10 Ways to Streamline Your HR Practices Today

1. Go Paperless

The promise of the “paperless office” was so appealing fifteen to twenty years ago. However, as with many things in life, the forecast lacked a great deal of accuracy. Studies have shown that, in the years since full-scale computerization in the workforce, the typical office generates more paper than it did in the old days. Why? Because computers make it so much easier to print off anything and everything.

Stop doing that.

In today’s office environment, paper is unnecessary. In fact, it is a huge waste of your time. In order to streamline your paperwork, institute a document management system. This saves you the time you would ordinarily spend trying to find the physical file you are looking for. Below are just a few ways a document management system streamlines your processes:

• It gives you instant access to your employee documents through an email application or by integrating with HR systems such as a human resources information system

• It electronically captures and stores your documents and keeps them all in one place

• It increases security by locking the documents with a password or other security measure

• It gives you a complete view of an employee, all in one place

• It saves office space

• It makes documents even more portable

By consolidating document management and HR functions into one platform, you reduce the need to manage multiple systems and ensure consistency across other systems, such as payroll, benefits, and time tracking.

The list could go on, but you get the idea. The upshot is that the dream of the paperless office, while it will probably never be a reality, is something you can and should aim for.

2. Employee Management

You work in Human Resources. You manage employees, most of which are human. But, while this is your job, so much of your time seems to be taken up fielding random questions from out of left field:

• “How much time off have I used this year?”

• “Where can I get my old pay stubs?”

• “How do I add a beneficiary?”

Yes, it is your job, but how can you get any real work done if you are answering phone calls and emails all day?

Empower employees.

What exactly does that mean? It means teaching a man to fish. It means showing your employees where to go when they have a question (besides you). You probably have a web portal that tells employees how much paid time off (PTO) they have left, how to access their benefits, what and when the next training is, etc. Some companies have software that allows them to make their own changes to their personal data, like mailing address and phone number. Utilize this! Employee self-service features in these portals allow staff to independently manage their own HR tasks, such as updating personal information or accessing pay stubs. Self-service options not only empower employees but also reduce the workload for HR teams and increase overall efficiency.

It may seem like this one question will just take you a second to answer, but all those seconds add up to consume your whole day. Empowering employees by showing them how to find their answers will give you a lot of your time back—probably more than you think. You will still have to manage one-off questions or handle unique situations, but establishing a culture of empowerment will strip away your need to answer the myriad of common questions you get every single day. Providing employees with access to self-service tools is essential for streamlining HR processes, as it enables them to manage their own information and requests efficiently.

3. Tracking Paid Time Off (PTO)

In this computer-dominated workplace, you would think that tracking paid time off would be easy. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Emails to managers, emails back to employees, signed slips scanned in and sent on, this signature needed, then this other signature needed, then send it back to this other person—it is often a small miracle to get PTO approved at all.

There are far easier ways to do this. Now we have HRIS programs that integrate with mobile apps, allowing employees to request time off and managers to approve it (or not) all within that app. The data is captured on the network, logged, and kept in an electronic file for posterity. These systems can also track employee hours and attendance, ensuring that time-off and attendance information is accurately integrated with payroll data. This integration helps reduce errors and ensures consistency across HR and payroll processes. These programs put a stop to endless emails, tracking down signatures, papers flying all over, and all the wasted time and effort in accomplishing a common HR task that should really be much, much simpler.

There is another benefit to streamlining this process: the more streamlined it is, the more people will use it, and the more people use their PTO, the happier, healthier, more efficient and more productive they are. Innumerable studies have shown that employees are happier, more energetic, more motivated, and more productive—just better workers in general—when they use their vacation time. So making it easier to get a day off means you will get a more productive department in return.

4. Outsourcing

Human Resources is a major task—I don’t think there is much argument on that point. You are responsible for overseeing employee payroll and tax filing as well as employee benefits and health administration, legal compliance, files and records maintenance, and oversight for training and development. And, for a lot of firms, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes you feel like the captain of the Titanic, heading for that iceberg, too. So how do you lighten the load a little?

Outsourcing is a great way to do just that. There are two major advantages to sending some of your HR tasks outside the company. By outsourcing routine administrative tasks, your internal HR team can focus more on employee engagement, talent development, and other strategic initiatives that drive business success.

• Risk Management – Employment laws change, almost literally on a daily basis. It is extremely difficult to keep abreast of those changes, and there are serious punishments for failing to keep updated and compliant with those changes. Outsourcing firms employ dedicated HR pros whose sole function is to do exactly that. Not only do they keep updated on legal changes that affect your business, they can also audit your processes on a regular basis to make sure it is compliant and nothing has slipped through the cracks. Many outsourcing partners also have access to legal counsel to ensure your company remains compliant with all employment laws and regulations.

• Cost Savings – The downside to HR in any form is that it is not a revenue-generating department. As such, it is easy for the higher ups to look at the bottom line and ask difficult questions about why HR spends so much money while it brings none in. Outsourcing some of your tasks can be a lot cheaper than doing it in-house, which makes your department come across as less of a load on the bottom line.

5. Leverage Technology for Onboarding

Onboarding is one of the most time-intensive processes in any HR department, especially when it comes to onboarding new employees, and it is also one of the most consequential. Studies consistently show that employees who experience a structured, thorough onboarding process are more productive faster and more likely to stay with the company long-term. Yet many HR departments still rely on stacks of physical paperwork, in-person orientations that have to be scheduled and rescheduled, and informal knowledge transfer that leaves new hires feeling lost by week two.

Technology closes that gap. Modern onboarding platforms allow you to:

• Send digital paperwork before a new hire’s first day, so day one is spent on people and culture rather than filling out forms

• Deliver compliance training through video modules that employees can complete on their own schedule

• Automate reminders for items like I-9 verification deadlines, benefits enrollment windows, and required signatures

• Create a centralized resource hub where new hires can revisit policies, organization charts, and contact directories at any time

The goal is to remove yourself as the bottleneck. When onboarding runs on a system rather than on your personal availability, you free up hours every week and your new hires get a more consistent, professional experience in the process. HR pros play a key role in designing and supporting effective onboarding processes for new employees, ensuring a smooth integration and ongoing support. That is a win that compounds over time as your workforce grows.

6. Centralization

Lots of bigger companies have what is considered on paper to be a Human Resources department, but in reality it is a group of HR offices onsite at several offices, and those HR offices function independently for all practical purposes. In a lot of cases this came to be due to acquisition, and have largely left the system intact due to the fact that those pre-existing departments have a corporate culture that has already developed. While this may be a valid reason to leave things as they are, it is important to at least go through the thought process regarding centralization.

Three questions should be asked at the outset of any discussion about centralization:

• Is centralization mandated? In some cases it may just be a question of following company policy and bringing the department up to speed. In other cases, perhaps in the areas of health and safety rules and regulations, significant functions may need to be conducted onsite, effectively making decentralization mandated.
• Will centralization add value? In some cases, it may be cheaper to leave the HR function as it is. You will need to weigh the cost savings before doing it.
• What are the risks of centralization? Will it lead to business rigidity, reduced motivation, bureaucracy, and/or distraction? These considerations should be weighed as well.

Centralization of the HR function has obvious advantages—eliminating or reducing redundancy, fewer issues left to low-level discretion, blanket policies and procedures instead of a patchwork of rules unique to each location—but be sure to weigh the disadvantages against them as well before deciding to go forward.

7. Shared Services

Along with outsourcing and standardization, adopting a shared services model is a way for mid- to large-sized companies to slim down the HR function, making it far more agile and able to focus more on high-level strategy instead of day-to-day functions. Many of today’s companies do it, too—ninety percent of Fortune 500 companies currently use some form of shared services model.

The basic idea behind shared services is to provide the corporate services required across an organization from a centralized unit. For HR, shared services models often mean dealing with routine HR administration in one place, ranging from payroll to training and recruitment. Shared services offer a number of advantages:

• It reduces the number of employees needed to carry out the HR mission by leveraging economies of scale
• It reduces accommodation charges due to the fact that the responsibilities are shared and not specific
• It increases efficiency by reducing the kind of redundancy found in providing services in a more specific manner
• It lowers transaction costs while offering a higher quality of services

Be careful how you implement shared services, though. The rewards can be substantial, but so can the risks. Critics of the shared services model have been quick to attack the economy of scale assumption that goes along with the idea. They have also pointed out that, because they cause a disruption to the service flow by moving the work to a central location, creating waste in handoffs, rework and duplication, it may lengthen the time it takes to deliver a service, and consequently create failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer).

8. Automate Communication and Training

This is closely related to empowering employees, discussed above. The average business owner spends between seven and twenty-five percent of his or her time handling employee-related paperwork, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. By reducing this burden, or eliminating it altogether, time- and money-savings can be realized. When you push as much of your department’s processes online or into the cloud, the ability to automate communication and training becomes possible. Automating repetitive tasks and various processes can save significant time and reduce errors, allowing HR teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. However, this functionality is not always utilized, or not utilized to its fullest extent. With online benefits administration, employees can quickly and easily access all of the communications, forms and information they need without the need of printed handbooks and documents. An online system can also send targeted messages and reminders to keep employees apprised of upcoming deadlines. This is of obvious importance, but again, it is frequently underutilized.

HR automation can enable a company to:

• process payroll and benefits information much more quickly and efficiently;

• do more with fewer resources;

• maximize employee productivity, which can positively impact the bottom line;

• manage employees more effectively by delivering HR tools, templates, and best practices;

• automate performance reviews to streamline employee evaluations and feedback through continuous, data-driven systems; and

• enhance employee satisfaction and build loyalty by enabling employees to access or modify their benefits and personal information themselves.

By providing online access to all of these materials, you can also track and monitor your employees’ needs and understand the most common issues facing your workforce. You can see what sort of training and benefits they have taken advantage of, and consequently what they may need to be made aware of.

9. Standardize Your Processes

If you have ever watched two people in the same department handle the same task in completely different ways, you have witnessed the hidden cost of unstandardized processes. When every manager approves time off differently, when every onboarding checklist looks slightly different, when every employee review follows a different format, you are not running a department—you are running ten departments simultaneously.

Standardization fixes this. Standardization is also essential when implementing new processes to improve efficiency and ensure everyone is aligned. Start by documenting your most frequently repeated tasks. What does onboarding look like, step by step? What is the exact process for handling a termination? What checklist does a new manager receive on day one? When these processes are written down, reviewed for legal compliance, and distributed uniformly, several things happen at once:

• Errors drop because people are not relying on memory or improvisation

• Training new HR staff becomes dramatically faster

• Legal exposure shrinks because everyone follows the same compliant procedure

• Accountability improves because there is a clear standard to measure against

• The hiring process and talent acquisition workflows become more efficient and transparent, ensuring better alignment with business goals

• Employee performance evaluations are consistent and fair, thanks to standardized processes

Standardization is not about removing human judgment from HR; it is about removing unnecessary variation from processes that do not benefit from it. Save the judgment calls for situations that actually require them.

10. Standardized Forms

Standardizing your forms provides you with significant advantages. First, it saves time by keeping people who need such a form from reinventing the wheel each time they need it. Second, the process of standardizing a form allows you to add the step of legal review to your process, which is a good idea for the majority of HR functions. It is also important to consult with legal counsel to ensure all forms comply with employment laws and regulations. Third, it saves a lot of time and grief by eliminating the argument over which form to use. If there is only one form, there is no argument; we use that form, period.

A great way to save time and streamline your forms is to do so by using forms that have been generated using the laws in your jurisdiction.

Consider using LegalNature’s forms!

LegalNature has a full suite of HR forms, from employee confidentiality agreements, consulting services agreements, and employee non-disclosure agreements, all the way up to an employee handbook.