Create a culture that means business™
Email address
Your HR team is responsible for many key aspects of your organization’s success: retaining the talent your business relies on, maintaining employee motivation across your company, and bridging the gap between employee needs and organizational goals. But achieving these big picture objectives relies on the day-to-day work of each HR professional at your company. That’s the purpose of HR operations: aligning the daily work of your HR team – and the daily experience of employees – with your organization’s vision and goals.
Let’s take a closer look at how HR operations can help your company achieve its strategic goals, ways to optimize your HR ops team, and how software can support your mission.
What is HR operations?
The HR operations department manages the practical and technical aspects of human resources on a day-to-day basis. In contrast with HR management and people operations, both of which focus on high-level, strategic initiatives, HR operations centers on administrative functions like data management, legal and regulatory compliance, payroll and benefits, and selecting and maintaining HR technology, like a human resource information system (HRIS). At enterprises with a large workforce and many employee roles, there may be a dedicated HR ops team of significant size, while smaller companies may assign HR ops functions to their one or two HR professionals on staff.
The goals of HR operations
HR operations helps turn your organization’s business goals into reality. For most ops teams, this means setting your company up for sustainable success, strengthening employees’ connection with your business, improving operational efficiency, ensuring legal compliance, and enabling professional development.
Create a sustainable organization
HR ops helps your company plan for the future by implementing a talent acquisition and retention strategy, keeping the number and type of employees in line with budgetary and organizational goals. Workforce planning also involves building succession plans for senior leaders and fostering a strong organizational culture.
Improve employee relations
Employees work best in an environment where they feel safe, supported, and appropriately challenged. HR operations teams are in charge of providing this structure at every stage of the employee lifecycle, from the first day of onboarding through retirement.
Drive productivity and efficiency
Sitting at the intersection of administration and strategy, HR operations teams are perfectly placed to drive organizational efficiency and productivity. Successful ops teams streamline HR processes by automating manual tasks and facilitating employee self-service. With the help of the right tech, ops teams compile and analyze employee data to drive efficiency and address pressing organizational issues.
Maintain compliance
HR operations professionals work to keep your organization compliant with local, state, and federal laws. This involves staying up-to-date on evolving regulations and communicating necessary changes to the leadership team. Ops crafts and updates HR policies and training to mitigate legal risk and help your company deliver an exceptional employee experience. The HR ops team should also create an employee handbook to answer team members’ questions and lay out processes to address common issues and resolve any conflicts that may arise.
Support employee learning and development
A recent Gartner survey found that only 46% of employees are satisfied with professional development at their organization. A talent development program helps close that gap, resulting in greater employee retention and a healthy talent pipeline. HR ops supports learning and development (L&D) initiatives by empowering employees to build individualized career paths while achieving organizational goals.
HR operations responsibilities
The HR operations team is responsible for improving every aspect of employees’ daily experience. Here are just some of the areas your company’s HR ops team should prioritize.
Employee retention
Forty one percent of employees say they’re looking for new jobs this year, which is why it’s so important for HR operations to boost employee retention by focusing on its two biggest drivers: engagement and recognition. Engaged employees believe in your company’s mission, and they’re excited to continue delivering value to your customers day after day. That said, the levers of employee engagement are different at every company. The only way to truly understand if your team is engaged is by soliciting and acting on accurate feedback through an employee engagement platform.
Modern employee engagement solutions use pulse surveys and intelligent HR chatbots to provide decision-makers with a deep pool of employee input in real time. Your leaders can then leverage the platform’s reporting and analytics capabilities to find the signal in the noise, prioritizing those areas that will make the biggest impact on employee engagement and retention – like recognition.
When employees receive recognition on a daily basis, they know that they’re valued by both leaders and their peers, and they’ll be reluctant to move to a workplace where they might not receive the same level of appreciation. You can kick employee recognition into high gear at your company with a platform that enables high-frequency, high-impact recognition from anywhere team members find themselves. It should also democratize monetary recognition through a points-based system where every team member can give and redeem reward points for gifts and experiences they actually want, rather than yet another company tote or tumbler.
Benefits and administration
HR operations administers payroll and employee benefits programs, including health insurance, retirement plans, workers’ compensation, and unemployment benefits. Beyond these core offerings, HR ops should work with leadership to provide an array of employee incentives that help attract and retain the best talent. These include wellness programs, like mindfulness training and subsidized gym memberships, as well as flexible work policies that improve work-life balance.
Recruiting
HR operations play a key role in recruiting top talent by writing job descriptions, advertising openings across recruitment channels, and managing the interview process. HR ops should ensure that candidates align with your company culture by communicating with relevant stakeholders at all stages of the recruitment process.
Onboarding
Onboarding goes beyond the short orientation process that many companies provide in the first days of a new employee’s tenure. A solid onboarding process may last as long as a year and encompass everything from goal setting to establishing performance metrics to providing training. And whether the employee is new to the company, new to their role, or both, incorporating mentorship into the onboarding process can shorten their learning curve and offer the professional development opportunities employees crave.
Technology and support
HR operations owns the HRIS and other technology that supports a quality employee experience, like engagement and recognition solutions. They’re responsible for onboarding team members as they drive the adoption of these tools and others, providing all the support needed to ensure employees understand why and how to use critical HR systems.
Offboarding
Offboarding may not get as much attention as onboarding, but it’s an essential part of the employee lifecycle. Creating an effective offboarding process ensures that your organization gains valuable feedback from team members who are moving on, minimizes wrongful terminations and the accompanying potential legal exposure, and maintains your company’s reputation as a desirable employer.
HR operations roles
While the structure of your HR operations team will vary depending on your organization’s size and industry, most HR ops teams include some or all of the following roles.
HR manager
HR operations managers handle administrative tasks related to payroll, benefits, and other HR functions. They may also oversee recruitment, hiring, onboarding , and conflict resolution. HR managers connect leadership and your workforce, communicating strategy, assisting with change management, and making recommendations about future workforce planning initiatives.
HR generalist
HR generalists support the day-to-day functions of the HR department. As their job title suggests, HR generalists do a little bit of everything. You know you’re an HR generalist when a typical day at work includes everything from ensuring that the employee handbook doesn’t violate local labor laws to helping a staff member access employee assistance programs.
HR specialist
HR specialists are usually entry-level human resources professionals who specialize in no more than a few HR functions. They may focus on recruiting new talent, handling employee relations, or building training programs, among other duties. HR specialists might also act as employee support, guiding new hires and tenured employees through HR processes and procedures.
HR analyst
HR analysts collect, manage, and analyze HR data to support better decision-making and strategic initiatives. Whether analyzing employee survey data to find opportunities to drive retention or attract new talent or reviewing compensation data to set appropriate salary ranges for open positions, HR analysts play a critical role in developing an intelligent HR strategy for your company.
Support HR operations with the right technology
HR operations professionals support the full employee lifecycle while ensuring that every initiative furthers organizational goals. The Achievers Employee Experience Platform empowers HR ops teams with reliable and easy-to-use features that meet the unique needs of their people. From integrating recognition into employees’ work lives through the tools they use every day, to providing HR professionals and leaders with the data they need to track the impact of key employee programs, to connecting and facilitating fruitful discussions between remote team members that otherwise might never meet, the Achievers Employee Experience Platform is designed to help HR engage and thrill their workforce.
See how Achievers can help your HR operations team reach its full potential with a free demo.
In this article:
