Photo by Viorel Kurnosov
Sooner or later, there are numerous obvious and not-so-obvious challenges to every human resources program. Easy-to-spot obstacles certainly include talent acquisition, employee engagement and retention, and the adoption of new technology such as artificial intelligence or AI.
Increasingly, there’s regulatory compliance, dangers from too much emphasis on diversity and inclusion, economic pressures and burnout of your employees.
Ineffective HR departments also struggle with administrative overload, an inability to evolve strategically, and a negative perception among employees who view them as disconnected from their needs.
Here are the eight key areas to address:
1. Talent management
Major hurdles include the competitive marketplace, ever-mounting turnover costs, finding the best employees and keeping them engaged.
Adapting to new techologies are a challenge to addessing skill gaps.
2. Work environment
Especially if you have multiple departments and locations, it’s difficult but preserve and strengthen your culture.
If you fail to support your employees, provide unclear expectations or have a high-pressure environment, you’ll experience employee burnout.
Businesses with remote or hybrid workers face possible nightmares in logistics or maintaining positive cultures. Success depends on setting defined expectations, investing in the right technology, and empowering employees with flexibility and autonomy.
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3. Technology and strategy
Careful planning and adaptation are vital to implement and manage emerging technologies, especially AI.
When business goals and necessary resources aren’t being used, you can expect resistance from employees when you try to implement changes.
HR struggles to become a strategic partner with executives when it fails to be credible with actionable insights to support business strategy and drive success.
4. Three most-common misunderstood dangers
Regulatory compliance is important in our ever-changing U.S. Department of Labor Laws.
Diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI legal problems occur when they lead to illegal discrimination, reverse discrimination and hostile work environments. Beware of federal guidance and court cases, particularly in thosse affecting affirmative action.
Obstacles are unnecessarily created by managers when they don’t receive adequate training, or aren’t cited for poor performance. Carefully watch for the warning signs.
5. Internal and operational weaknesses
HR is less productive and too-slow to adapt to a changing marketplace with ineffective or too-repetitive processes as well as errors in evaluations.
Failure to adapt to needs and to use new solutions result in weak effectiveness, usually thanks to a lack of innovation.
It’s unnecessarily difficult to demonstrate value or measure success unless you use good metrics for business profits.
Inadequate traing for HR employees will lead to inadequate traing for all employees company-wide.
Inability to stay relevant will always result from not staying current with compliance, ever-changing workforce demands, and technology.
When HR fails to align with company goals, they will fail and lose executives’ support.
A common issue is poor communication — between HR, various departments and employees.
HR must be adaptible and amenable. Resistance to new ideas and strategic shifts lead to mediocrity and downfall. The goal should be to create an emotionally intelligent culture.
Poor leadership in HR is inherently the root cause of issues.
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6. Negative perceptions about HR
Take steps to avoid negative views about your HR deparment — not always being assoctiated with disciplinary actions or being the company’s goon squad.
Employee trust is eroded when HR is perceived with having primary loyalty ties with executives. This is particularly true when HR enforces unpopular management decisions or is viewed as being disconnected from the needs of the average employee.
Trust is important. If company leaders are viewed as incompetent, often HR is too. Employees may feel they have to solve problems themselves, which further isolates HR and makes it less effective.
HR is considered a failure when it ineffectively deals with recruitment, retention, motivation and employee engagement.
When mitigating legal risks conflicts with supporting workers, such as in harassment or terminations, employees often feel a lack of fair treatment for the sake of risk management. It’s also true in recordkeeping of toxic co-workers.
7. Inefficient practices
Too much emphasis on administrative tasks, such as manual payroll, benefits enrollment and data entry, limits ability to deal with employee initiatives.
Unnecessary turnover results from too much focus on recruitment, weak practices in employee onboarding, employee development and offboarding.
Ineffective performance management is caused by the traditional annual performance reviews instead of frequent constructive feedback. This is a hindrance to employee improvement and growth.
8. Lack of strategic integration
Failure results from poor communication, aligning with business objectives and the use of superbly defined metrics.
Instead of a purely administrative function, HR must be viewed and integrated as a strategic partner to the business and be able to speak the language of business. This is especially true for key business strategy discussions.
Instead of spending time putting out fires, HR needs to be proactive and strategic — planning for future talent needs, foresees compliance changes and addresses typical issues such as employee burnout.
Conclusion
In essence, effective HR employees and managers understand and respond to the weaknesses and strategic needs of both the employees and company. Failure to do so means morale, engagement and profits suffer.
Address these common issues, and your department will achieve its full potential.
From the Coach’s Corner, see additional strategies:
Management: How to Achieve a Happy, Productive Staff — Do you want valuable management tools to improve your employees’ morale for high performance?
Guidance to Save HR, Company Data and Documents — Help your lawyers to adroitly defend your business. Also, you’re less likely to suffer adverse rulings by a judge if opposing attorneys accuse you of altering or destroying documents.
Manager Beware – the Most Common EEOC Complaint — Appearances matter, especially if the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission considers you to be a hostile boss. Retaliation by management is the most-common source of EEOC action.
Document Employee Behavior to Withstand Legal Scrutiny — The key to documenting incidents in your workplace is to look into the future. Imagine how others will see your actions down the proverbial road. Here’s how.
To Win in the Marketplace, You Must Win in the Workplace — Eleven salient HR strategies to dominate your competition.
“Treat employees like they make a difference and they will.”
-Jim Goodnight
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