Many organizations know how important it is to develop people, but finding the time and money to do it often takes a back seat. The HR Tools Best Practices series is designed to give you practical advice on planning and implementing your HR investment plan, so that you can get more done faster, while avoiding waste.
HRTool Best Practices” helps you to answer the following critical questions with ease: – What is the right HR solution for my company? – How can I benefit from implementing it? – How much does it cost? – What value will it add to my business?
HR Practices vs. HR Activities
So is there a difference between HR practices and HR activities? Absolutely there is. Think of HR activities like the daily tasks that get completed by you or someone on your team every single day. HR activities are checklist items that would fall under the umbrella of a sound HR practice.
For example, in our list below, we talk about ensuring fair compensation for your employees. A task or activity under this practice is running payroll. Other common HR activities include conducting employee surveys, writing rejection emails to job candidates, calculating paid time off balances, and tracking employee overtime hours.
While all of these activities are critical for a business to function properly, they’re just that–activities. The practices found on this list embody many of the activities that are completed on a daily or weekly basis.
Once you have the right practices in play, the activities that correlate with those practices should follow. Having the practices without the activities (or vice versa) is like having a car without an engine. The car needs the engine to run, but the engine also needs a vehicle to power.
The best human resources teams know how to strike a balance and optimize both practices and activities.
Some of the best small and mid-sized companies are choosing Eddy to help manage their people, processes, and payroll.
Top HR Best Practices in 2021
Hire Great People
People are the heart of any great business. Your first priority as an HR professional should be to bring the very best people into your organization so that they can contribute to the culture and success of the company.
Of course, hiring great people is easier said than done. In order to hire the best, you need to ensure that you have great hiring processes in place. If your hiring process is lackluster, or if you fail to communicate quickly and effectively, you’ll miss out on some of the best candidates.
When you think specifically about the hiring process, try to put yourself in the shoes of your candidates. Ask yourself, “what’s the candidate experience like?” Are they well informed about where they stand? Did you communicate with them quickly and show interest and excitement about their application? Did you make them feel comfortable and appreciated in the interview? Take the time to really understand the candidate’s experience so that you know where to make improvements.
Prioritize Workplace Safety
Although workplace safety has always been important, there is definitely a renewed focus on this critical HR practice. While some people have only ever thought about workplace safety in terms of factory work or being careful with heavy machinery, this is not the case.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced all workplaces, regardless of industry or activity, to place a greater emphasis on the safety of their employees. If employees cannot come to work and feel like they’re safe and cared for, they may just stop coming to work.
So what does this look like in practice? Here are a few things to consider when working to make a safe environment for employees:
- Place hand sanitizing stations throughout your office in order to give everyone easy access to clean their hands.
- Regularly spray desks and computer monitors with disinfectant.
- Limit the number of people who can sit together inside a conference room.
- Spread out employee desks so they are socially distanced.
- Purchase plexiglass barriers to place in between cubicles.
- Circulate air regularly
- Purchase air purification systems
- Do not allow visitors in the office
- Require that masks be worn in the office
- Limit access to shared spaces or common areas like the break room or kitchen
Of course, the above suggestions are related to precautions in association with COVID-19. If your office has other safety measures that need to be enforced due to the nature of the work, (like in a factory or warehouse setting) then ensure those safety guidelines are established and followed.
Compensate Employees Fairly
In many surveys conducted across hundreds or even thousands of employees, the most important thing to employees is fair pay. When employees feel like they are being compensated fairly, they spend a lot less time worrying about why they’re not making more, and a lot more time focused on projects and efforts that move the company forward.
So how can you know that your employees are making a fair wage? A good way to do this is to compare their salaries and compensation packages against the market in your local area. Obviously, if your business is operating in rural Nebraska, you don’t need to compensate employees as if you were headquartered in San Francisco. Location matters when it comes to compensation.
Services such as Glassdoor and Payscale are easy, convenient ways to get compensation data for different job titles. You can see the range of compensation being paid for positions with those job titles, and you can ensure that the salaries you are paying fall within the range. Of course, it’s always a good idea to pay at the high end of the range when you can afford it. When an employee is well-paid they feel valued and care for. This will likely lead to them staying in your company for a longer period of time.
In addition to salaries, you should also consider if and how your company pays out bonuses. Bonuses are a great way to incentivize employees and can be a welcome surprise for some of your top performers. Consider creating a bonus structure that aligns the goals of the business with the performance of employees.
Self-managed and effective teams
We all know that teamwork is crucial in achieving goals. High-performance teams are crucial for any company when it comes to achieving success.
Teams provide value because they consist of people who are, and think differently but are working towards a common goal. This means that different ideas are generated to help achieve the goal. These ideas are then processed and combined, resulting in the best ones being selected.
The best teams are cognitively diverse and psychologically safe. This means that team members can generate ideas that are different while feeling comfortable bringing these up and discussing them.
Creating and nurturing high-performance teams is one of HR’s key responsibilities. Belbin’s Team Role Inventory is a popular tool for team creation and cooperation. Effective HRM includes directly supporting teamwork by involvement in how teams are organized. This can be done in several ways. Measuring team performance, rewarding team excellence, and advising management on techniques and tools to facilitate teamwork are some methods.
Individual personality assessments also help understand how other team members think and behave. Understanding these processes is one of the main responsibilities of a manager. This is the reason why a lot of management courses focus on it.
Different tools facilitate teamwork. Examples include communication software, feedback tools, project management tools, and other task and goal setting software. These can facilitate communication and help teams be more efficient.
Finally, HR needs to encourage different teams to work together in the organization. A team is usually part of a larger entity, like another team or a department. These larger entities also need to work together. Facilitating this helps to build an efficient and effective organization. One of the tools that can be used for this is Organizational Network Analysis.
Open book management style
Sharing information about contracts, sales, new clients, management objectives, company policies, employee personal data, etc. ensures that the workforce is as enthusiastic about the business as the management. It helps in making people interested in your strategic decisions, thus aligning them to your business objectives. Be as open as you can. Employee self-service portal, manager on-line etc. are some tools available today to practice this style.
Fair evaluation system
Develop an evaluation system that clearly links individual performance to corporate business goals and priorities. Each employee should have well-defined reporting relationships. Self-rating should be a part of the evaluation process as it empowers employees. Evaluation becomes fairer if it is based on achievements of the employee, tracked over the year. For higher objectivity, besides the immediate boss, each employee should be evaluated by the next higher level (often called a reviewer). Cross-functional feedback, if obtained by the immediate boss from another manager (for whom this employee’s work is also important), will add to the fairness of the system.
Conclusion
HR tools for small businesses Overall, the system is easy to use, takes care of most of the functionality related to statuses (and etc) and has simple but aesthetically pleasing user interface.