Enhancing HR Workflow through Auditing
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Auditing is an important part of any business, but most of us think of financial auditing when we hear this term. All business functions perform audits in some form - from measuring performance metrics to assessing data accuracy and creating compliance documents to inventory tracking.
HR professionals are no strangers to audits. If you ask any HR manager what they spend most of their time doing, you'll always get the same answer: audits.
HR audits are an important part of ensuring that a company's employees are productive, happy and constantly improving. Audits are something like checklists for HR managers. According to SHRM, audits are most commonly used to review current human resources policies, systems, documentation, and other various aspects within an organization.
Having worked in HR at various companies for the past 20 years, I know firsthand how important audits are to both HR professionals and the overall health of a company. Audits and productivity go hand in hand.
Below are some audit tips for HR managers that will make the workflow in a company easier.
- Focus on the employee experience
- Optimize your applicants' experience
- Conduct ROI analysis
- Create consistent audit schedules
- Survey your employees
1.Focus on the employee experience
When reviewing a company's workflows, you should first focus on employee experiences. Examine the recruiting, onboarding, service/performance, and administrative processes you have in place. Ask yourself: Are they intuitive? Are they easy? Are they effective?
If not, you should highlight opportunities for improvement within the company so that employees can brag about their jobs. When employees have a positive experience, they are likely to be more productive.
Factors that can contribute to a positive employee experience include:
- Meaningful work
- Opportunities for growth and advancement
- Healthy/positive work environment
- Trust in managers and superiors
- Supportive management
Additionally, employees who have a positive experience are more likely to have higher employee retention, customer satisfaction, profitability and job performance.
Due to the plethora of hiring laws that come into play at almost every step of the employment process, it is critical for HR professionals to continually conduct audits to ensure that their company's operations are compliant with all applicable policies and laws within their jurisdiction.
2.Fine-tune the applicant search
Whether or not your applicant selection process is effective can also have a massive impact on the number of new hires your company receives, as well as the type of hires your company receives.
How often a company reviews its applicant sourcing practices varies from company to company. A simple rule of thumb is: If your hiring success is poor, the review has been delayed for too long.
Start by figuring out how and from what sources candidates enter your hiring pipeline and whether you are finding the right type of talent. Do you use job postings? Social media? Have you noticed a pattern since using these sources?
Experience the process as a candidate
This step is about understanding the path of a potential applicant. This allows HR managers to get an overview of what a company's application process looks like and whether it is effective or not.
It is important to constantly adapt these processes to ensure that your company is focused on hiring relevant talent that can only contribute to the company's growth.
Define your candidate persona
In order to effectively recruit potential employees with relevant professional experience for your company, you not only need to determine where and how candidates apply in the first place. Start by creating a candidate persona and aligning that persona with the employer or company brand.
Next, you should check the engagement numbers on each of your recruiting platforms. Is posting on Instagram more effective than posting on LinkedIn? Does this technique bring in a large number of potential candidates with relevant work experience?
Reviewing the hiring process goes beyond avoiding applicants with little or no relevant experience. Ultimately, this saves a company time, money, energy and resources.
3.Conduct ROI analysis
Return On Investment (ROI) is a term used to measure the financial return of an investment. This concept can be applied in HR when conducting audits to analyze employee productivity, budgets, future initiatives and of course an ATS.
If you're looking to build a case for a new ATS, we have an ATS ROI calculator to help you get started. You can tell your decision makers that a good ATS can save your company $127,875 annually - no exaggeration!
When auditing an organization, you should also analyze your budget forecast and examine your expenses. This will help you determine which areas make sense to continue investing in and which areas are no longer needed.
This ultimately frees up resources to improve work processes in human resources. Companies can assess whether they need to invest in employees or save for a future initiative. Using ROI analysis, HR managers can clearly see which expenses are worth spending instead of continuing to spend company money on expenses that have a low ROI.
4.Create consistent audit schedules
Most HR processes rely heavily on employee data. Keeping data clean and up-to-date is essential to creating analytical dashboards that help your company make important people and business decisions. Audits are a reflection of the data in your company. If your audits are consistent and accurate, this will be reflected in the data collected.
Regular process audits keep data clean and serve to identify breaks in the process before those breaks become a major problem. Process audits examine a set of outcomes and then determine whether the activities, resources, and behaviors that caused those outcomes are being managed effectively and efficiently.
HR managers will most likely create a schedule for their process audits, either annually, monthly, or quarterly. Each company's audit needs depend on many different factors, such as: on the number of employees, the size of the company and the general goals of the company.
Process audits can also help HR teams better assign roles and responsibilities within the team, identify administrative burdens and ways to resolve them, and determine whether or not the process is worth continuing at all. Process audits, in turn, increase the overall productivity of an organization.
5.Survey your employees
Surveys are an important tool that is often overlooked by many companies and HR managers. The best and most effective way to find out what your HR team should focus on is a simple survey of your employees.
Start designing your survey by deciding what type of survey you want to conduct to answer your question. Different types of surveys produce different results. Want to conduct a qualitative survey focused on written feedback? Or would you like to collect data with a quantitative survey instead?
Scheduling these surveys can be easy and quick, depending on the content and length of each question.
Although sometimes tedious, surveys provide the insights you need and the opinions you need to revamp processes and develop a meaningful people strategy. They blatantly show us what we should focus on and how employees feel about certain elements of your company.
Employees are willing to tell you where they are lacking, what they like about the company and what they should pay more attention to. When employees feel confident enough to provide high-quality, detailed feedback, most HR managers can assume they trust them.
Auditing is worth the time
While audits seem like an unnecessary or time-consuming process to many people, HR managers know how important audits are. By examining a company's processes, people, investment returns, and hiring practices, HR managers ultimately gain a clear picture of what's working and what's not.
They save companies time, money and resources as they continually strive for improvements and optimize workflow. This is exactly why audits should be part of every organization's tool belt in the future.
Investing in HR audits is pivotal for organizational success. Tools like IceHrm empower HR professionals to streamline processes and elevate employee experiences.
