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Employees
Although you know your HR department as the people who hired you and the people who you tend to want to avoid, they can actually be a really useful asset to employees who are seeking career development. So, without further ado, here are 6 ways that HR departments can help employees thrive.
- Career planning
HR are focused on helping the business to succeed, but they’re also aware that businesses won’t succeed without employees who are good at their jobs and want to move forward.
Your HR manager is a good person to go to if you want some help on next steps to achieve your goals or if you want some advice on identifying your strengths and weaknesses, for example.
- Offering continuing education and training
Many companies offer tuition reimbursement, especially if the degree or certification is something that can directly help the company. It’s worth asking HR because most of the time there’s a good chance your employer will make some money available for you.
Even if you’re not seeking a degree, there will be many online classes or courses you could attend.
It’s a good idea to seek legal protection if you or a loved one is suffering with health problems. Rather than missing work and risking getting in trouble for violating attendance policies, HR can provide you with paperwork to protect you. Most companies also have some kind of employee life insurance they can add you to.
All workplaces will have a dedicated person whom you can talk to but remember that HR is always there to help too. No matter what violations you’re reporting, the HR department will be able to set up an investigation and get to the bottom of the issue.
- Recruitment and induction processes
In order to be successful in a role in the first place, HR will ensure the role is right for you and you’re right for the role. Once the recruitment process is over, they’ll then begin the induction process which will ensure you hit the ground running on your first day.
Having a proper recruitment and induction process at the start of an employee’s journey is vital to ensuring the successful running of any company and ensuring that all employees thrive within their workplace.
HR departments coach their line managers to lead their teams (you) effectively! Without this process, managers won’t have the ability to provide clear direction and expectations, have good communication skills or have the confidence to build trust and recognise performance – all of which will have a direct impact on the success of the employees under that manager.
How can HR departments help employees thrive? Final thoughts
To summarise, HR departments have a huge amount of influence and impact through people-oriented strategies that focus on engagement and leadership, which will ultimately drive employee and business success. HR departments have their own practices in place to ensure every employee is performing as they should, but it’s equally important for employees to know that they can speak to HR at any time about any issue they’re having.
Basically, what the question boils down to is this: should your company fund its own devices for its employees to use, or should you let these workers use devices they already own? At first glance, the latter might seem the cheaper and more streamlined way of doing things, but the choice isn’t quite that simple.
Implementing a BYOD – that stands for bring-your-own-device – strategy in your business can incur a range of costs that might not be manifested entirely clearly until much further down the line. That’s why your firm needs to tread carefully when trying to decide whether it should really opt for the BYOD approach.
BYOD: a strategy that makes sense on paper
If your company’s finances are under strain, as is surely the case for many businesses, you might not want to hesitate in enacting a BYOD policy. After all, according to research mentioned by Karen D Schwartz in an article on Samsung’s website, 77% of Americans have a smartphone and constantly keep it with them.
However, the problems start when your company wants to keep a tight check on what goes onto those devices. In order to go ahead with that, your firm will need to install, onto each of the applicable mobile devices, the client for what is known as a mobile device management (MDM) platform.
Some of your employees could be reluctant to have such software installed on their phone, perhaps fearing what privacy implications could arise from their employer being able to monitor work activities they undertake on what are supposed to be predominantly personal devices.
Would furnishing company-owned devices be a better alternative?
It would have obvious financial drawbacks, especially for smaller businesses that could be somewhat cash-strapped compared to their better-established competitors. In the long run, however, the tactic could help to pay for itself more effectively than keeping up a BYOD policy would.
Naturally, you would have to make room in your business budget for buying devices through the company. On the plus side, though, you could choose to buy multiple units of the same device model – and, in the process, make savings by capitalizing on the likes of negotiated discount rates and volume discounts.
Which choice would bode best for security?
This is a tricky question to answer confidently. On the one hand, many workers are likely to want to regularly upgrade to new devices of their own accord, as The Balance Careers implies. Therefore, you might not yourself have to put your staff under too much pressure to replace their devices in this way.
However, people might not always keep on top of security updates with their personal handsets as much as they would with company-owned devices, on which you could install enterprise mobility management (EMM) software to ensure that the latest security patches are added as they arrive.
All the same, though, your company could easily require either BYOD or company-owned devices to use Wandera’s zero trust network access solution so that a wide array of work practices can be completed securely.
If you have a business of your own, then you are no doubt aware of the huge importance of keeping your employees as safe as possible. The fact is that this is one of your main concerns of all, and there is a lot that you will need to consider if you want them to be as safe as they possibly can be. On the whole, it is a matter of ensuring that everyone knows what the rules and regulations are and that they follow them as closely as possible. As long as you do that, you should find that the rest will follow, but it is worth knowing exactly what you should be doing to keep them as safe as you can at all times. Let’s take a look in a little more detail so that you can better understand your role in it all.
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Easily Accessible Rules
It is clear that it’s obvious you need rules in order to keep people safe, but you also need to make sure that they are as easily accessible as possible. This means that they are located somewhere physically in the office where anyone can find them and read them at any time, but also that they are easy to understand. If anyone can’t understand them, then you can’t reasonably expect everyone to follow them to the letter. Make sure they are written as clearly as possible, and that way you are much less likely to have any kind of trouble. Moreover, be sure to have several copies around the workplace, just in case more than one person needs to refer to them at once.
Championing The Cause
Something that often makes a huge difference is if you put one person in charge of the process of keeping everyone safe. Using a champion in this way is a powerful way of ensuring that everyone follows the rules, and that they know why they need to. You might want to consider choosing someone who is particularly keen on it themselves, as this way you can be sure that they will do the job in the best possible manner. Having a champion is also a powerful way of demonstrating that you as an employer take health and safety seriously. This is useful to have in case you need to present a case to a lawyer, for example, or when you are checked externally for your health and safety regulations.
Self-Auditing
A great way of showing that you are a responsible employer is to carry out the occasional self-audit and follow up accordingly. This can be done by anyone, but it is more effective if you hire someone neutral to do it for you. They will be able to ensure that you are doing everything as a business to keep everyone as safe as possible. If you are not sure about how to self-audit, then consider hiring a professional to do it for you. You might be pleasantly surprised at what a difference this really can make.
It’s often been said that people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers. Every year, thousands of people escape a toxic office environment where their emotional, personal, professional and safety needs remain unmet. The problem for employers is that all of this stuff is rather costly. There’s a lot of money involved in finding and training new staff, so any way to get your existing staff to hang around is a bonus.
Some enterprising companies are already looking at ways to do this. For instance, Jeff Gunther a CEO of a Charlottesville software company decided to switch things up at his company, after being influenced by the book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. He realized that the best way to improve his productivity and make his staff happier was to operate what is known in the industry as a “results-based working environment.” What this meant, essentially, was that workers could do whatever they wanted and use their time as they saw fit, so long as they got the job done. Employees at his company can take time off when they want, work late, work early and work from home if so they choose, so long as the business as a whole achieves its objectives.
What else do employees want from the companies for which they work? Let’s take a look.
Employees Want Goals
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It turns out that just asking somebody to do the same task over and over again isn’t a particularly good way to make them thrilled about coming to work. It’s boring doing the same thing every day, without an overarching objective in mind. Gunther says that he tries to institute measurable and obtainable goals for his team members to give them something to strive for. For instance, he tasked his sales team with making a given dollar value amount of sales in a particular time period. Gunther says, however, that it is important to give teams a degree of autonomy in this process. It should be up to them, he says, to decide how they’re going to complete the mission.
Employees Want Safety
Pixabay
Every year, something like 300,000 people get seriously ill and die in the workplace. More often than not, it’s because of things like heart attacks and stroke. This is why there is a growing demand from employees for companies that are prepared to react when things go wrong. Older employees especially, want to know that they are protected, should the worst happen. An onsite automatic external defibrillator, for instance, as well as a trained member of staff, are important for getting the message across that team working on your site are protected. Remember, employees want transparency and safety, as well as high pay.
Employees Want To Be Able To Innovate
Flickr
When Google instituted it’s 20 percent creativity time where employees got to do whatever they wanted, nobody thought it would work. But surprisingly, it did work and led to greater success within the company. The same goes for your business. People in the organization need to have the opportunity to bring something new to the table. Foster innovation through things like brainstorming sessions.
