Human Resources Management: How to Make Your Company's HR More Functional

Human resources departments have gotten a bad reputation over the years. There are concerns that HR reps always side with the boss and don't take workers’ concerns seriously. The erosion of trust between employees and HR can have devastating effects on your firm’s morale, efficiency, and even legal compliance.

Great HR departments create an environment where workers are comfortable coming to them with workplace issues, confident that they will be met with receptive listening and actionable solutions. 

It is not easy to foster this environment, especially if the office culture is already in place. But with the help of human resources management software like BQE CORE, you can optimize your HR activities while freeing up human workers for more important tasks and connect all your HR data in one easy-to-reach place.

What are the Techniques for Improving Human Resources Management?

Whether you’re auditing existing HR processes or building from scratch, these best practices can help you improve the productivity of your human resources department and enhance your company’s performance.

Be a resource to employees

This should be priority number one for all HR departments. Instead of focusing too much on the company and C-suite, don’t forget you are primarily an advocate for employees. With up to ​​50% of employees convinced that HR isn’t trustworthy, companies should do everything possible to foster a culture of trust, transparency, and availability. 

To do this, frequently communicate with the team, continuously solicit feedback, and once you receive it, demonstrate that you care and are taking action. The more employees feel their employer is invested in them, the more invested they’ll be in doing their best work. Simply listening and being loyal to your workers can help reduce costly employee turnover.

Consider your business goals

Aligning your business strategy with your human resources plans will help drive overall success for your firm. To get started, evaluate if you have enough people to meet your short- and long-term goals and if current team members have the right skills to complete projects for the best outcome. 

Is either answer no? This will make it difficult for your firm to hit its financial targets, and you’ll need to rethink your hiring plan for critical roles, schedule additional training and development, or adjust your goals. 

If you suspect your team doesn’t have the right experience, conduct a skills gap analysis, which identifies talent gaps within your team, determines if you can realistically close them through upskilling, and reveals which skill developments will have the greatest impact on your metrics.

Team Management

So how can an HR department support its company’s profit and growth goals without sacrificing employee satisfaction? It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Companies with high employee engagement are actually 22% more profitable! Improving employee engagement for your firm is as simple as making team members feel included and that their voices are heard. 

Start with transparency. The easiest way to be more transparent as an organization is to share — share your company’s goals, share a team calendar, share status updates, and share important documents. A centralized workspace for employees that makes collaboration easier gives every person at your firm a strong understanding of the team’s bandwidth, priorities, and progress. 

Beyond unifying the team’s workspace, consider what’s hurting morale. Too many meetings or messages are a burden that causes stress and distracts people from more important work. Brainstorm what you can automate, streamline, or make async without sacrificing clarity, performance, or team-building opportunities. 

Another way to increase employee satisfaction is using gamification techniques, which turn tedious work processes, like onboarding or training, into fun and rewarding experiences. Examples of gamifying your processes include rewarding employees with a free lunch voucher or an extra day off for receiving a new accreditation or completing mandatory training. Gamification benefits include improved employee retention, lower turnover, and higher productivity.

Workstream management

Human resources can majorly impact your firm’s project management processes by introducing structure and procedures to keep projects organized, properly staffed, and call out at-risk deadlines. 

Start by implementing company-wide best practices and process changes. Set up a regular cadence for sharing performance goals and updates, and set up teams to use shared calendars. These initiatives offer transparency and accountability to keep everyone on the same page. When employees know their goals, responsibilities, collaborators, and upcoming deadlines, they're more likely to stay on track and proactively solve problems.  

Organizing and simplifying your workstream management can eliminate redundant work, keep all tasks moving forward, and prevent miscommunication. Delays and communication issues frustrate both management and employees while hurting your firm’s goals. The best way to avoid this is to use project management software with built-in HR management tools, as it helps you automatically ​​track projects, profits, and employees’ achievements. 

Automated admin tasks

Improving your HR function is significantly easier once you automate time-consuming administrative tasks and give yourself more time to focus on improving employee engagement. HR software like BQE CORE stores all of your company’s essential compliance records and employee paperwork, letting you automatically track paid time off balance and saving you from manual Excel calculations.

With benefit management, performance reviews, salary history tracking, and employee incidents and milestones all in one place, 95% of BQE CORE users say the software reduces their time spent on paperwork, leaving them with more time to focus on strategic decisions and mentorship.

Data Management

When your payroll information, employee performance metrics, and benefits management are all in separate systems, you’re bound to make mistakes and waste time toggling between each. The time it takes to track this data and produce related reports manually can take hours of your time each week, pulling you away from higher-value work.

Having a centralized data library for all of your HR functions and automating more of these activities helps your HR department stay compliant with regulations, easily share data, and quickly find the information you need. A more seamless employee management system that includes performance metrics lets you offer a higher level of transparency, creating a greater sense of trust among employer and employees.

Small businesses and lean firms must make their HR system as efficient as possible while preventing costly mistakes and mundane data entry. Having a centralized data library for all your HR functions and automating more activities helps you stay compliant with regulations, easily share information, and quickly harness data. All your HR ad performance data in a unified platform helps you strategically grow your business while enabling your employees to develop their skills.

Human Resources Management with BQE CORE

Creating a more functional HR department helps keep your employees happy, makes your firm more productive, and frees up your staff for more critical activities. With so much administrative work automatically done for you, you’re left to focus on more effectively managing teams, improving training programs, enhancing your hiring process, and maintaining a strong company culture.

BQE CORE is the perfect tool to make your HR more functional. It’s a top-rated project management platform that includes HR automation, expense reporting software, time tracking, accounting, analytics, and more. Use it to manage benefits, track salaries, review employee incidents, store HR forms, and conduct employee performance reviews. Sign up for your BQE CORE free trial today to work more accurately and efficiently.