Four Ideas to re-engineer your Human Resource Practices

How much do you have in your budget? You’re not alone. Corporate belts are cinching all across America. While a few unfortunate companies are struggling for survival itself, nearly all organizations are looking for ways to become leaner. The solution however, isn’t as simple as cutting HR budgets. The challenges the HR professional faces today are more complex: maintaining productivity while reducing staff, for one. A company can be facing contraction and experiencing growing pains, at the same time. These challenges force most leadership to look beyond simple budget and staff reductions to re-engineer its human resource practices. So in short you are not alone. Across the HR field, companies are finding creative ways to “do more with less”. Following are four simple ideas you can use to help you re-engineer your Human Resource department:

1) Analyze Your HR Practices
2)Develop a Strategic HR Plan
3)Embrace Technology
4)Leverage Your Resources

Analyze Your HR Practices - Everyone gets stuck in a rut. You are so busy putting out fires that you have little time to think about the big picture or the smaller details. Reach out for another pair of eyes to give you a fresh perspective. One valuable tool to help you gain insight is an HR audit. Find an HR expert to review and evaluate your company’s HR operations, top to bottom. An audit is an extensive examination of a company’s systems and practices.

What’s on the list for an HR audit? These areas are likely suspects:

Recordkeeping
Compliance
Salary and Compensation
Benefits
Professional Development and Training
Performance and Recognition
Recruiting and Retention
Safety and Health
Culture
With a successful audit, you’ll uncover those compliance risks that can derail an organization, learn how your company’s practices compare to industry leaders and get a host of new ideas to improve your results.

Develop a Strategic HR Plan - You want senior leadership to understand that HR brings value beyond the basic hiring and firing functions. A strategic HR plan aligns the department’s goals with those of the organization. Any major corporate actions are sure to have an impact on HR. When a regional service firm created a 5-year strategic plan to expand its single-state presence to the entire Midwest through a series of acquisitions, the firm’s HR executive created a plan to support those goals. She focused on learning the employment laws in the new states, securing regional benefit brokers and creating step-by-step processes to integrate the acquired staff members.

Embrace Technology - Technology can streamline HR workflow, provide communication and accessibility to a non-centralized workforce and allow your staff greater flexibility. Some great technological time-savers: web-based payroll and HR Management System applications, employee intranets and electronic applicant tracking systems. The HR manager at an 160-person, five office company, partnered with the IT department to create a simple intranet-based tool for employees to make annual benefit selections.

Leverage Your Resources - This concept is about accomplishing HR objectives, especially those strategic goals, more efficiently. Break free of traditional practices. Rather than hiring a new staff member to fill a long-term but ultimately temporary need, consider alternate forms of employment, such as payrolling. Payrolling is the practice of referring a contingent worker to a staffing vendor or payrolling provider. The vendor acts as the employer of record, responsible for employer taxes, payroll, and all legal matters pertaining to employing workers, thereby reducing contingent workforce costs.

Your company’s employees can be an invaluable resource, too. When Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston challenged the hospital’s staff to volunteer creative cost-saving ideas, he received hundreds of suggestions. Putting some of those ideas into practice, BIDMC was able to save enough expenses to reduce necessary layoffs from 600 to 150.

Don’t overlook the importance of employee morale during an uncertain economy. Enterprising HR departments can give employees valuable benefits, without blowing the budget. For example, companies may offers its staffers bimonthly brown bag lunch-time enrichment events, led by local vendors, experts and service providers. These vendors deliver their programs at no or nominal charge to the company. Topics can be work-related subjects such as time management and presentation skills, or take a personal bent, such as choosing a workout program or creating a will.

Submission by www.kjgrouphrconsulting.com