Processes are built into the fabric in most businesses, and there are few areas more vital to systematize than Human Resources.
HR is where your employees begin and end their employment journey with your business, and it’s where they go when there is interpersonal trouble along the way. The essential functions of Human resources include:
- Hiring
- Firing
- Employee Training
- Compensation
- Relationships between employee and employer
- Staff Safety
Often, HR sets the tone for a team member, and that tone remains an intrinsic part of the company culture.
Why HR Processes are Vital to Your Company
Your Human Resources team is working with one of the most unpredictable parts of your company, the people who staff your business. While many aspects of a company can be automated and handled routinely, you certainly cannot automate the interpersonal relationships of human beings.
However, processes can greatly facilitate HR staff and help them train, hire, and navigate issues with your employees. Here we have presented several reasons why processes will help your HR team. These points also show where processes should be built urgently.
Equity in Staffing and Compensation
Let’s begin with the first step for any employee, the hiring process, and negotiating compensation. In most companies, the main job of an HR department is hiring and firing. This doesn’t mean that your HR team simply lists jobs on Zip Recruiter and calls it a day. HR has to vet applicants, set up and perform interviews, and offer the job to the best performer.
These steps can open the team member up to the risk of using personal bias when hiring and offering compensation. Most of this bias is unintentional and can be mitigated by creating a set hiring process.
For example, if there is a history of salary inequity in your company (say one race or gender has historically been offered less for the same position as another), your process can include using an approved salary scale provided to all applicants for a particular job.
Your HR team can build a process to take them through every aspect of hiring, generally reducing inequity and improving hiring results.
Conflict Resolution and Firing
Dealing with conflict and determining when to fire an employee are two are the more challenging aspects of HR. This is an area around which one must build clear policies and provide business systems so the HR employees can work out when to work on a resolution – and when it’s time to let someone go. This should not be a “gut” determination.
Training Your Employees
Building processes around training new employees or updating the training of existing employees is vital. Every employee should be introduced to your business in the same way, with the same values instilled in them.
Additionally, new hires must be brought up to speed with the business, their new job, and their understanding of who they will be working with. The more oriented one feels in a job, the better they will perform their work.
Processes and procedures can significantly improve the efficacy of employee training in general – and with new hires in particular.
Assuring Legal Safety Standards
Legal safety standards usually require continuing education and are typically updated regularly. Your HR team needs to ensure that staff are trained on updated legal safety standards and create a reporting system to assure compliance. This can get tricky because some safety standards can appear to be outside of HR’s purview. Building processes can eliminate uncertainty and help all employees remain on the same page.
Avoiding Legal Problems
Finally, one of the functions of HR is to protect a company against legal liability while also supporting employees and providing systems for recourse. Maintaining this balance is best done with clearly written policies, processes, and procedures. If every circumstance is handled in the same way, and the processes and policies meet legal standards, then the company is less likely to be liable in the case of employee wrongdoing.
Similarly, if safety standards are continuously upheld, employee training is in place, and equity is built into the processes and procedures used by HR, your business has done everything possible to assure employees that legal recourse will not be necessary for them to receive fair treatment.
HR balances employee needs, fair practices, and legal practices. Providing systems that guide your HR team and all staff toward consistency will help mitigate legal liability and build a company culture based on competence and trust.
If you are ready to build HR systems into your business, contact us today. The experts at Business Success Consulting Group are here to help.
