HR Best Practices That Can Transform Any Organization
The world of human resources is changing, with an increased sense of purpose and focus on activities that add value to the business as a whole. No longer thought of as merely an administrative or reactive field, HR can lead the way in terms of positive business change. Therefore, it’s vital to understand the latest trends and best practices.
The top 7 HR best practices every HR manager should know
Let’s take a look at the top seven HR practices being championed in successful businesses and how they yield results.
- 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 and 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. - 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.
- 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.
- 360-degree 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.
This 360-degree performance management focuses on gathering objective and relevant feedback from a selection of an employee’s contacts, including their manager, colleagues, subordinates, and external contacts. It’s a useful way of achieving a well-rounded and objective view of performance management from a range of sources. It can help an employee address performance concerns in specific areas, as well as be rewarded for excellent performance in others.
- 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. - Paperless HR processes
Along with all of the new and improved processes that HR teams now manage comes a mountain of administrative tasks to keep them running smoothly. But trying to conduct these activities using paper, spreadsheets, or manual databases eats up valuable HR working hours, leading to less accuracy due to human error along the way. Paperless HR uses software to automate many of the most common and time-consuming processes. This means that data can be processed quickly, accurately, and consistently, freeing up the HR team to focus on more value-adding work. - Actionable insights
When it comes to making important decisions related to workforce, businesses need data-driven insights. However, when businesses use HR software that don’t offer advanced reporting functionality, teams are forced to wait too long to gather data, analyse it, and retrieve insights.
On the other hand, choosing an HR tool that comes with an inbuilt reporting module enables targeted data analysis to make better informed workforce decisions. Best of all, by harnessing the power of business analytics greatly speeds up ‘time to insight’ and enable real-time actions.
Step your HR up a notch with these HR best practices
Start today by picking a couple of the best practices discussed above that are most relevant to your organization. Take the initiative to see what improvements you can achieve in each area of your business.
Kissflow HR Cloud is a great tool to experiment with bringing automation to your HR and improving all of your HR processes. Sign-up for free demo to see how you can use automation to take your HR to the next level.