Top 3 Obstacles for HR and How To Handle Them

COVID-19 pandemic may have helped your human resource departments steal the show in 2020, but also presents new obstacles for HR. 

Challenges abound in an organization, but the stress is not distributed evenly across departments. Needless to say, who handles the toughest corporate adversaries.

You guessed it. HR personnels face new challenges every day. From helping managers find the right talent for their teams to managing regular grievances and norms, there is a new obstacle waiting for HR leaders at every level. 

While you don’t have to weather through every storm, it is crucial to deal with the fundamental challenges that prevent HR from advancing in their operations. Today, we will offer solutions for these basic obstacles for HR and target areas that turn out to be productivity killers.  

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#1. Relying on paper documents

From recruiting to replacement, every talent’s journey brings a new wave of documentation for HR leaders. On top of that, there are other HR functions that require immense paperwork. Employee relations, policy addition/deletion, training – you name it, there will be a series of documents for it.

Paperwork is necessary, but doing it on paper isn’t anymore. 

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure bulletproof documentation—and keep the planet green:

1. Leverage a unified file management system
2. Enable electronic signatures
3. Make digital filing a must

#2. Limited training

Investing in workforce training is the best way to put an end to many problems before they even begin to take shape. 

If your workforce is one hundred percent clear about “what to follow” and “what to avoid,” there will be no productivity hardships at all. On the contrary, the advantages to it are many-fold. For instance, you’ll be able to create a workplace grooming experience with no additional expense while encouraging employee training and development. 

Many new benefits will start presenting them once you take the following steps:

1. Find the right person to teach your top-level workforce
2. Keep your managers updated about all company rules and regulations
3. Ask them to thoroughly train their respective teams on company norms, especially anti-harassment policies, employment laws, and incident reporting
4. Implement a mentorship program that works on both levels

3. No analytics 

2021 is not like those regular years. An exceptional year like this requires an exceptional understanding and implementation of emerging technologies, especially Analytics. 

Your organization is exhaling a lot of data. The inability to use them are one of the ultimate obstacles for HR. Unless you have the tools to store and analyze it, you are simply demotivating strategic, game-changing initiatives from taking birth. 

“Data” is the biggest weapon for today’s organizations and “insights” are their ultimate trigger elements. Correct insights will help you take the right decisions and push the organizations several levels ahead. 

To manage the data overload and make sense of every little information, take the following steps:

1. Have a reporting and analytics tool set up in your HR portal for KPI assessments
2. Recruit data scientists who will be able to convert insights into actionable reports
3. Implement insights to create predictions for the organization’s future