Efficient, effective, and legally compliant HR processes that are universally followed make a significant impact on achieving business goals. If you’ve ever found yourself in the middle of an employee lawsuit or a policy that kept the business from running efficiently, I know you can attest to this.
Let’s start at the beginning – recruiting. There’s no doubt that HR impacts the speed and quality of the applicant and employee experience. But that’s just the first step. From the moment someone sees your job posting to the time they leave the organization, there are HR processes that impact the ability to achieve business goals.
- Hiring quality employees
- Training and onboarding
- Manager effectiveness
- Driving performance and coaching employees
- Total rewards (base & incentive compensation, benefits)
- End of employment process
Effects of Letting HR Processes Languish
As a leader within HR, it’s easy to get bogged down into the daily grind of operational needs. Let’s face it, we put out fires, right? It’s easy to let our processes get sloppy while attending to the daily requests of managers and employees. We know the processes are there if we need them, and meanwhile, we fight the fires to keep things running.
I worked with an HR leader recently who got caught in that trap – and she didn’t even see it coming. Let’s call her Monica. For years, Monica barely had to recruit. When she did, she used her existing processes to move things forward.
It worked well for her, for a while.
However, Monica’s successful track record changed as her cooperative experienced more turnover while also growing at the same time. Those loose HR processes quickly became time consuming to handle.
She found the job posting and employment branding strategy lacking in today’s tougher recruiting environment, and it needed to be revamped. By taking time to identify internal HR business needs from a recruiting standpoint, Monica and I worked to update their process. For this situation, that meant:
- Adding new advertising options
- Reducing the time from application to first interview
- Leveraging virtual interviews to speed up the interview process
- Streamlining processes that didn’t add value to the business
Improve Your HR Processes
HR processes impact how efficiently we can serve managers and employees, to give them the tools and resources they need to do their job. They also create standards that help keep our cooperatives out of legal issues!
So, take the time to review and improve your HR processes and give your firefighting mode a rest. Trust me (and Monica), it will be worth it in the long run.
Want to Learn More?
Our HR Best Practices Guide provides insights on ways to improve recruiting, interviewing, performance and compensation HR processes. Download and begin using it today!
If you’d like to connect, reach out to us to schedule a complimentary HR assessment. Together, we will go through your HR processes to identify gaps and provide ideas on solutions to bring more value to the business.
