To stay in-line with the dynamic business needs, the HR department is struggling to elevate their area as a key component of overall business success. This requires HR teams to come up with a “Smart HR Strategy” that is prepared to meet the needs of today and future challenges. Here we list out 6 key aspects you must consider in implementing a smart HR strategy.
#1: Better Employee Satisfaction
Despite the huge technology revolution happening, “Human/Employee” is evolving as the pivotal resource of an organization. All the organizational strategies are becoming more “employee facilitation” focused and extending budgets for employee satisfaction. HR strategy should have a more structured approach in dealing with employee satisfaction.
The result of low employee satisfaction results in Employee Turnover. Companies have realized that employee turnover is costing thousands of lost dollars in productivity and wages. In most of these cases, employee satisfaction is the major reason for turnover; which can be corrected by improved HR strategy.
Helping employees become happy to work at your company is the ultimate goal. This is becoming more critical as good workers are become harder to find and retain. By 2020, for employee management, a new title called Chief People Officer (CPO) is expected to top the company boards and the HR department is expected to transform into “People and Performance” areas of the business. This performance component will only happen when employee satisfaction rates are high.
Success in business is all about people, people, people. Whatever industry a company is in, its employees is biggest competitive advantage"
Richard Branson
In the new age of HR a smart HR strategy will include treating every employee not as a number, but as a real person being the challenge of every HR team. So, considering of above two aspects can help you to work, in getting better HR strategy. Also, it will help you to boost up the employee advocacy rate. While pay is often not under HR's direct control advancements like HR automation, a streamlined on-boarding process, and even mobile HR initiatives can improve overall employee experiences and resulting satisfaction.
#2: Transparency
Transparency in HR to employees is making sure that employees have complete visibility on what can be expected from the HR team and how their processes work. But transparency is not limited to HR, but, is on HR's shoulders to facilitate. As with most companies, HR mediates between employees and organizations more often related to misunderstandings that relate to top transparent practices.
Lack of a system to monitor requests and updates on processing status, will lead an employee to have no clarity and accuracy of the overall work. This state is termed as a No-Transparency state; this leads to employee dissatisfaction, which may also result in employee turnover (Know what leads to employee turnover ).
Having an HR automation system to monitor these activities would ensure transparency in all the HR activities. This increases the ability of HR to serve employees better, avoids employees wait time, and finally results in the creation of a better workplace environment.
(Looking for a few HR automation ideas? Visit our HR Hero page that provides some ideas and best practices to a smart HR strategy.)
#3: Inter-Department Workflows Integration
HR functionality spans across multiple departments. HR has to coordinate with various departments like finance, sales, IT, executive suite, and most every area of the company. HR job becomes difficult in managing, when business systems and workforce are distributed across different locations. To conduct smooth end-to-end interactions across various departments, HR needs well defined workflow integrations.
Implementing a cloud service solution, HR portal, (an component of HR automation) will facilitate HR for smooth work flows integrations with greater visibility in the process. Some of the key features of HR portal includes:
- Self-service options for employees
- Operational efficiency for the supporting HR teams
- Flexibility to customize as per the business needs
- Enables portal administrators to monitor their performance and measure important KPIs
#4: Say “NO” to Repetitive Tasks of Onboarding Process
Onboarding and recruitment have a lot of recursive tasks including sending multiple emails for employees and keeping track of them is a challenge. Employees should do a lot of manual filling of repetitive information. This process makes a document management system complex and chances for potential data losses are high. This increases the onboarding time with least efficiency and causes unnecessary operational costs.
The 36% of employers lack structured onboarding" Business Management Daily
The best possible solution would be automating the entire onboarding process. Here, the employee dashboard can be created and give access to employees to fill all the information in one form and auto-updated in other forms too. This avoids repetitive information filling process, avoids difficult paperwork and saves employee time. Also, HR can the monitor status, updates and changes in a single dashboard.
In this way, HR automation can be “stop at once solution” for all onboarding issues.
(To know how HR automation can quicken the Onboarding process check out this case study brief <PDF file> )
#5: Workforce Analytics & Performance Tuning
The strategic function of HR comes with identifying the right talent for the right role. It is the right talent that delivers success to the company and help them push ahead of their competitors.This is the key to better productivity and deliverables.
To find the right talent, HR needs to run the workforce analytics on each employee with various metrics on regular cycles and to identify strengths and weakness of every employee.
Performance tuning is also a job of HR. Based on analytics, HR needs to identify hurdles an employee is facing to deliver better performance and conduct training sessions to raise up the employee skills. This action helps to build morale in employees to increase confidence and performance.
HR strategy should work to develop automation to run workforce analytics and performance tuning activities one after the other for better results.
(Learn how HR automation can streamline your business process)
#6: Smart HR is Mobile
Smartphone users are expected to be 6 billion by 2020, says CNBC report. The same trend is observed even in workplace environment too. Employees are expecting services to be delivered straight to their mobile, where they can access and upload information at their free time. Restricting employee services either to desktop or a laptop is not a good HR practice.
Our employees love the fact that all of their benefits and company information are right at their fingertips.”
HR Manager, Large Services Company
With employees distributed globally, expense tracking and management has been the toughest challenge for HR and employees. In this case, a mobile app installed can help the employees to submit and track expenses on the fly. Moreover, employees can be free from difficult paper receipt submissions and long waited reimbursement approval times.
This ability of the mobile HR strategy helps HR to generate better employee experiences in delivering HR services and to build a strong employee community.
Conclusion
Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients."
- Richard Branson
Employee satisfaction is pivotal to HR strategy. While there are many ways to design an HR strategy, the above mentioned 6 aspects are the leveraged by leading companies and are industry best practices that guide you in getting a successful Smart HR strategy.
If you are looking for a ready-to-use HR strategy to save time and money for your company, then click here to learn how you can be an HR Hero.
