Depending on the size of your HR department and the size of your company, you’ve probably got your hands full with:

• advertising open positions
• recruiting new employees
• onboarding
• payroll
• managing complaints
• updating company policies
• staff training and development and
• offboarding.

However that doesn’t mean you’re doing all these tasks as efficiently or easily as they could be.

In most cases HR lacks the time and resources to look at ways of improving processes, but you’d be surprised how much time you can save if you stop spending all your time working in your processes and set aside time to work on your processes.

Here’s 4 ways a little bit of effort now will save you and your team a lot of headaches in the future.

1. Get the whole organisation implementing your HR strategies

Who doesn’t like delegating heavy lifting?

Even if they don’t fall under the official HR banner, all employees have a key role to play in Human Resources. While HR has the official role of managing succession and promotions, dealing with complaints, training and developing staff, every employee can help make these processes more efficient if you give them the tools and framework to do so.

Have managers look out for up and coming staff for promotion or their replacements. Encourage your team to live and breathe the company culture. Have leadership train and develop staff members and suggest development plans to HR directly.

Though these processes are bolstered by the support of a structured HR department, involving employees in HR tasks gives them more control and involvement in their workplace, creating better employee engagement. They’ll feel ownership over their career and workplace, rather than seeing themselves as just another number.

2. Clean up your dirty data

Statistically, most organisations will probably run an HRIS system that relies upon anywhere from 1 to 5 independent systems for information. (Navigo Research 4th Annual tech report).

Not only does this mean somebody in your HR department needs to manually transfer data between different systems, they may also need to manually duplicate data in one system to for use in another. This level of inefficiency often lends itself to what we call ‘dirty data’ (data that is inaccurate, has missing fields or is not up to date) as small mistakes in the manual copy process often go unnoticed.

To combat this issue, automate your data cleansing!

Try and find a connector – a fancy word for a piece of software that sits between systems – helping them communicate and transfer data.

Having an automated process using a connector to integrate your many systems into one is not even as costly as it used to be thanks to services such as Zapier. The biggest benefit of this automation is not just the increased quality of data, but the amount of HR time you’ll free up.

3. Transform HR – be strategic!

While there are many ways you can reduce the strain on the HR team, be it through automation of processes or outsourcing complex and time-consuming tasks, what you do with your new found time is even more important. HR’s key focus, aside from completing traditional tasks, should be to formulate strategy.

With more time available to you look, make sure you’re looking the at big-picture by:

• Developing and reworking your training programs to help your staff reach their highest potential
• Trialling new ways to motivate your staff through incentives, rewards and less tangible benefits
• Proactively create succession and restructure plans to imagine ‘What-If’ Scenarios

4. Keep up to date with HR Tech

Don’t forget the key to enabling HR’s full potential is in removing the burden of manual tasks: technology.

Technology is vital if your HR department is ever going to expand beyond its current form, and automation can help take you to the next level.

From using Powerful Org Charting software to help plan your next restructure and succession plan or even using an Onboarding and Offboarding tool to assist in employee transitions, HR needs to upgrade its old-school processes for the new era.