As the hub of a successful company, your human resources (HR) team is responsible for a variety of tasks that keep your business running smoothly. Tasks like payroll and training fall to HR. This group is also in charge of guiding the company’s culture and managing the requests of individual employees. Perhaps most importantly, your HR team is responsible for attracting and retaining employees. With such a heavy load to carry, it’s essential to find solutions that create balance and maximize the efficiency of your HR team. Introducing these tips to your HR department is a great way to boost efficiency (and sanity!) in the busiest office in your company.
1. Create a strategy
The value of organization may seem obvious, but many offices fail to take the time for this vital job. When faced with an impossible mountain of tasks, instinct typically takes over, leading you to jump in and tackle the jobs that seem most urgent. Laying out a strategy will help define the overall role of the HR department in the company. Additionally, the ability to examine each of the duties required by human resources allows you to develop a strategy to group jobs together and maximize efficiency.
2. Encourage Employee Feedback
Your employees carry significant knowledge about the operations of your company. Creating an open line of communication provides your employees with a sense of trust and confidence in the business. Besides building a better company culture, employee feedback has the power to provide HR professionals with information that will allow them to correct issues before they escalate and create additional burdens or costly mistakes.
3. Embrace Technology
It’s no secret that your HR department has more than its fair share of laborious tasks. The right technology can streamline those tedious jobs and free up time for essential tasks that keep the company moving forward. As your business enters 2020, it’s vital to consider that millennials and Gen Z employees make up a large portion of the workforce. These employees are digitally native and expect the convenience of modern technology to be utilized throughout the workplace.
For the HR department, there is an abundance of advantages to technology that go beyond attracting new talent to the company. Today’s technology has the power to go beyond payroll management. A full-service human capital management (HCM) system can help your team manage tax forms, employee logs, and important compliance details. Increased security and employee access work to further eliminate risks and increase employee confidence in the company.
4. Nurture Talent from Within
Instead of seeking new employees to fill high-level jobs, consider the loyal employees who already provide value to the company. Employees who show leadership potential and an interest in the future of the company can easily be promoted into new positions within the company. Nurturing talent within the company works to eliminate unnecessary HR tasks in two ways. You avoid the costs and hours associated with recruitment while retaining your most valuable employees with higher level positions.
5. Eliminate Paperwork
Cutting clutter is a valuable step in the journey to efficiency. Mountains of paperwork create an inefficient workspace and build extra work for the HR team. While paper documents seem reliable, they require space for physical storage and increased security risks. Additionally, countless hours are wasted on organization, searching through filing systems, and uploading and updating physical documents.
The tasks that lead up to a completely paperless system can seem daunting but the payoff is worth the effort. Electronic filing decreases labor, increases security, creates a reliable compliance system, and provides a more efficient workspace for your HR team.
6. Consolidate systems for efficiency
The best definition for inefficiency might actually be the act of entering the exact information into multiple systems over and over. All too often, as a business grows, new software is added to an existing system. Each of these systems are actually completing the job as expected, but since the systems are independent, hundreds of work hours are lost to the tedious task of data entry. Those lost work hours aren’t the only way outdated data systems are costing your company money. Each additional time employees or HR professionals are forced to enter data, the potential for human error increases. These mistakes often lead to more work and could even result in costly compliance errors.
An all-in-one cloud-based system for payroll and HR streamlines how data is entered and used. Instead of using multiple cumbersome programs, a cloud-based system that connects processes provides a streamlined solution that cuts costs in the following ways.
- Avoids lost work hours related to repetitive tasks
- Eliminates intentional or accidental time theft from employees
- Increases employee satisfaction with an improved HR experience which reduces turnover
- Reduces opportunities for human error
- Eliminates excess paperwork
- Increases security
7. Streamline Compliance
Compliance regulations are always changing. Staying on top of the tasks associated with updating compliance information across multiple organizations can seem like a full-time job. On the surface, compliance functions don’t appear to affect the HR department, but proper compliance plays a major role in recruiting and retaining employees. The ability to maintain accurate secure records and respond to employee requests promptly provides workers with the confidence they need to maintain their position and a competent HR staff successfully recruits new talent to the company.
Cloud based software can offer your business greater control over costly compliance risks. With a streamlined data entry process, automated security tasks, and automatic updates, time will be spent more efficiently and the potential for costly mistakes decreased. The right system will even provide your business with continued evolving solutions that have the scalability to grow with your business.
Platinum Group is a full-service human capital management (HCM) resource that allows businesses to manage their payroll and benefits compliance, track time and attendance, and conduct other human resources functions in a way that maximizes efficiency and eliminates redundancies. This is made possible by means of our platform, iSolved. For more information about Platinum Group, or to schedule a demo of iSolved, please visit our website.
