How to Optimize the Role of HR in Your Company

Human resources (HR) is a vital component of your business. Without a good HR team, your employees may become disgruntled as working conditions falter and benefits are ill-thought-out or non-existent.

Despite the importance of HR, few businesses invest in HR or optimize its potential. Many companies today even outsource their HR team or wildly underfund their HR department. This is a certain misstep, as a good HR team can turn the tide during a difficult quarter and help you find better talent to help support your recruitment drives.

Even if you are working with a limited budget, there are still things you can do to optimize the role of HR in your company and make your business a people-friendly employer.

Outsourcing HR

There’s nothing inherently wrong with outsourcing your HR department. Around 10% of small businesses around the globe outsource some amount of HR, as the time, effort, and funding necessary to house an HR department internally may not be possible.

However, just blindly outsourcing your HR department is not the answer. While it’s unlikely that you’ll fall foul of a rogue trader (most external HR departments have clear accreditations) you might find that the HR services you sign up to don’t meet your expectations.

Before outsourcing your HR department, be clear about your company culture and the way you want your employees to be treated when they touch base with HR. When interviewing potential external HR services, ask them for examples of their work and be diligent about finding a service that aligns well with your current rules and expectations in the workplace.

Training

Most people think that HR is just there when a conflict occurs. However, a fully optimized HR department does much more than solve workplace squabbles.

One of the best services your HR department can offer is further training. Further training shows your current employees that you care about their development and ensures that your workplace is efficient and capable of completing any reasonable task.

Before tasking your HR team with further training, take some time to consider which soft skills are most important for your team. For example, if you work in construction, time management is a top priority for you and your workers. Your HR department can improve on current time management skills by learning to better monitor performance, gain competence with integrated digital solutions, and improve the standard of leadership in the workplace.

Taking the time to improve soft skills through HR ensures that everyone is on the same page and able to fulfill their roles adequately. Few employees have ever received formal soft skill training and will benefit greatly from fully optimized, HR-led training initiatives. 

Recruitment

Your HR department should already be a key player in your recruitment drives. Most recruitment specialists already work in HR and usually report to your business’s HR manager. However, many businesses still treat recruitment as a separate department entirely and only include the rest of the HR team in the final proceedings when prospective employees are ready to sign on the dotted line.

Failing to involve the entire HR team from the early stages of your recruitment stage is a mistake. HR has a better understanding of your employees than anyone and can help spot key pieces of information that you may have missed in job adverts, candidate assessments, and interviews.

You can optimize the role of HR in your company by ensuring that your recruitment specialists are also responsible for some basic HR tasks. To facilitate this, you should lighten the load on full-time recruiters to ensure they have the time and energy to get stuck into day-to-day HR operations. It may seem like a headache at first, but getting recruitment specialists involved in everyday business practices gives them a better sense of the company and its recruitment needs.

Onboarding

Onboarding is a vital part of your business success. However, 22% of businesses do not have a formal onboarding process. Failing to formalize the onboarding process leads to a jumbled experience for new employees who will quickly spot that their new employer is disorganized and unable to fulfill basic training obligations.

You can optimize your onboarding process by creating a universal experience for all new employees. This onboarding process should:

• Teach all employees the rules and expectations
• Introduce new employees to their specific roles
• Introduce new hires to the company culture
• Help employees build meaningful relationships in the workplace.

Building a successful onboarding program starts and ends in your HR department. HR has a clear understanding of the rules and expectations and can steer new employees clear of potential mishaps. They will also be able to guide new employees towards new interpersonal connections and act as a touch-point if employees ever get lost or confused during the onboarding process.

You can optimize your onboarding process by allocating specific HR professionals to a team of new employees. The folks you choose to aid in onboarding should understand that onboarding is their priority and should take precedence in their workflow. Just ensure that the members of your HR team who are helping with onboarding do not have any time-sensitive obligations, as you don’t want to overwork the folks who are supposed to be onboarding new employees.

Conflict Resolution

HR is best known as the department that resolves conflict. However, many HR departments currently have suboptimal conflict resolution protocols that haven’t been updated to meet contemporary issues that employees may face. In particular, you need to ensure that your HR department is competent with any issues that arise from:

• Conflicts that originate or spread to social media
• Issues that involve discrimination and/or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
• Remote work problems that arise away from the physical workspace
• Abuses of power and/or management errors that make employees feel uncomfortable

Updating conflict resolution protocols to meet contemporary issues that employees face is essential. Conflicts constantly arise on social media and greater access to education and information has raised folk’s awareness of DEI issues at work. You need to update your conflict resolution protocols on a near-yearly basis to ensure that your HR department is optimized to help any employees that come to them with grievances, complaints, or questions.

Conclusion

An optimized human resources department can improve training, recruitment, onboarding, and conflict management in your company. Investing in these areas is a sure-fire way to show employees that you care about their well-being and are invested in their future. Over time, a fully optimized HR department will draw better talent to your business and improve your bottom line.