rules for the benefit of your employees. Internal compliance helps your Human Resource department the same way external ones do. By placing boundaries and creating a framework for action and interaction. With these boundaries in place, People can act confidently and make a decision without having to wonder what is ok and what is not because the rules and guidelines for this will already be in place.
HR Process Improvement #3: Digitized Employee Data
Probably one of the best things that you can do for your HR department or any part of your business is to digitize your documents. As many companies are going paperless, it has become increasingly popular to ditch the old filing system and go to a purely online system with easier access and less storage space. This is beneficial to the HR department since they have to work with many different types of files regarding employees, job applications, advertisements, and many other things. In traditional documentation settings this can all get very complicated. If you make the decision to digitize your documents, this can become much simpler. To do this is a lot of work, but you can also hire a third-party company to help with this (HR departments can also help to find these third parties). If you do digitize your documents, you will also need some other tools such as an online PDF editor. Online PDF editors are great tools that let you work with PDF documents. You can manage your digitized PDFs, edit them, use the merge PDF tool, and many more things that will increase the operational capacity and efficiency of your HR department.
HR Process Improvement #4: Recruitme
One of the main jobs of HR departments is to recruit and add new people to the company. Since employees are so important to the future of the company, great care must be taken during this process. Recruiting and hiring can be a complex task but luckily there are now many great online tools that HRs can use to find the right people for your company. One of these is Recruitme. Recruitme is a recruiting website that assists HR departments in finding the right people to fill the roles in a company. This is not the only tool available though. Sites like LinkedIn and Flexjobs help find workers who you might not otherwise find. For Human Resources there is a lot of pressure to find the right people, so giving them better tools to find those people will take a lot of stress off of them.
HR departments are in many ways the beating heart of a company. They are what brings in the people who make up your company. They onboard and train people, set up office parties and team buildings, and many other things. Since those who work in Human Resources have so many tasks, any way you can make their job a little bit easier will be good for them which is, in turn, good for the company. Although there are many things that you can do to improve your company, implementing some improvements to your HR departments is one of the best ways to see long-term and structural improvements to your company.
