HR issues are very common among organizations, and they encompass a wide variety of problem areas—from running the HR department itself to assisting the company’s employees through HR functions.
If this sounds familiar to you, you need to look at the big picture and all the small details to get to the root of the problem and help you lay down your plans on how to best resolve these challenges at every level.
Get rid of the challenges you’re currently facing in your organization so that you could start the coming year with more efficiency and positivity.
1. Employee retention
Employees who leave a company often take with them proprietary information, as well as skills that are unique to them, so you need to pay serious attention if there’s a high turnover rate within your organization. Not only is it costly to replace one employee after another, but could also severely damage your reputation as an employer.
Your organization is most likely to encounter retention problems when you have managers who lack either leadership skills or are micromanaging too much.
Under the first type of manager, your employees may feel they can’t trust their manager enough, especially when there’s lack of good judgment in making decisions that affect the team.
On the other hand, employees may feel their level of confidence erode under someone who does not give them the chance to work on their own and prefers to manage employees and their tasks too closely.
Once you determine that management style is contributing to low retention among employees, you need to step in and mediate about what would help change the perception of your employees. Discuss their expectations objectively and try other approaches where workers can perform their duties and responsibilities with balanced control.
There may be many more underlying, inter-connected factors that are causing employee retention problems in your organization, but they’re not impossible to detect and address through regular talks with your employees and assessment of your HR policies.
2. Lack of training and learning opportunities
Training is beneficial for your employees’ learning and your organization’s success. Without proper training, employees may be unsure of how to do their job, causing them to feel inadequate until they come to a point when they feel it’s a much better recourse to just quit their job.
On the other hand, exposing your employees to formal or informal training, whether they’re done in-house or online can help workers to become subject experts and afford them opportunities to take on higher-level, more impactful roles in the organization.
Instead of looking at employee training as a waste of time and money, you could focus first on measuring the value of your training programs. Technical training programs, for example, provide simulation activities that enable trainees to easily transfer the knowledge they have acquired from training into the real work environment.
3. Workplace health and safety
The principle of health and safety in the workplace needs to be part of your goals, too. Often, though, this area is overlooked until an issue that poses serious risks to employees arises, which could range from cold and flu outbreaks to workplace violence and ergonomic hazards
These things, if not given attention, could compromise your employees’ welfare and their ability to work effectively. Not to mention, pose legal liabilities on your company.
HR should, therefore, lead in maintaining employee health and safety in the workplace. It can be done through a company-wide information campaign on cold and flu sickness, training in emergency situations, and strict enforcement of safety and security policies around the workplace.
4. Late pay
Payroll issues such as late processing and inaccurate computing are major triggers for employee dissatisfaction.
These problems can cause employees to be extremely unhappy since they expect HR to be proactive and extra careful in making sure that workers don’t experience any problems receiving their wages on time or in full. Imagine the frustration of employees when they fail to receive the salary they’re expecting and reserving for a long holiday or weekend.
It might be better to do your employees’ payroll in-house so that you could have more control in doing the payroll in advance, unlike when you outsource it to an accounting firm that may be incapable of handling several accounts and answering your employees’ payroll disputes in a timely manner.
Make sure your payroll department has a well-trained staff that can handle employee payroll including leave benefits, overtime rates, or special holiday pay. You could also leverage payroll software or programs that you can integrate into your HR system to facilitate tracking of daily time records and leave allocations so that you could pay your employees without any delay.
5. Discrimination
Modern-day businesses and workers have become more aware and accepting of various cultural and social backgrounds in the workplace, which makes it crucial for you to spot any potential case of discrimination in your organization.
You should also work hand-in-hand with your managers in protecting your employees so that they don’t experience discrimination for their gender, age, disabilities, social status, or religious and political affiliations from their co-employees or your business leaders or partners.
Encourage your employees to come forward with their complaints when they feel they are being discriminated against or harassed so that you could prevent potential problems early on.
6. Lack of diversity
Diversity in the workplace can have positive effects for your organization, as it brings about a synergy of creative thinking, while the lack of it can hamper your company’s business goals. You can’t have a male-dominated workforce, for example, if you’re trying to market to family consumer groups.
To develop a culture of diversity in your organization, you could start with your hiring strategies. Consider different demographics when hiring employees and make it a point to review your hiring history to ensure you’re consistently targeting to build a diverse workforce.
7. Poor recruitment process
HR challenges are mostly talent-related including recruiting someone who has the best skills and cultural fit among a large pool of candidates, and the kind of recruitment process you follow. These challenges from the job posting to resume and candidate screening could make or break your chances of finding your ideal hires.
In fact, bad hiring decisions due to a poor recruitment process have impacts that may extend to financial losses and low productivity and employee morale.
A recruitment consultant in the Philippines or recruitment company could help assess your hiring process since they have years of experience and a deep perspective that could complement your HR system.
Be sure to share important information or feedback with your recruitment agency before going ahead with your talent search to make the whole collaboration a productive one.
8. Low workplace productivity
Every company fears to have a workforce that scores low in productivity because, at the end of the day, profitability is important to the business.
When employees are taking a long time to learn or complete a task correctly, the whole operations may suffer through lost income or a decline in the quality of your products and services.
The first step to counter this problem is to determine which between lack or misappropriation of resources and a flawed workflow is keeping your employees from performing optimally.
Identify what a team does and how you could also pinpoint which areas to enhance and improve. You should, likewise, coordinate closely with team managers to determine which employees need training or mentoring so that they could work smarter and achieve higher productivity.
HR issues come in different forms, but they all have the potential to disrupt the whole organization if not resolved as soon as possible. So before the year ends, take the time to make an honest assessment of what employee issues you’re facing, and although it’s hard to find a perfect team or organization, it’s your responsibility to reflect on how to do things better in 2018.
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