10 Tips for HR Professionals in 2019

Aspire means to envision and strive for something more.  As an HR manager or business owner you probably want your organization to be known as one of the “best places” to work right?  What is it that you aspire your Human Resources efforts to become?  Best in class?  Innovative?  Proactive?

Looking to make a splash with your HR strategy in 2019?  Here are some tips to consider in order to bolster the Human Resources area of your business.

How you can improve your HR practices

  1. Establish/Redefine your corporate culture – every company strives to have a strong corporate culture, yet many fail to deliver on this. If you want to be known as one of the best places to work in the Okanagan, then perhaps it’s time to redefine just who you are as a company.  Are you the employer in your industry that offers a four-day work week?  Are you the place that has a bring your pet to work day every month?  To help define your current culture, interview and poll your employees.  Find out what they love best about working at your company.  Create a list that you can develop some marketing material around.  Share this list with your employees and with interview candidates. Culture is more than just perks and policies, it’s also how you envision and setup your workplace.
  2. Update all of your job descriptions – you might want to polish your existing job descriptions. Work with your employees to revise their existing job descriptions to include the pragmatic features but also some creative aspects as well.
  3. Create a staffing plan – work with the management team to develop a hiring plan for the year and beyond. Have a good sense of what your sales, customer service or development teams require and create a hiring around this.  Of course, budget will have an impact on staffing levels, but you can present a staffing plan once you’ve met with key stakeholders to determine staffing needs.
  4. Create a cost of lost employee metric – perhaps your company has experienced a lot of turnover in recent months? The cause of this turnover could be many reasons and as HR manager you should be monitoring this closely and conducting exit surveys to gain an understanding of why people are leaving the organization.  Take this a step further and put together some forecasts on what a lost employee is costing the organization.  Present this to management to illustrate the bottom line.  This can help secure additional budget for items such as training and development, improving corporate culture or other initiatives that can keep the team engaged.
  5. Develop a mentorship program – work on having seasoned employees actively and regularly support junior staff members. Consider partnering new hires with current employees.  Have an actual mentorship program that helps with onboarding and creates a bond between team members.
  6. Devise salary structure documentation – determine what salaries for various functions within your company and compare and contrast those with fair market value for similar positions. Have a strong sense of the “going-salary rates” and revise every six months to remain competitive.  This is very useful when presenting offer letters or for performance reviews.
  7. Communicate your HR plan for 2019 – after establishing your HR plan, share it with both management and staff. Communicate key goals and timelines and metrics that will be used to monitor progress. Define and communicate what success means for the HR department.
  8. Communicate training and development options – update and communicate the training and development options for your company. Have a training and development plan in place and communicate the plan to the team throughout the year so that they can grow their skills even further and become the rockstar that they were destined to be.
  9. Revisit/Update your Exit Strategy questions – at some point people are going to leave the company. There is a great opportunity to gain feedback from the departing team members experience.  Developing a series of questions to acquire this feedback can save time and make for a less unpleasant experience when the exit survey is completed.
  10. Create an onboarding kit for new hires – be creative with this one.  Perhaps you include a gift certificate for a local coffee shop for their first day on the job.  Have a map of the office or place of business.  Provide them with an org chart if available.  Assemble a nice little group of resources that will make new hires feel welcome.

As you think about your mapping out your HR needs for 2019, you may want to spend some time revisiting your existing policies and practices.  It might be time to step outside of the box and revamp your policies, procedures and documentation to make your day to day even more efficient!

Need help with your HR strategy? Contact us today to set up a consultation.  Speak with one of our experienced HR specialists and work on delivering a solid HR plan in 2019.