Human resources plays an important role in every business. Your people are one of your best assets and when it comes to nurturing them, training them, retaining them, looking after them and managing them, it’s crucial to get your human resources right.
That’s why HR leaders are critical to the success of your organization. They can help put in place the right strategies and practices so you can recruit, manage and retain talent that is the right fit for your organization.
Human resource leaders should ensure they keep up-to-date with best practices to achieve the best outcomes for their workplaces.
Current ideas to focus on include:
1. Stay current
Keep on top of all the latest trends in HR to stay ahead of the pack. Subscribe to professional journals and read HR blogs.
2. Focus on improving HR
It can be easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work. By making continuous improvement a priority, you can include innovative practices that streamline your workflow and improve your company’s overall HR function.
3. Embrace technology
Identify tasks and processes that take up too much of the HR department’s valuable time and determine if there are technological solutions that exist to relieve you of some of the burden.
4. Ensure consistency
Once you have policies and procedures in place relating to your HR activities, you need to ensure that they are being applied consistently and fairly to every employee in the organization. If HR is perceived to be playing favorites it creates a culture of mistrust and cynicism.
5. Take a new approach to performance management
Many organizations are shifting away from traditional top-down annual performance processes. This is a great opportunity to test continuous, developmental, more meaningful performance management and feedback systems in your business.
6. Seek out a mentor
A study from the University of Virginia and Harvard University found that people who had three mentors were more likely to get promoted than someone who had less than three mentors. Mentors are also useful for bouncing ideas off – they’ve walked in your shoes before.
7. Embrace diversity and inclusion
Organizations that align diversity and inclusion with their business objectives are more likely to perform well, according to research. Benchmark your existing inclusion and diversity programs against key areas such as gender, age, nationality, culture and ethnicity.
8. Carry out a workplace gap analysis
Analyze the gap in your workforce to allow you to identify and overcome any shortcomings you may have in this area. To do this you need to identify what sort of workforce you need, analyze the current workforce, and then measure the gap between these two points.
9. Copy the best
If you know a particular system or method is working wonders for another company, don’t be afraid to implement it in yours. Of course you should always give them credit and you can also customize to make it a fit for your unique business operations. Implementing proven systems that work is more cost effective and a better use of your time than starting from scratch.