It's New Year and time to kick-start some resolutions and plans that are going to make a big difference to your organisation this year and beyond!
HR is great at dealing with day-to-day issues and queries but it's not always sought out to help deal with those thornier, more medium/long-term strategic problems. You know the ones: 'Reward', 'Culture', 'Talent', 'Managing Performance' et al.
It's so easy to come back after Xmas and just fall back into the same routines, get on with the action points from historical plans or deal with the latest annual, quarterly or parent organisation deadlines/admin that seem to drain a lot of time. So here are three steps to give HR a big boost that can help improve its image further as well as having a great impact on what's happening around the place people-wise:
ONE: That 'business partner' thing
- Take one or two organisation/team issues (not big broad things; specific issues you can start to get under the skin of)
- Collect some basic data around what's been going on or start to capture the data now for the next few months
- If it feels too big then just take one part of the business or one small team and centre the data there
- Analyse what the data is telling you - even basic excel can help - no need to buy statistical modelling software or recruit three data scientists!
- Start to tell the story around trends and possible solutions - get others excited around your eureka discoveries
- Pilot your suggested solutions in just one or two teams to see if they have a positive impact.
TWO: Admin and efficiency
- Pick the three routine things that take a lot of time admin-wise
- Can someone help you automate them or come up with a nifty excel workaround?
- Does every report need to be produced the way it was years ago?
- Are you producing reports or admin because someone asked for them years ago and that person doesn't even work here anymore!
- This is about ruthless efficiency to save you every possible minute
THREE: The same questions!
- Capture the top ten frequently asked questions (email/phone/in person) into HR on a whiteboard for the next month
- Target yourself with seeing a 50% decrease in them over the coming months!
- You may come up with intranet solutions or other ways of getting information across to reduce the likelihood of questions - as soon as you see just how often a question is asked you will surprise yourself at the number of ideas you have to make things more slicker
- Every minute spent dealing with the same questions can stop you doing the sexy stuff above!
HNY23!
