If you want to ensure that your employees are happy and that they feel well looked after, there are all sorts of things you can do to help that along. The truth is that it’s all going to be helped and supported by an HR process that really works, and this is the kind of thing that you need to make sure you are thinking about. So what are the elements to an HR process that works well for everyone, and how can you ensure you are doing this right?
In this post, we’ll go through a few of the main essentials to an HR process that everybody is going to benefit from. If you can do the following and get it right, you are going to find that your business is a lot more likely to succeed overall, and you will certainly have happier employees too.
Clarity All The Way
One of the main overarching qualities that you will want at every step of the way is clarity. Ambiguity has a way of killing momentum, whereas you are going to find that being clear is much more likely to grease the wheels of an HR process.
This is applicable to everything from job descriptions, onboarding steps, or performance review criteria. All of this should be painfully clear to all who are affected by them. If your employees have to wonder what is likely to happen or what is expected of them, then you need to turn this around.
The key here is to use standardized documentation and communication protocols to eliminate gray areas and cut down on miscommunication and confusion. It helps if you use plain language wherever possible, as you need to make sure that those outside of HR can understand it easily at a glance.
Accessibility & Transparency
It’s also vital that your HR systems and policies are out in the open for all to see. They shouldn’t live in some forgotten drive folder that nobody can access. They need to be right where everyone can see and access them at all times.
This is about fairness, but also about keeping things transparent, because it’s when things are out in the light that they can actually be improved. This is something that you should really work on if you want to make sure that everybody feels included in things too.
It’s something that you should apply to how promotions work, how to report a problem or what benefits an employee is qualified to receive. You can probably already see why it would be important that these things are clearly visible and accessible.
It’s much more than just making sure that those with particular needs are able to access what they need – it’s about everyone having the option to see policies and protocols easily whenever they want to. You’ll likely be amazed at what this can do for your morale in the team, and how much it helps to create trust between you and your employees as well.
Trustworthy Software
Mostly everything you do in HR is done through some kind of software or another, and it’s therefore vital to make sure that you are using software that you and everyone else can trust. This is particularly important when it comes to jobs and tasks where you need to store the personal details of your staff.
A good example of this would be payroll, which of course involves the use of very sensitive information, including banking details for your employees.
Here, it is particularly important that you are using software for payroll management which is trustworthy, an industry standard, and which you know you are able to use without error too. If you are doing that here as well as for other sensitive HR practices, it’s really going to help a lot.
Active Feedback Loops
It’s great to ask for feedback from your employees often. But you need to make sure you are actually acting on that feedback, otherwise this is all for nothing.
What you actually want is to make sure that you are creating some active feedback loops, where you are collecting feedback and then responding and acting on it on a regular basis – and then responding to the feedback on that too.
You should make sure you are building in a number of regular feedback loops, and not just through annual surveys. You might also consider exit interviews, pulse checks and open forums where people can provide the insights they feel are important.
The key however is always to close the loop, to show what actions came from that feedback, otherwise people will simply stop bothering to tell you.
Flexibility Without Chaos
It’s rarely good to have completely rigid systems that don’t move and don’t go anywhere. Usually, you are going to benefit from some flexibility at least. Rigid systems might sometimes seem efficient, but they are often liable to break when real humans interact with them.
Actually, the best HR processes tend to have some kind of built-in flexibility: remote work policies that evolve over time, PTO systems that account for unpredictability, and performance management that allows for nuance.
This is a much better approach on the whole. But there is a limit. You don’t want to simply adopt a process of anything goes. Too much flexibility is not a good thing. You want to make sure that you are avoiding chaos, as that only makes things worse in the end. So make sure that you still have clear guidelines and fallback options to avoid things becoming a free-for-all.
Good Tech Options
Finally, if you have some tech that really works, that is one of the most powerful ways to ensure that you are going to have an HR process that really works. It’s amazing what this can do for you, and you should find that you are much more likely to achieve great things if you are going to have the tech that works. This is something to bear in mind today and in the future.
