How to make HR simpler

People analytics has been a buzzword for years, and continues to be so, which has led many HR professionals to frantically attempt to create dashboards and assume metrics on data they just don’t have.

HR has fought for a place on the board but doesn’t have the time to do the strategic thinking and planning required to be as effective as they’d like in that role and the change in workplace dynamics has forced the industry to become more inventive in the way it hires, onboards, manages, develops and retires employees.

But that’s just the half of it.

In a time where we have higher demands, increased pressures and no additional time, HR needs to find a way to reduce output and get the same results. Here are some ways to do just that.

Rationalising Processes

For what seems like forever, HR have developed processes and usually struggled to get their people to follow them. In recent years there’s been much discussion around how we create processes, and the reasoning behind them. Are we writing them based on what actually happens, or what we like to think should happen?

Reviewing and rationalising what processes we have in place can dramatically improve employee engagement and reduce friction. One of the considerations here is to stop designing processes and instead design experiences for our people. Think about what people are really doing, and why. How can we make it as easy as possible for them, which in turn can create habits?

Read more about designing experiences instead of processes.

Empower Employees and Managers

Self-service isn’t just a reduced burden for HR, but it can help empower your employees and managers by giving them the ability to control personal details, book their own leave, keep payroll records, and manage their own and their team’s personal development via accessible tools including XCD’s mobile app.

Applying this to additional areas of your business, such as recruitment, also means managers can create and manage vacancies, and HR can put their focuses elsewhere, such as improving equality and diversity, or succession planning.

Already have this functionality, but struggling to get your people to adopt it? Take a look at our article where we explore how to encourage the use of self-service.

Understand What Metrics are Important and Track Them Easily

It’s easy to get caught in the trap where we’re measuring every tiny detail, and while this could be important for your organisation, try to review what really makes a difference and why. By spending too much time pulling together reports and understanding metrics, we can often find we don’t have the time act on them and make real difference.

There’s also higher demand from the C-Suite, who want to see more and more metrics across the organisation, and HR can get caught up trying to pull together metrics that don’t have an impact.

Try to get a real understanding of why people want to see specific metrics – there may be a better option that can impact strategy in a more effective way. HRDConnect suggests five key metrics HR should be tracking here.

Review how to kickstart your people analytics.

Once you know this, how do you report on it easily and effectively without spending weeks on end pulling together data that will be out of date as soon as you send it?

Use reports and dashboards for people analytics, highlighting key trends and statistics that are important to the C-Suite, and can truly impact the success of the organisation. Not only will this give you quick access to the information that HR needs, it will also give them direct access to the information, simplifying the process and freeing up the HR team to take action on the information.

How HRMS analytics data can improve your HR strategy.

Improve Productivity

Simple to say, difficult to achieve, but there are two clear ways that HR really can improve their productivity.

You won’t be surprised to know that email is HR’s top time-stealer. And while there are some great steps you can take to improve the way emails are managed; the true problem often lies deeper than this.

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at failure demand, and how it impacts the HR department. But what is it?

Failure demand is created where a system or process is unable to meet the real requirements. It’s created when parts of your carefully honed HR machine that should be simple, regularly generate more work. We like to call it “work you don’t want.” Step one – reduce (or eliminate) this from your workload.

Tackle failure demand and save yourself some time.

Step two is around automation. Many organisations will have some kind of HR system in place – advanced, or not. Use whatever you have to automate as much as possible, be it leave requests or alerts, return to work reminders, responses to job applications or reporting.

Enabling powerful automation for this can stop duplicate data entry, reduce errors and save up to 80% of your administration time, while helping you build an accurate picture of your overall organisation in real time.