Businesses today are realizing the important role an HR department can play in determining a business’s success through deployment of a top class workforce. This realization has led HR to emerge as a strategic business partner as compared to being only a support function as it was in the old times.
A business is dependent not only on the quality of its products, but also on the quality of its people, especially if it is involved in providing services. Regardless of how proficient your processes are, if the people working for you are not performing for your business, your success will be limited.
The rule for success is quite simple, an engaged workforce can lead your business to success. The rules and regulations of the system that your HR has defined, determine how engaged your workforce is and whether that engaged workforce is doing the right things at the right time in the right way to achieve the right results.
So how would you know whether your HR is doing their job correctly or not? Just like you evaluate the performance of other departments in your business, you need to evaluate your HR department through an HR audit.
The HR Audit
HR audit allows businesses to evaluate how well the HR department is operating within the business. It makes visible the strengths and weaknesses of your HR function and allow you to identify areas for improvement. It allows you to determine whether your HR department is:
- Effectively utilizing the available human resources with the business
- Following the set policies, rules and regulations concerning human resources
- Streamlining business goals with the goals of the human resources
By doing an HR audit, you are able to identify exactly where your HR department is currently standing. Divide the existing issues with the HR department into different categories including:
- Whether the issue is critical and has a substantive impact on your business’s success or is a minor procedural issue that can be easily resolved without having much impact on existing processes;
- Whether the issue is strategic in nature or more relevant to day-to-day operations of your business.
Once you have divided the identified issues, you can conduct the following analysis:
- Those HR issues that are strategic in nature and also have a substantive impact on your business’s success are policy issues and thus require you to redesign your HR policies;
- Those HR issues that are minor procedural issues but are strategic in nature require you to redefine your business’s culture because the culture is a strategic element that is inculcated in all your procedures;
- Those HR issues that are inherent in the day-to-day operations of your business and are substantive in nature are efficiency issues and have a direct impact on how efficient your business is in the long term;
- Those HR issues that are inherent in the day-to-day operations of your business but are minor can be fixed by improving the climatic or the working environment of your business.
Resolving issues identified during the HR audit can lead to creation of user friend HR systems that automatically help in engaging the workforce towards taking your business on the road to success!
