30 Easy HR Improvements for Better Business – Pt. 1

The Big HR Tips

These HR tips for productivity improvement can work wonders for anyone within your organization. If you don’t have time for any other HR improvements, focus on these.

1. Plan – Planning out your time is underrated and wildly effective. Take 15 minutes at the end of each day to make a to-do list for the next day. Make sure you add important events and deadlines to your calendar with reminders so you know what’s coming up and how you should prioritize.

2. Set goals – What do you want to accomplish this year? This month? This week? My primary HR tip is to set goals for yourself and focus your planning time on breaking big projects down into manageable tasks you can easily check off your list.

3. Listen to & care for your body – Eat well, get some exercise, and listen to the cues your body is giving you. If you feel tired or burned out, take a break. Encourage your employees to do the same and you may be surprised at how much more quickly tasks are completed. Not all HR tips are specifically work related!

4. Learn & teach – Don’t know how to create a pivot table? You’re probably not the only one at your organization who hasn’t been taught, so learn how to do it and pass that skill on to others. Leverage the knowledge of others in your organization by asking them to teach you, and everyone else who’s interested, how to do something.

Employment Souring & Hiring

Recruiting is a continuous HR function that takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish effectively, and for that reason, to improve HR processes, you should start here. You can always outsource recruitment to a staffing or talent acquisition company, but may prefer to personally manage the recruitment process since you know your talent needs better than anyone. Other HR tips to improve the productivity of your recruitment efforts includes:

5. Use social media – Social media has proven an effective method for sourcing talent. Millions of people use social media to look for jobs and even leverage their mobile devices in applying for positions, so posting your open positions on these channels can provide you with a large, diverse candidate pool.

6. Offer remote work – Writing, web design, and software development are just a few of the functions that can be performed outside of the office. Remote work provides employees with more control over their work/life balance, which has been shown to improve productivity.

7. Be detailed in what your organization expects from employees – If employee timeliness is important to your business, make sure your new hires know that tardiness will not be accepted. “Only a few minutes late” may seem like no big deal to some people, so describe your expectations definitively.

8. Review your onboarding process – Can it be more efficient or more effective? If you spend extra time searching for onboarding supplies or put temps through the same onboarding experience once they become permanent employees, streamline the process. Improve HR processes wherever you can.

9. Automate where possible – Managing various rote HR processes, such as payroll, benefits, and background screening, decreases productivity. The HR space provides many simple software programs that can manage these processes for you and free up your time to focus on complex tasks that can’t be completed by automation. The best HR tip I can offer you is to make your job easier where you can.