All the HRs out there who’re attempting to set up and streamline the HR processes at their workplace - this one’s for you.
The year brings shiny new hope for one and all. So why should HRs be exempted? Here are 8 simple yet impactful steps you can take this season to ensure you’re functioning at your efficient and effective best.
1. Use detailed job descriptions to attract the right talent
Detailed job descriptions can serve as powerful communication tools to attract the right kind of talent to your organization. They provide both candidates and employees a clear sense of the expectations of the role, required skills, educational qualifications and desired work experience. This improves both internal and external recruitment by ensuring that personal expectations are aligned with business needs. Additionally, well-written job descriptions help employees understand the boundaries/scope of their responsibilities.
2. Implement consistent branding early in the employee lifecycle
Ensure company brand and values are reflected consistently in all HR communications to both employees as well as candidates with a focus on delivering the brand promise. This can be initiated as early as during the recruitment process through a partnership with your marketing team. For instance, one way to achieve this is using recruitment advertising with consistent messaging indicating the culture of the organization across all media including print and online. Such an initiative can go a long way in ensuring that you attract candidates who are a good cultural fit for your organization, thus saving you time and money.
3. Design a strategic and memorable onboarding process
The onboarding process will impact both the time-to-productivity of new hires and well as their retention. Thus, when designing an onboarding program, it’s imperative to bear these two-pronged objectives in mind: to connect the dots between the program and business objectives, and to improve the experience of the new hires.
The best onboarding practices both familiarize new hires with the culture of the organization as well as set performance expectations. The Aberdeen Group found that best-in-class strategies for onboarding are composed of three major components:
- Forms management: This includes the collection and management of all new hire forms - both for internal and external use.
- Tasks management: Ensure all that critical transactional activities, such as receiving access to a computer and all necessary internal systems and meeting with the manager are complete.
- Socialization: A key component of understanding company culture and expected behaviors, socialization is best initiated during the onboarding process by initiating personal introductions to critical resources/staff members across the organization.
4. Be on top of compliance requirements
From recruiting to termination, rest assured that compliance or adherence to the laws of the land will play a part in your work life. However, the compliance aspect of HR often gets relegated to the back burner in the mad rush small organizations find themselves in to ensure growth and sustenance.
However, making sure that your organization is compliant from the word go can go a long way in ensuring that you are not slapped with fines or penalties, or worse, have to fight legal battles. As an HR professional, you must adhere to various central and state laws that apply to the HR processes.
Moreover, change is the only constant when it comes to statutory compliance. To keep up with these frequent changes is a gargantuan task, no less. Opt for an automated HRMS software and make sure you don’t miss a single beat.
5. Adhere to checklists to avoid costly mistakes
From medicine to aviation, the checklist is an important tool in error management across several fields. HR too can benefit greatly from adopting checklists. They contribute significantly to reductions in the risk of costly mistakes and improve overall outcomes. Additionally, they make delegating and handovers faster and easier.
Having checklists in place for onboarding, employee information management, payroll processing, compliance and offboarding, for instance, can ensure that these HR sub-functions are handled infinitely more efficiently.
6. Carry out a smooth and orderly exit process
One cannot emphasize enough how chaotic an exit process can get. From accepting the resignation to approaching the various internal departments for sign off, terminating access to systems without delay, meeting with the employee to conduct an effective exit interview, and making systematic arrangements to process his/her full and final settlement, the exit process makes for quite a handful!
The exit process of an employee should be handled with sensitivity and care. A shoddily conducted exit process can cost a company its resources in the form of physical and intellectual assets held by the employee, the possibility of re-hiring the employee and its reputation, especially if the circumstances of the employee’s exit aren’t the most pleasant.
This year around, ensure that proper knowledge transfer/handover is carried out and that areas of improvement within the exit process are well-documented.
7. Introduce goal setting
Goals are an incredibly powerful way to focus attention and get things done. A Harvard Business Review study reported that 69% of employees surveyed said that the most impactful employee engagement driver is when business goals are effectively communicated and understood.
Two types of goals are commonly seen in business: one, big-picture strategic goals that shape the future direction of the business and two, team- or function-level goals that improve performance.
Start with the strategic goals and then drill down to set smaller goals that will aid in achieving the bigger ones. For example, if a strategic goal is to expand production capacity, set smaller goals to achieve what is needed to expand and establish a completion date.
It is also important to ensure alignment with the goals by facilitating regular one-on-ones between managers and employees.
8. Cultivate culture
Whether Peter Drucker actually said “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is debatable. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that organizational culture can be powerful enough to impact the direction in which a company moving and affects employee retention significantly. Looking for ways to establish company culture? Encouraging the demonstration of company values is one way that company culture can become entrenched. This can be done through hiring based on values, working and playing by the values, and rewarding and promoting adherence to company values.
With that, we wind up. We hope this has given you a good place to start streamlining and organizing HR processes at your organization.
