HR Audits – How They Help Improve Your HR Workflows
Auditing is a critical part of any business, but most organizations think about financial auditing when this topic is brought up. After the COVID-19 pandemic, economic challenges have put a focus on HR audit planning practices. With budget constraints and the workforce spread across remote locations, businesses must create strategies to ensure they continue to thrive and remain compliant with all employment regulations.
HR audits are a review of the practices and procedures of a company’s HR department. The main goal is to evaluate how well it complies with legal requirements and how effectively it manages the workforce and business processes. By conducting regular HR audits, businesses can find any areas which need improvement and create effective plans to address those weaknesses.
The potential benefits of conducting HR audits are:
- Well management of the organization’s workforce
- Higher morale among employees
- Improved compliance with legal requirements, such as employment law plus health & safety
- Reduced costs related to poor performance or employee turnover rates
- Enhanced competitive advantage within the workplace
A few auditing tips to simplify an organization’s workflow.
Focus on Employee Experiences
When auditing a company’s HR workflow, the best place to start is by focusing on the workforce’s experience. Look at the hiring, onboarding, performance, and administrative processes you already have in place, and check whether they are simple, intuitive, and effective for everyone.
If not, find areas of improvement within the company so employees will speak with pride about where they work. Employees with positive experiences are more likely to be more productive.
Enhance Your Recruiting Process
An effective candidate sourcing process significantly impacts the number of new hires and the types of hires your organization receives.
How often a company audits its talent sourcing process will differ from company to company. If your hiring successes are low, auditing has been delayed too long.
Find out how candidates enter your hiring pipeline, from what sources, and whether or not you are finding the best talent. Whether you are using job boards, social media, or not.
To hire employees with relevant work experience for your company, you should track more than just where and how candidates apply.
Then, check candidate engagements on each of your recruiting platforms. Is posting on Instagram more effective than posting on LinkedIn? Does it help attract more potential candidates with relevant work experience and skills?
It is crucial to regularly adjust recruiting strategies to ensure your business is focusing on hiring relevant talent, which will only contribute to the company’s growth.
Perform ROI Analysis
Return On Investment (ROI) is a term used when calculating the financial return on an investment made. It can be applied within the HR management process when conducting audits to analyze workforce productivity, budgets, future initiatives, and the HRM platform.
When auditing an organization, you must analyze your budget forecast and spending habits. This can be attained by defining which items make sense to continue to invest in and which are no longer needed.
ROI analysis helps HR professionals see what spending money looks like for expenses with low returns.
Schedule Regular HR Process Audits
Regular process audits keep data clean and help locate flaws within the process before problems arise. Process audits observe a set of results and then determine whether the activities, resources, and behaviors which caused those results are being managed effectively and efficiently.
Process audits help HR professionals assign roles and responsibilities within the team to find administrative burdens and possible ways to resolve them. In turn, process audits will boost the overall productivity of an organization and its employees.
Conduct Employee Surveys
Surveys are an essential tool, often ignored by many businesses and HR departments alike. The best way to know what your HR team should focus on is by simply asking your employees.
Employee surveys provide the insight you need and the opinions you require to enhance processes and create a meaningful people management strategy. They reveal what must be focused on and how employees feel toward some aspects of the organization.
Employees will share where they feel you are falling short, what things they love about the workplace, and what needs more attention. Asking for employee feedback also creates trust between managers and employees. If employees feel safe to give detailed feedback, HR professionals can assume they have a high level of trust with them.
Conclusion
There are a lot of tedious tasks within a business that is imperative to endure its growth but can be managed by improved planning and technology practices. HR audits help find such tasks and improve them for better productivity within workplace processes.
