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3 Key Areas of Focus for all Human Resource Departments

With businesses rapidly transforming ways in which they operate, the challenges and solutions needing to be identified and addressed by human resource managers and executives continue to keep coming at quite a pace.

While transactional processes such as recruitment, training and compliance have been common elements of HR activity requiring regular attention and resourcing, with the changing business environment comes a need for HR to focus on other areas to support and enable the business needs of the future.

Retention

Long gone are the days when the roles and responsibilities of human resources were limited to sourcing, hiring and training new talent. Today, it not just important to employ capable professionals but to also to retain existing them, especially when they are in key roles with long developmental timelines or have skills that are scarce in the market.

Without a plan to retain key capabilities, all businesses, small or large, will struggle to maximise results and minimise risk.

Workplace Diversity

Attention needs to be given to ensuring that the makeup of the workforce supports the operations of the business and relationships that it needs to foster and maintain among stakeholders and customers. Consideration in workforce planning and recruitment programs needs to be given to ensuring the right mix of gender, age, education and other diversity factors are considered, understood and acted on in building and sustaining the workforce.

Productivity

One of the most essential HRM practices and goals is ensuring that HR is contributing to, not negatively impacting on the productivity of the business and its employees. Unfortunately, for some HR professionals, productivity enhancement isn't always 'front and centre' in their planning and operational actions.

For a business to operate efficiently and increase profits, the HR team must put in efforts to enable an environment in which employees are most productive. In this regard, it should establish well-planned programmes and understand how HR programs such as rewards and recognition, performance-based appraisals and the timely management of underperformance can be run efficiently and effectively to encourage and reward employees to perform their best.

The Bottom Line

While there are many other factors besides the three mentioned above for HR professionals to think about and act on to support business improvement and change, it's a starting point and provides food for thought.

Outsourcing to a reliable human resources consultancy where specialist internal resources aren't available can help businesses manage their HRM operations better and boost the performance of the company.

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