Elevate the Employee Experience: 10 HR Processes You Need to Know

According to a Gartner survey, employees who work in a human-centric organization—where they are seen as people, not just resources—are 3.8 times more likely to be high performers.

Empathy is a guiding pillar of a human-centric workplace, so it’s crucial to not just tell employees you value them beyond their contributions but to show it. You can walk the walk by implementing thoughtful and strategic HR processes that balance their wellbeing with the company’s success.

While building processes spanning the entire employee lifecycle can be overwhelming, it’s well worth the effort. Otherwise, you risk top performers heading for the exit, which can have a ripple effect on productivity, team morale, and your company’s reputation.

In this article, we’ll cover 10 critical HR processes and practical strategies for efficiently managing them. With BambooHR^Ⓡ, you can have all your company’s data in one place to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

What Are HR Processes?

HR processes are standardized systems and procedures companies use to manage their employees. They cover the entire employee lifecycle, which encompasses recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and offboarding.

Why Do You Need HR Processes?

Employees are the heartbeat of any organization. HR processes collectively provide employees with the tools and peace of mind they need to be successful in their roles, which, in turn, helps the company achieve its short- and long-term goals.

Some of the many benefits of HR processes include:

• Greater efficiency: Established HR processes enable your team to identify any gaps in your workforce or systems and take strategic action to increase the company’s productivity.
• Better employee experience: Addressing each phase of the employee lifecycle with applicable HR processes shows employees that the company values them and their career growth.
• Increased compliance: From what you can ask job applicants to maintaining employee records and everything in between, HR processes help your business remain compliant and avoid legal repercussions.

What Is End-to-End HR Process Management?

End-to-end HR process management entails overseeing and optimizing each stage of the employee lifecycle, from hiring to offboarding, to provide a consistent employee experience. Technology and automation are often used to progress the employee through their journey, making sure no steps are missed and providing actionable data.

This comprehensive approach ensures that all vital HR processes are seamlessly integrated and aligned with the company’s goals, leading to a more efficient and cohesive workforce management strategy.

What Are the Most Important HR Processes?

While HR processes may generally evolve as business needs change, here are 10 impactful HR processes that can help organizations thrive in the short and long term:

Workforce Planning

Workforce planning involves analyzing your overall personnel to prepare for future staffing needs. While the exact process varies across companies due to differences in workforce size and needs, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Understand company goals to determine what areas of expertise you need and how many employees to hire.
• Invest in workforce planning software to generate reports, support recruiting efforts, streamline performance management, and more.
• Offer professional development and create career paths and succession plans for internal talent as opposed to always hiring externally.
• Hire and onboard new employees before additional help is desperately needed to protect your existing employees from feeling overwhelmed and burnt out.
• Communicate with managers to understand how hiring in other departments will impact their department in terms of demand and resource allocation.

Implementing a workforce planning process can lower recruitment costs, improve retention rates, close skills gaps, and help your company achieve its goals.

Compensation and Benefits

Compensation includes an employee’s regular salary or hourly pay, as well as other types of wages such as overtime, commission, tips, and bonuses. On the other hand, benefits are all other supplemental perks, such as health insurance, retirement plans, and paid time off.

Some key steps for this HR process include conducting market research to determine competitive salaries for various positions, setting up a payroll system, building a competitive benefits package, vetting insurance providers, ensuring compliance with regulations, and managing open enrollment with benefits administration software.

A robust compensation and benefits strategy is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent. In fact, 64% of employees say a significant increase in income or benefits is the most important factor when deciding whether or not to accept a job offer. Check out our guide on compensation trends to learn more about how your organization can stand out.

Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition refers to a company’s proactive, long-term strategy for identifying, attracting, and retaining top talent. Key aspects of the talent acquisition process include:

• Workforce planning and identifying future talent needs
• Building a strong and consistent employer brand
• Sourcing candidates through employee referral programs, social media, networking events, and other channels
• Creating a positive candidate experience throughout the hiring process
• Developing relationships with potential candidates, even if there aren’t immediate job openings

By investing in a robust talent acquisition process, you can ensure your company has a steady pipeline of skilled candidates to meet both current and future business needs.

Recruitment

Recruitment is more reactive than talent acquisition, as it involves finding potential candidates for immediate job openings. During this process, recruiters advertise job openings, screen applications and resumes (often with an applicant tracking system), interview promising candidates, and then select the most qualified candidates to be further interviewed and assessed by the hiring manager.

While recruiters and hiring managers aim to hire candidates as soon as possible, this process must also be effective. After all, employers spend between $7,500 and $28,000 in hard costs to find and onboard each new employee. Check out these seven strategies for a deeper dive into speeding up recruiting while avoiding the costs of a bad hire.

Onboarding

Onboarding is the process of introducing a new hire to the organization and preparing them for their role. Common onboarding activities include, but are not limited to:

• Sending new-hire paperwork and an employee handbook
• Adding them to the payroll and setting up direct deposit
• Setting up their elected benefits and retirement plan, if applicable
• Providing them with applicable technology and granting access to relevant systems
• Giving them a tour and introducing them to their colleagues
• Assigning the new employee an onboarding buddy and/or mentor
• Inviting them to relevant meetings and regular check-ins with their manager
• Creating engaging onboarding videos and training modules (e.g., company values, cybersecurity policies, product demos)
• Providing a personalized 30-60-90 day checklist
• Asking new hires for feedback on the onboarding process

Depending on the company, onboarding can last anywhere from a few weeks to one year, but it usually takes a few months. The bottom line is your onboarding process should be thorough enough for employees to internalize their training, perform their job confidently, and decrease their time to productivity.

» Learn More: The Definitive Guide to Onboarding

Training and Development

Training and development are vital components for employee growth and organizational success. Training helps employees enhance the skills they need for their current roles. This process involves identifying skills gaps through assessments, designing training programs to address them, implementing training sessions (e.g., technical skills, compliance policies), and evaluating their effectiveness to make necessary changes.

On the other hand, development prepares employees for future positions within the organization. The development process steps are similar to training, but the focus is on long-term growth. For example, development sessions may focus on leadership training. Together, training and development can improve employees' current performance while preparing a strong talent pipeline for the future.

Employee Relations

Employee relations in HR involves preventing or resolving conflicts between employees and management, as well as creating and enforcing fair workplace policies for all. The following steps can help foster a positive work environment:

• Establish policies for fair compensation, meaningful benefits, work-life balance, performance management, and workplace health and safety.
• Reduce conflicts by reviewing policies regularly to ensure employees understand them.
• Create a formal complaint process for employees to follow.
• Respond to complaints in a timely manner.
• Assign a liaison to meet separately with all parties involved in the conflict.
• Design an action plan to resolve the conflict and follow up with all parties.
• Document issues thoroughly to maintain accurate employee and legal records.

Ultimately, advocating for employees, supporting their growth, and allowing them to voice their concerns without fear of retaliation can help build mutual respect and trust between them and the organization.

Performance Management

Performance management involves managers measuring and developing their team members’ performance and reporting to higher leadership. In addition to biannual or annual performance reviews, it’s important to give employees more frequent feedback. Consider implementing regular one-on-ones with managers, peer feedback sessions, performance improvement plans, and goal-setting and tracking initiatives.

Consistent performance management helps employees understand and align their work with business goals and objectives. Making small adjustments over time is more practical than scrambling to make larger course corrections once a year.

» Learn More: The Definitive Guide to Performance Management [Free Download]

Retention

Retention is your company’s ability to prevent as much employee turnover as possible within a specific timeframe. HR processes are interconnected, so your company’s success in the earlier stages of the employee lifecycle directly influences your retention rate. For instance, having regular, meaningful performance reviews can encourage your people to grow with the company.

Here are some other strategies for improving retention:

• Create accurate job descriptions so candidates’ on-the-job experience aligns with what they were told to expect.
• Offer a well-rounded compensation package that allows employees to care for their financial, physical, and mental health.
• Ask employees for feedback—and act on it.
• Create a positive work environment by recognizing and rewarding excellent performance, creating team bonding opportunities like employee resource groups, and prioritizing transparent communication.
• Offer clear career paths to give employees purpose through regular target setting, additional training, internal hires and promotions, and more.

Prioritizing retention has several positive ripple effects, such as increased employee engagement, productivity, revenue, and profitability.

Offboarding

Offboarding is the process of an employee leaving the company due to resignation, termination, or retirement. Some steps in this process include asking them to train their replacement, collecting their company equipment, revoking access to company accounts, arranging their final paycheck, providing information about benefits changes, and conducting an exit interview.

A formal offboarding process is mutually beneficial as it prevents legal and security issues for the company while allowing the employee to leave with dignity. Plus, making a positive last impression may encourage them to return in the future or recommend your company to their network.

» Learn More: Offboarding Checklist [Free Download]

How to Manage HR Processes

Managing multiple HR processes may feel daunting, so here are a few tips for an efficient experience:

• Collaborate with key stakeholders: HR should work with department heads and executive team members to develop processes that align with business needs and the strategic direction of the company.
• Remain compliant: Stay current with state and federal regulations that influence certain HR processes (e.g., minimum wage laws impact the compensation process).
• Document processes: Formally recording HR procedures in an employee handbook, for example, makes everyone accountable for staying informed and abiding by policies.
• Listen to employees: HR processes are meant to enhance the employee experience, so go straight to the source to learn what’s working and what can be improved.

To make things even easier, let software do the heavy lifting for you. BambooHR’s complete platform has all the tools you need to manage data and benefits, hire talent, run payroll, and help employees thrive. Learn more with a free demo today!