In times of crisis and economic uncertainty, the Human Resources departments of companies play a key role in the success of organizations. They are directly responsible for job stability and a good organizational climate; and those factors affect the productivity and performance of employees, and, therefore, the company. For this reason, the Human Resources department must respond both to the general direction and to employees for their welfare.
However, the most difficult decisions in organizations are often taken in these departments, whether wage increases, dismissal of the staff, promotion or recruitment and the selection of new talent. At the same time, they must have a clear policy of work motivation, which includes talent management and the establishment of communication channels in order to strengthen the work climate information, the relationships between the staff and the organization, and the increased welfare and employee satisfaction. All this, with the sole aim of generating the best work environment and increasing the company’s productivity and global competitiveness.
So, how can you optimize the Human Resources management, and thus bring benefits to your company? Let’s find out.
First of all, you need to identify the needs of your organization. In order to do this, you must know exactly on what stage the company currently is. Maybe it is immersed in a merger, purchase or sale process, even though it has well-established internal processes in its different business areas, or perhaps it requires a system that facilitates a global cost reduction.
Knowing the starting point of the company is fundamental for you to determine what is expected to the human resource management of the company: for instance, mark targets. Among all these objectives, you can highlight the creation of a single database that allows you the exchange of information, increasing the consistency of human resources processes within the organization itself, the broader view of the talents of the company, moving some transactional processes to managers or, on the contrary, promoting self-management employees.
Related article: 7 Of The Best Human Resources Practices You Should Implement Today, by Jason Hanold
Second, you should make a complete evaluation of the work environment of your company: this diagnosis should go hand in hand with a plan that aims to decrease work discontent. The working environment has always been a very important element for all kinds of strategic planning. The reason for it is that it allows to manage employee’s motivation in order to achieve better economic results.
The most common way to assess the working environment involves the use of employee surveys (sometimes it may also be supplemented by personal interviews.) Designing and conducting surveys of labor climate may become a complex issue, therefore, it is necessary to have knowledge about working environment, psychology, statistics and survey methodology. To this extent, many organizations decide to outsource this service to specialized companies.
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The third key to optimizing the human resource management in your company is to understand the goals of the company itself. The human resources department must work on the organizational strategy of the company in order to support other areas of the organization for subsequently achieving its objectives. Issues like the business area, the objectives, goals and results of the company, should be perfectly clear for the inclusion of the management strategy and for creating synergies between all components of the organization to efficiently manage the human resources policy.
All institutions need to be clear about their raison d’etre in the market, as well as knowing where they’re going, when, how and with what human and financial resources they will reach such goals. Strategic planning is not just a list of actions and programs, detailing costs and time: it involves the ability to determine a target, to associate resources and actions to approach it and discussing the results and consequences of those decisions.
Creating a strategy is not only a task for executives. The decisions about which business approaches should be adopted and what further measures should be initiated involving executives at the corporate office, is also a concern of business units and product divisions, as well as managers and supervisors.
Finally, it is vital to implement the proper technology into the world of management, it is, making technology become an ally of management and not the reverse, subordinating all organizational processes to technological processes. Ideally, technological tools provide easy management directed not only to professional human resources, but to the team leader and employees.
After all, they are a team in the human resources management. Interactions, for example, in the processes of training and evaluation using tools that allow different actors collaborate in these processes, is more than necessary. The technology should be close to the human resources department, and it should be complete enough to meet the needs of the organization.
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