Innovative HR Practices You Can Adopt Today

HR is more than an administrative support function — it plays an increasingly strategic role in any business. An effective HR department utilizes the latest technology to attract, hire and retain the best personnel for the company.

Managing and measuring performance reliably help managers ensure that the workforce operates at peak efficiency. All of this has to be done in a cost-effective manner. To be successful, understanding innovation in HR is important. If you are an HR manager, then you must know innovative trends in the HR field.

Understanding Innovation in HR

Here are some of the important HR innovative practices you should try:

  • Career Development

Maintaining a highly-trained workforce benefits both employees and employers. Employees develop their skills and knowledge and employers ensure they have individual contributors who are ready to move into management positions when they become available.

Additionally, an HR department can promote learning and development by creating posters, brochures and tip sheets about career development. This might also include designating one or two days a year for employees to focus on their career planning.

Career development might also involve job rotations that enable vertical, lateral, realignment, relocation, enrichment or exploratory job moves.

  • Employee Surveys

Conducting annual employee surveys gives an HR department the knowledge needed to build a positive employee-employer relationship and a productive work environment. An anonymous survey enables employees to speak freely and candidly about working conditions. This helps determine employee satisfaction, attitudes, loyalty and potential issues.

  • New Employee Orientation

When businesses are short on staff, they might be tempted to put new employees right to work. However, successful companies offer a comprehensive orientation program to introduce employees to the company’s culture, operations and policies.

This gets employees off to a solid start and up and running quickly. Ideally, effective orientation for new employees actually starts during the recruitment process and conveys a consistent message about the company’s values, procedures and mission using multiple techniques.

  • Team Building

HR functions may seem to focus only on the day-to-day administrative tasks that ensure employees are fairly compensated for their work. Innovative strategies for promoting the proper use of key programs, such as health care, ensure that the company gets the highest best value for its investment in its people.

They promote interdepartmental best practices such as improving productivity, prioritizing work, delegating appropriately, managing stress and working within time and budget constraints. This makes the company stronger as a whole.