Human resources departments are vital to the health of any company, and a bad human resources department will make work very challenging for employees. If you are not giving your employees solid support, then their quality of work that they turn out will be very poor. As a human resources director or employee, it’s your job to improve the working environment for your employees. Ways to improve your HR department include making yourself open to more comments and discussion, playing games and doing trust exercises, and providing extra training and resources for your employees.
Make sure that your employees feel safe and comfortable with you, and allow them to voice their concerns anonymously. Providing surveys that are anonymous will allow people to feel comfortable talking about sensitive issues, but opening a forum for group discussion will also help. That way you can keep people accountable, and they will be more reasonable and civil. Having multiple environments where people can speak up about things that are going well and things that are not going well both with the workplace and with the human resources department will improve the quality and environment all-around in the company.
Another way to improve the quality of your HR department is to reduce the overall workload that they need to accomplish. Any person or group that is overworked is going to start shortcutting some aspects of their work. Also, if you reach out too far past your area of expertise then you’ll be running thin on your skills and your work will suffer. Outsourcing can be a way to reduce the workload to keep your staff numbers smaller and keep your team focused on the areas where they have the most expertise. Almost everything can be outsourced, but some payroll and document management aspects, as well as workman’s comp and the first report of injury forms, can be a good place to start.
People know when human resources departments are taking care of their employees and when they are not. To improve your human resources department and to give it a good name, you will have to go the extra mile. Take the hit on evaluations, and allow people to give feedback. If you do that, the employees will respect you greatly. Offering auxiliary support for the team and for professional development will improve the quality of the company all around. Working hard cannot hurt you; it can only help you to improve your human resources department.