Human resources has now become the fundamental enabler of business strategy. Technology enablement has paved the way for paperless HR and offered a window to tap into existing opportunities through data and information.
However, relying too much on expensive HR process designs can end up causing more harm than good. In order to become technology-enabled rather than technology led, HR managers need to work on following some tried and tested HR best practices that have evolved over time.
Listed below are seven HR best practices that when implemented properly can substantially lower costs, improve employee engagement, and leave a positive impact on employee morale.
1. Selective hiring
Today’s marketplace for candidates is competitive, with many companies fighting to attract, secure, and retain the best talent. To hire the best employees, your business needs a recruitment process that attracts the best candidates, shortlists them effectively and consistently. It’s vital that managers draw up realistic and comprehensive job descriptions from the outset. Also vital is utilizing the best in role-specific interview processes.
Selective hiring helps you recruit the people best-suited to your roles and your organizational culture. This, in turn, reduces the likelihood of employees leaving and thereby decreases your staff turnover, improving employee morale and productivity.
2. Self-managed teams
A lot of current management thinking focuses on breaking down the traditional hierarchical structure of layers of managers, team leaders, and employees and replacing it with self-managed teams. This means that no individual has total responsibility for a team’s performance. Instead, everybody works together to achieve a common goal, with team members taking turns to lead particular projects based on their expertise and experience.
Self-managed teams encourage everyone to take responsibility for business success by giving them some personal accountability for performance. It is also usually the case that employees working in such team frameworks benefit from higher levels of motivation and morale as they feel more in control of their daily work.
3. Effective training
Hiring the best talent should be a crucial part of your HR strategy, but the work doesn’t stop there. To keep your employees up to date with the latest developments in their field, continuously improve their skills, and keep them interested, energized, and motivated in their roles, it’s essential to provide them with opportunities to learn on an ongoing basis.
But training in itself isn’t necessarily effective. The employee training needs to be relevant and purposeful for the employee. Additionally, they need to be given an opportunity to practically use the new skills they have learned.
Second, the style of training needs to fit the needs of the employee and the skill itself. There are lots of different training styles to choose from, including classroom-based, online, on-the-job, etc.
Finally, training should be ongoing and continuous, and not performed as a one-off or tick box exercise. Otherwise, it won’t achieve its objectives of upskilling or motivating employees effectively.
4. Performance management
The notion of carrying out an annual performance appraisal between managers and employees has been around for a while now. However, this once-a-year meeting in itself isn’t enough to encourage real performance improvements.
A well-rounded performance management will focus on gathering objective and relevant feedback from a selection of an employee’s contacts, including their manager, colleagues, subordinates, and external contacts. It must help an employee address performance concerns in specific areas, as well as be rewarded for excellent performance in others.
5. Employee feedback mechanisms
Switched-on organizations recognize that feedback works two ways. While providing employees with the right feedback to improve their performance is key, so is allowing staff to give their opinions about the business to drive improvements. Staff surveys can be useful to gauge employee morale in general, as well as give individuals an opportunity to confidentially voice problems or concerns. Managers should use this feedback to tackle issues about the working environment or management style, with the aim of helping employees feel more valued.
6. Paperless HR processes
Paperless HR can benefit an organization in a number of ways. First, it frees HR teams from the burden of filling in forms, updating spreadsheets, and filing paper documents. It replaces these tasks with automated processes and soft-copy files, giving them back the valuable time they can use to carry out activities that contribute towards business success.
Also, the HR function is likely to suffer from fewer errors and benefit from a higher degree of accuracy. Furthermore, documents are stored digitally, making them easy to find and well-organized, and automated hr processes are less prone to mistakes.
Paperless HR uses software to automate many of the most common and time-consuming HR processes like recruitment, onboarding, performance management, training, and more. It processes data quickly, accurately, and consistently, freeing up the HR team to focus on more value-adding work.
7. Moving HR to the cloud
Moving HR to the cloud takes paperless HR one step further–a one-stop HR system that takes all of your existing processes and automates them so that they can be carried out with minimum manual input from the team. HR software offers an organization many benefits, contributing positively towards the efficiency of the HR function.
A cloud-based HR tool stores all data relating to employee personnel and job information and employee documents such as contracts in such a way that it improves accessibility while ensuring confidentiality and data protection of the information with role-based access.
What’s more, an user-friendly HR tool like Kissflow HR Cloud businesses can save time, cut costs, reduce errors, and ensure consistency in their HR process. It offers maximum flexibility, a customizable interface, dynamic workflows, a visual-rich reporting module, and more to streamline an organization’s hire-to-retire process end-to-end. Best of all, it integrates effortlessly with existing third party applications and accounting software. It offers all the functionalities and features an HR team needs to manage their human resources effectively.
Best practices vs. HR technology: strike the perfect balance
Most organizations don’t realize the importance of following HR best practices or implementing effective governance and control. However, without these key enablers, HR leaders could not influence or drive efficiency in their HR processes. Central to this is choosing the right HR technology to implement these best practices.
Businesses can start today by shortlisting must-have features of a HR solution that can bring automation and improve all HR processes. Take the initiative to see what improvements these features can help you achieve in each HR process.
