Human resources professionals sure do have their work cut out for them. There are the big challenges, of course—attracting and retaining top talent, engaging the workforce, and ensuring adoption of new technologies are just a few of the major challenges HR professionals face.
But that's not all HR has to tackle. For your team to get good at taking on the big human resource issues, employees must first master dozens of day-to-day items that so often fall to HR—reviews, approvals, employee surveys, and countless other highly important responsibilities. The more productive your team can be at these types of tasks, the better positioned you’ll be to take on big picture strategies and move the business forward.
And so, without further ado, here are three proven strategies to improve productivity within HR.
Put Processes and Paperwork on Autopilot
Despite some long-held beliefs among the workforce at large, the primary role of HR is not to push paper—nor should it be. Human resources management is behind many of your organization's most mission-critical activities.
Your team is the one that guides policy, finds and recruits talent, keeps people engaged at work, and assists in upholding the company’s mission and vision. In fact, a recent survey of HR professionals by TotalJobs found that 50% of time goes to employee engagement, strategy development, and meeting with senior staff.
But according to Formstack’s workflow automation report, 55% of managers still spend eight hours or more each week on administrative tasks instead of high-value initiatives.
Just think of how much more your HR team could accomplish by eliminating those tasks. This is where automated workflows come in.
If you haven’t already replaced manual tasks with automated workflows, now’s the time to start. Human resources teams can use this productivity tool to automate entire processes around budget and project approvals, employee feedback and reviews, PTO requests, and so much more.
They don’t take long to set up, and can free your team from countless hours of repetitive manual tasks. We’ve seen instances where automated workflows saved companies as much as $80,000 a year.
Learn More: How to Accelerate Your Workflows
Use Workflows to Get Approvals Faster
Does your team still get tangled in email threads to share information and get important approvals? Are you often held back on important business decisions just because you need a signature or signoff? Even in the midst of so many tech tools, this is one human resource challenge that persists.
Thankfully, there is an easy solution.
Approval workflows offer yet another way to put important day-to-day activities on autopilot:
- First, instead of relying on email or shared documents to gather approvals, you set up an online form—be it for a proposal, project, or other form of documentation that requires sign-off.
- Next, you embed an approval process within the form by adding anyone who will need to approve or deny submissions.
- Now, when the form is sent out, your approval process is automatically put into action. Team members are alerted right away and given easy options for fast reviews and approvals.
Improve Surveys to Increase Engagement
And then there’s one of THE most important jobs for human resources management today: driving employee engagement.
By 2020, 20% of organizations will approach employee engagement as a shared performance objective for HR. Even more challenging is the fact that only 34% of US employees are currently engaged with their jobs.
That means human resources teams everywhere are in need of a reliable method for measuring and improving employee engagement.
Best way to do that? Surveys. But not just any standard survey tool will do. You need to create powerful, user-friendly surveys that let you get to the heart of human resource issues and understand what different departments need in order to find passion and purpose at work.
For example, successful employee engagement surveys tend to use:
- Conditional Logic that lets HR gain additional insights without cluttering a questionnaire or making it overwhelming for employees.
- Calculating form fields that automatically determine an engagement score for each completed employee engagement survey, painting a picture of where engagement currently stands and what needs to be improved.
Save and Resume features that allow HR to capture more responses from time-strapped staff.
Then, after a survey has been completed, you’ll have in-depth analytics to see what’s working and where improvements can be made. After all, it’s a lot easier to convince the executive team of a need for new benefits when you have survey results to back up your recommendations.
Improving HR productivity is an ongoing endeavor, but these three strategies are a great place to start. Want more information on how to get started with these features? Click the link below to discover the many ways Formstack can help your entire team work smarter and save time.
Make HR more productive than ever with Formstack’s tools for human resources professionals.
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