When you work for a large company in a specialist role, the role of HR is actually more important to you than you often realise as you go about your day to day work.
HR provide a support role that impacts a lot of what you do, from reimbursing your travel expenses to keeping track of your annual leave, and from helping onboard new team members to providing references should you move on.
What Good HR People Do for Teams
A good HR department will also keep staff up to date on any process or policy changes, and ensure that anyone joining the business knows how to do the HR related personal admin they need to do.
They will also make sure that managers brought into the business understand things like corporate appraisal procedures, and how to deal with complaints, disciplinaries and other matters that may arise in their teams in compliance with company policy. Often, managers may also need to liaise with HR to retrieve information from their databases and systems they use like xcdhr.com about their staff, for instance statistics on their department’s sickness record.
Naturally, this means that good HR teams do a lot of communicating, and thanks to technology there are now more and more ways to make HR comms and policy documents easier to access. Here are three ways these can be used to make your HR team better at communicating with and supporting other staff:
Well Managed Intranet Portals
Intranets are not a new idea by any means, and many large companies have had them for as long as 20 years. However, advances in content management systems now make it easier to ensure that the policy documentation held in the HR part of your corporate intranet is up to date, easy to find, and accessible to the right people.
If your intranet is a bit dated or you feel the HR portal could do with an overhaul to make it more useful, then this could be a good way to help people engage more with HR services.
Communication Via Targeted Groups
When people are constantly receiving ‘all staff’ emails from HR that don’t actually affect them, they begin to see these as things to put off reading or even as a drain on their time.
Using your HR data, it is easy to create targeted groups on the fly, so you only send communications to the people they affect. If a policy change only affects people above a certain pay grade, send it to them. Having a special seminar for women in the company? Send the invite to all your female employees. Changes to policies for shift workers? Don’t bother those who don’t work shifts with it. This creates a culture where people see HR comms as important and worth reading.
Let People Book Appointments Through a Shared Calendar
Sometimes people want to talk in person with an HR representative for all manner of reasons, often private ones. Allowing for a system where appointments can be booked through a shared calendar makes this far easier.
These are just three easy ways to improve the relationship between HR and staff using technology you most likely already have in better ways.