Human resource (HR) is a vital facet of every business. But because this area is too broad and involves a lot of things, you’ll likely see yourself being pulled in many different directions. As someone who’s managing a company’s HR department, you need to meet the expectations of the senior leaders and employees while making sure that you hire and retain the best talents.
To improve its efficacy without wasting resources, prioritize streamlining how you manage the HR department. When you streamline your HR management strategy, you can avoid inefficient workflows, namely inconsistent reporting, compliance mishaps, and errors in payroll.
Here are four ways to help you streamline your HR management strategy:
Automate Common HR Activities
Traditionally, the HR department relies on physical documents to complete various tasks—from compiling employees’ information to preparing the payroll. And while this might get the job done, relying on paper requires too many resources. This also increases their risk of committing errors since tasks are completed manually.
One of the easiest ways to streamline your HR management strategy is to automate as many tasks as possible. There is an HR software today that enables your HR department to complete more tasks in a shorter period without compromising the quality of their outputs.
In general, you can automate the following HR activities today:
- Replace paper with cloud-based tools: Instead of tracking candidate emails and paper resumes, make use of a cloud-based HR system that offers applicant tracking features. With this system, your HR department can easily see all candidates on one page and how each candidate fares in the recruitment process.
- Integrate payroll with HR services: You can now use software that integrates payroll with HR activities, which means that tracking employees’ attendance, their pay, and benefits can be done in one platform. This decreases double entries and chances of errors.
- Add employee self-service: Instead of having someone from the HR department spend long hours providing employees with forms or answering their routine questions, invest in an employee self-service. This software provides employees access to payroll documents, benefit plan summaries, and time and attendance tracking.
Implement Web-Based Recruitment
Recruitment is one of the most essential and time-consuming tasks of the HR department. Studies show that it takes around three months for a company to hire a single person. Can you imagine how much resources your HR department has to spend if they have to hire an entire team of people?
If you want to streamline your HR management strategy, embrace web-based recruitment. This means that the entire hiring process—from the acceptance of applicants’ documents, conducting interviews to informing applicants whether they made it or not, should be done online.
Implementing web-based recruitment is actually beneficial for a number of reasons. Aside from going paperless, web-based recruitment is also cost-effective and expedites the hiring process. This also allows confidentiality as companies can conceal their names or contact applicants without publicly posting ads.
To ensure success in web-based recruitment, implement the following:
- Write an effective job description: To prevent your HR department from wasting time and effort in entertaining applicants who don’t even know what they’re applying for, write effective job descriptions. Use clear and simple words to ensure that applicants fully understand what the company is looking for.
- Build your brand on social media: Attract the best talents to apply by leveraging the power of social media. Pick one or two platforms and use these to advertise your job openings. But instead of merely posting an image about your vacancy, be creative with your efforts. Create videos about your company and have your employees talk about your culture. These will make your company stand out and entice applicants to work with you.
- Make use of hiring selection tools: Look for video interview tools so the HR department can easily facilitate interviews virtually. These tools can be very convenient for both the department and the applicants.
Standardized Forms
It’s common for the HR department to use and give out forms to employees. For example, people will have to fill out a different form if they have issues with their pays and then fill out another when applying for vacation leaves. The use of too many forms isn’t only stressful for the employees—it can also mean more work for the HR department.
The solution? Standardize all forms and, if possible, use one form only. This might be challenging at first, but the rewards will be worth it. Standardizing forms saves a lot of time by eliminating the argument on which form to use, and it also saves hours of work from producing and recording different types of forms.
Assess If Processes Are Necessary
The HR department deals with many tasks every day, but this doesn’t always mean that everything they’re doing is actually necessary. Business operations change, but the HR department is often left to carry out tasks that are irrelevant to the present times.
Another way to streamline your HR management strategy is to assess if processes used and done by the department are actually necessary. For example, if the recruitment requires three interviews and two written exams, assess if you can shorten the process into two interviews (initial and then final interview) and one written exam.
Assessing the existing processes is necessary, especially if you plan on making new ones. This will prevent any duplication and ensure that the HR department doesn’t waste resources doing different things with the same outcomes.
Remain Consistent With Your Efforts
There are many ways to streamline your HR management strategy but keep in mind that these require consistency. Implementing all the tips presented in this article for a week doesn’t warrant a positive and lasting change to your HR management strategy.
If you want to improve, ensure that all tips mentioned here become innate to your business. When all of these are followed consistently, it won’t be long before your HR department starts to do more without requiring more time or effort.