[HR Director] How to respond efficiently to the problems of your HR specialists

HR specialists are constantly faced with problems when they try to handle a task or a request from the company’s employees. It’s part of their job, but, when it implies a lot of frustration, a lot of energy wasted on activities that don’t directly contribute to their success, the effect of the problems is amplified, and you need an efficient way of solving them.

As you know all too well, HR technologies can turn your department into a strong strategic partner within your company, eliminate useless manual work and increase the efficiency of the HR processes. As an HR director or manager, it’s your duty to use the existing tools to look for solutions to your department’s persistent problems.

Recruitment

Recruiting new talents is one of the greatest challenges that your HR department faces. Finding the right mix of abilities, personality traits and motivation is a difficult mission, even when the pool that your recruiters can choose from is large. With the increase in the number of competitors comes an increase in alternatives for your potential candidates. Attracting the right persons can become a real problem, especially for niche, specialized positions.

Regardless of whether you perform the recruiting process in-house or you use a company specializing in recruiting, it’s important to manage all the actions and data in a centralized and efficient manner. You end up having hundreds of applicants and your team must review and compare each one. If your people do this manually, they become more and more frustrated from one resume to the next and valuable energy is wasted checking off tasks that a recruiting tool would perform automatically, based on certain parameters set by you. Such a recruiting tool or HR software solution helps you accelerate the recruiting process and dedicate more time to tasks that are truly important.

Retention and Performance Management

When you say that you work in HR, a lot of people assume that you spend most of your time recruiting and hiring new staff. However, a large portion of HR activities is actually focused on retaining the existing staff, a challenge most of the time more difficult than recruiting.

The responsibility of the HR department is to protect the company’s most valuable resource and, in order to do so, all employees must be appropriately rewarded for their efforts and feel like they are part of a tight-knit team. In the absence of a clear performance management system, the HR department will start having problems satisfying the expectations and needs of employees. Automating certain HR flows through employee self-service is a good step forward in going digital and use the technology in a positive way.

Payroll

In an HR department, the most challenging period of the month might be when you must perform payroll-related tasks, especially when you are a smaller company that didn’t outsource this task. And since payroll is not just about processing the employees’ salaries, but also involves calculations performed considering the company policies, bonuses, commissions, deductions, etc., HR has a challenging mission and the risk of error is high.

The simplest solution in order to eliminate this problem is to automate the payroll process. The accuracy of a payroll software integrated with your time and attendance tool can protect you from problems generated by human error and employees dissatisfied by miscalculations.  Finally, making corrections after the process is over is much easier and hassle-free.

Solving employee requests through Employee Self-Service

The HR department is the bridge between the company and the human resource so that work-related requests first go through your team. You and your co-workers within the department are already busy with various tasks and it’s not at all easy or pleasant to be frequently interrupted by employees that are only requesting information that they are entitled to. Receiving such requests is normal. What’s not normal is wasting a lot of time gathering the data necessary to respond to these requests.

The best long-term solution in order to handle these perfectly entitled requests is to have all the information in one place. When all the data is centralized, your employees can enjoy a self-service type tool, that offers answers to a lot of the questions that they would have interrupted you or one of your co-workers with. Among these for instance: access to their employment contract, performance assessments and goals, days off, pay-slips etc.

Employee training and legal compliance

Training is a key element of your employees’ development and it’s important for their professional satisfaction, as well as for maintaining high standards for your company’s activity. There are roles within your company that require the existence of special certificates or training, regulated by law. Even if each employee is responsible for keeping track of them, when your business is based on certified skills, you don’t want to run late when it comes to planning, executing and obtaining such certificates.

A tool dedicated to managing training courses, certifications and ensuring compliance with the internal regulations or the law in force will make the job of your HR department much easier and will facilitate the tracking of each type of course and certificate. It will ensure that notifications and reminders are sent, the concerned departments will be able to track the associated costs, it will be much easier to track the course schedule, etc.

The categories presented above represent only some of the challenges that your HR department is faced with. The solution in order to solve them quickly is the same in most cases: ensuring access to relevant data by digitizing this data and automate your HR processes. Achieve this by choosing and implementing an HR software adapted to your company’s needs. Your company might need a mix of tools in order to efficiently solve the specific problems that the HR department is faced with.

Discover the different features of an HR platform that can ensure the efficiency of your HR department. Details here.

• HR Department