Three HR Challenges & Solutions for Companies of All Sizes
Whether you have a team of 50 or 50,000, one thing is certainly true: your human resources department plays a vital role in the success of your company. Tasked with sourcing the highest quality talent, HR professionals are responsible for hiring a team that can deliver winning strategy, high-performing products, quality customer service, and more. Without HR, and without the incredible people they help you hire, your company couldn’t achieve its goals.
What HR does, though, is much more than simply “hire the best people.” In addition to recruitment, many HR professionals are responsible for employee engagement, policy enforcement, company-wide communication, remediation, and much more.
While every HR department takes on these tasks, the challenges associated with them often vary depending on the size of your company. Frequently, smaller companies lack resources, while larger companies are faced with ensuring consistency across a large workforce, who may be spread out across the country or the globe. But don’t worry—there are solutions available to you, big or small.
Three Human Resources Challenges & Solutions
The Challenge: Recruitment & Retention
Human resources is often synonymous with the most basic function of the job: hiring new employees. For smaller companies, the challenge many face is competing in the job market against larger companies, who may be able to offer higher salaries or more robust benefits packages.
While larger companies can also struggle to find the right talent at times, research shows that retaining employees is harder than hiring them and that this challenge is expected to grow in the coming years.
The Solution: Conduct Exit Interviews
A slew of suggestions aimed at sourcing and retaining talent can be found across the internet, but here is a recommendation many people overlook: utilize exit interviews. An exit interview is a questionnaire or conversation conducted with an outgoing employee. It helps companies understand the reasons an employee is leaving, and companies can also use it to understand what attracted their talent to the job in the first place.
Conducting exit interviews is only worthwhile if the information is acted upon, of course, so HR professionals can use the information gleaned to make organizational changes aimed at retaining existing talent and to craft job descriptions that capture attention. A quick tip: outsourcing your exit interviews will increase the likelihood that an employee is honest and forthcoming with their answers.
The Challenge: Policy Formalization & Enforcement
In addition to recruitment, HR professionals are responsible for the creation and enforcement of company policies. Company policies keep employees safe, help you maintain compliance with government regulations, ensure consistency across your brand, and positively impact your company culture.
However, like with hiring, HR departments face challenges. As small businesses begin to draft policies, they may struggle to communicate them to their workforce. Meanwhile, larger companies—who may already have a policy structure in place—have to ensure company-wide adoption and consistency.
The Solution: Policy Management Software
For both of these problems, policy management software is a good place to start. This technology empowers HR managers to write, edit, organize, and communicate company policies. It makes the process easy and automated, including electronic attestation from your employees that they have read, have understood, and will comply with the policy going forward.
For smaller companies, getting a system like this in place will take some of the manual labor off your HR teams, allowing them to focus their attention elsewhere while still managing this important task. For larger organizations, policy management software ensures consistency across the company, which might be difficult to achieve with thousands of employees (without technology to back it up).
The Challenge: Handling Employee Concerns
Beyond just finding employees, human resource professionals are responsible for helping employees feel comfortable and supported in the work environment. Unfortunately, difficulties sometimes arise, and HR must provide a path forward for employees to report their concerns in a way that is convenient, compliant, and thorough.
For smaller companies, protecting employee anonymity when reporting an incident can be hard. For larger companies, managing the volume of employee feedback is equally difficult.
The Solution: Case Management Software
Technology can step in here, too, to provide support for both small and large organizations. Case management software collects a report from your employee, helping you manage incidents as they arise. The process can be anonymous, and the software will facilitate seamless communication throughout the documentation and resolution phases. Beyond that, case management software can also provide HR with reports they can then use to make important changes at the organizational level to mitigate recurring issues.
Deploying any of these technology solutions will simplify some of the challenges your HR teams face. When you’re ready to make your HR tasks a bit easier, remember ETHIX360.
The ETHIX360 blog brings you weekly updates on all things human resources and compliance.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Kristin Hassan is the Chief Human Resources Officer of ETHIX360. Kristin spent six years as the New York City SHRM’s executive director and is a board member of the Human Resources Management Association - Princeton SHRM Chapter and a member of the Peer 150 HR Group.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
