Incorporating Change Management Into Your Organization
Being as efficient and productive as possible in your business is of immense importance. However, quite a few HR challenges could make your job harder. First of all, change can disrupt your operations and discourage your employees. Then, payroll processing hurdles can use up precious resources and result in errors, delays, and con-compliance. Finally, not exploiting your internal assets to the max can lead to additional costs and a dent in your productivity. Read on to explore these challenges and discover ways to overcome them.
Challenge: Navigating Change Within Your Organization
Change can take many forms within a business. It could be managerial, procedural, structural, or technological. In any case, the important thing is to embrace change with grace and ease to be able to navigate it successfully. As humans are creatures of habit, this is easier said than done. Let’s see what makes change management a challenging task for your HR department.
The greatest HR challenge when it comes to implementing a change of any kind is employee resistance. Often, employees react to change with feelings of apprehension or even denial, which leads to low employee morale, disappointment, and increased tension. These feelings usually stem from a misunderstanding regarding the new state of things or a fear of change. Another challenge HR often faces in times of change is the lack of necessary resources and training. That’s especially evident when there is little warning beforehand. It is very difficult for an HR department with limited preparation, staff, and budget to smoothly implement a change and handle the employee reaction. At the same time, lack of training makes employees feel uncertain and cling to their old ways.
Change management is often viewed as the most challenging aspect of HR development. Therefore, it is crucial that you offer guidance to your managers and employees during that time. The good news is there are a few tips to accomplish that. Let’s see what they are.
1. Predict Change And Plan For It
For change to take place as gracefully as possible, your business must be able to predict it and be ready for it. No one likes being blindsided. Warn your employees of the changes to come ahead of time. Clarify your goals, make a plan, and communicate each step of it with front-line employees. Honesty will save you from unnecessary misunderstandings and frustration.
2. Communicate Transparently With Your Team
Each employee reacts differently to change, but they are all entitled to express their opinions. Make sure to communicate transparently with them about the change, explain the need for it and the benefits it will bring. Furthermore, keep open communication channels before, during, and after the change so that you can keep tabs on the progress of its implementation.
3. Provide Tools To Navigate Change
If your business is going through a procedural or technological change, it goes without saying that relevant employees must undergo training. Provide your staff with the necessary training and resources to help them develop the skills needed to navigate changes in their work. This way, they will be more open and positive to change, and they will feel confident and capable of going through with it.
Challenge: Payroll Processing Hurdles
Two basic functions take place in every business: bringing in revenue and paying your employees. However, as the focus is usually on the former, the latter can get a little overlooked. As a result, payroll processing, which is already a complicated task, has turned into an undeniable HR challenge.
The hardest task when it comes to payroll processing is tracking the number of billable work hours. Especially if your business is using a manual system, keeping track of attendance, sick leave, and vacation days can be awfully time-consuming. Not to mention the room for human error, as someone can get the wrong salary due to a miscalculation or a delayed vacation approval. Repeated errors and delays can also impact your business since they reduce employee productivity and morale. Another important concern is data security. Payroll information is highly sensitive, and any leak could be harmful to your business. Finally, HR departments that manage payroll must always strive to remain compliant. With the constant changes in taxation and employment legislation, that is not an easy feat. Complexity increases significantly if your staff is spread in different countries where different systems and laws apply.
If you have noticed any of these HR challenges in your payroll processing, it is time to rethink your approach. Now, we’ll share some tips that will smooth out payroll processing for your business.
1. Automation
Payroll processing is a task that gets increasingly complicated as your business evolves. If you want to keep your employees happy and ensure the smooth operation of your company, you should consider automating the entire payroll process. A payroll management software can automatically calculate wages and deposit salaries directly into the employee’s bank account. In addition, you can program it to calculate taxes according to various systems, thus ensuring that you always remain compliant. A cloud-based system also ensures data security while making any information readily accessible to all employees regardless of their location.
2. Outsourcing
Purchasing payroll management software and training a team to be responsible for it might sound like a waste of resources to you. In that case, outsourcing seems like the best solution for your business. A third-party service provider brings all the benefits of automation combined with their expertise in that particular field. This way, you will not only streamline your payroll process but also have expert surveillance to prevent any errors. Meanwhile, your business won’t have to hire or train HR to take care of payments while also ensuring that payroll processes are standardized, uniform, and compliant across all branches.
Challenge: Maximizing Internal Assets
In the fast-paced eLearning world where budgets keep dropping but expectations keep rising, business people are faced with an important challenge. How can they get more with fewer investments? To increase their ROI, businesses are forced to follow an introspective approach and find ways to maximize their internal assets. But, first, let’s see how you’re not making the most out of your existing assets.
In most cases, the term “assets” in a business refers to employees and training material of any kind. When you’re not striving to develop an employee’s skill set to the max of its potential, you are wasting the investment you made when hiring them. At the same time, stagnant employees feel unappreciated and don’t devote themselves to their roles and responsibilities. Now, if there are online training courses available in your business but you still notice a lack of employee development, you need to look for the problem elsewhere. It’s possible that you’re not promoting your online training courses efficiently. Alternatively, they might be in a form that repels employees from completing them. For example, they could be too long, unrelated, or simply not engaging.
However, there are ways to overcome this HR challenge. The first step is to make a comprehensive list of internal assets to separate redundancies from reusable content. Then, you are ready to consider implementing the following tips.
1. Promote Online Training Courses Within Your Organization
Training resources are expensive, but if you don’t promote them properly, only a small percentage of your staff will complete them, thus throwing your investment down the drain and putting a damper on your productivity. Use internal communication apps, emails, and newsletters to remind everyone that course completion is overdue. Establishing a reward and repercussion system as well will certainly boost participation rates.
2. Utilize Metrics To Measure Success
If you haven’t been tracking your training metrics, it’s high time you started. Metrics analysis lets you know how many employees have completed or failed a course, which sections have the lowest ratings, etc. You can use this information to uncover gaps in your training and make changes accordingly. This way, you can maximize the efficiency of your L&D services.
3. Repurpose Existing Online Training Material
Going through your online training material, you realize that some courses have very low completion rates. This could be due to their long uninterrupted form that dims the employees' interest. Consider repurposing your material by breaking it into JIT modules that require less time and effort. You could also polish your courses to make them more fun and engaging. Repurposing could still cost you money, but surely less than purchasing new courses.
4. Leverage Your Employees
At the end of the day, employee development doesn’t have to be all about training. You can also leverage your most experienced and knowledgeable employees to help your newer hires. Peer coaching and mentoring promote a more intuitive knowledge-sharing process within your organization. At the same time, it helps employees form relationships and bond with each other.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many HR challenges involved in running a business. In this article, we spoke about the ways change management, payroll processing hurdles, and insufficient use of internal assets can impact your business. Hopefully, the tips we have shared can help you overcome these challenges and streamline the operation of your organization.
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