Quick! What’s your HR department doing right now? Depending on the size of your staff and your company, they might be advertising open positions and recruiting new employees, onboarding new staff, managing payroll and benefits, investigating complaints, writing and policing company policies, changing employees’ status forms, overseeing staff training and development, and much, much more.
When they’re this busy, it’s not surprising that your HR staff can’t see the forest for the trees. They don’t have the time or energy to see some of the very things that would help them the most.
But that’s when you can come in. Take a good look at your company and see how many of these your HR department is (or isn’t) doing now.
1. Sharing the responsibilities
Whether working for the official department or not, everyone in your company is involved in human resources – or should be.
Employees should be motivated enough to want to excel. Managers should be deeply invested in developing the people they manage. The leadership team should be harnessing the talents of the entire staff to drive company goals. And your trusty HR department should be behind them all, pointing the way.
Not only does this shared responsibility alleviate some of the HR overload, but it creates employee engagement and can inspire real, heartfelt ownership in the company.
In addition, working together from a consolidated system improves communication and keeps everyone in the company on the same page.
2. Consolidating systems for efficiency
Payroll information in one computer system, basic employee data in another system and benefits in a third: Sound familiar?
Not only does storing information in disparate systems force some poor HR staffer to type an employee’s requests and information into multiple databases, but it also requires that every change made over the years – benefits modifications, address changes, tax adjustments, pay increases – be made in triplicate.
In addition to being an extremely inefficient use of time, multisystem processes can practically guarantee mistakes.
Put all your information into one unified system, however, and your team can spend a lot less time on mundane data entry. And that gives them more time to work on strategy that can help grow your business.
3. Spending more time on your HR strategy
There are a couple ways to give your HR staff some breathing room. Some companies choose to outsource some of their HR responsibilities to another company. But if you already have a capable and fully-staffed HR department, you may just want to improve your technology so you can streamline numerous functions.
No matter which you choose you will enable your HR staff more time to apply their knowledge and experience toward strategies to help your company reach its goals.
With more time, HR can focus on big-picture plans for people and processes such as:
- Developing training programs so employees reach – and exceed – their potentials
- Motivating staff to excel
- Developing competitive compensation
- Methods to reward and retain the best employees
- Best practices in measuring performance
- Building succession plans
Remember, technology is your friend
According to Scientific American, we buy new cell phones about every two years. Shouldn’t your company’s HR system deserve the same attention?
Now granted, a new HR system costs a bit more than the latest iPhone but if it helps your company reach its business goals, shouldn’t it be more important than a device that lets you play Candy Crush?
The latest human capital management (HCM) systems relieve HR departments who are drowning in data by consolidating HR data and processes such as:
- Employee administration
- Employee and manager self-service functions
- Benefits administration and enrollment
- Payroll management
- Tax compliance
- Reporting and analytics
Plus, they’re Web-based so your staff has anytime, anywhere accessibility which, as we become progressively mobile, becomes increasingly important.
So don’t focus on what your HR department isn’t doing and help them see what they could be doing. They’ll thank you.
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