Four tips for improving your organization’s HR communications
By Miranda Nicholson
From performance reviews to paid time off (PTO) requests, most HR professionals understand that HR communication can be tricky. You need to collect a lot of information from your employees (which often entails tracking down individuals and sending countless reminders), but you also need to avoid over-communicating so you don’t clutter their inboxes with HR emails.
Here are four tips you can use to stay organized, cut down on administrative tasks, limit massive email communications and improve HR communication overall for your business.
Make employee request forms easily accessible
Excessive paperwork is a typical pain point for employees and human resources when it comes to forms like PTO requests, expense reimbursements, office supply requests, complaint forms and others. According to a McKinsey report, employees spend nearly two hours per day searching for information – a tremendous loss of productivity. One way to remedy this is to create an online employee portal that allows for all these forms to be stored in one easy-access location. This keeps employees from having to dig through their inbox or hunt down hard copies of forms that float around the office, and HR professionals don’t have to worry about tracking the progress of each form submission. It’s a streamlined process for all.
Automate reminder emails for deadlines
This is another instance in which an employee portal will aid in document collection. New hires are often required to submit various forms, copies of identification and other employee authorization documents. In the initial craze that comes with starting a new job, these documents often fall by the wayside, delaying essential HR functions. To avoid the hassle of following up with individual employees and tracking each form, HR departments can implement a system to track form completion progress, view which employees have submitted the form, and send automatic reminder emails to other employees to ensure they meet the submission deadline. This also eliminates the possibility of over-communication and reduces stress on both sides.
Integrate an email marketing system
Email marketing systems aren’t just for marketing teams – HR can use them for internal communications as well. On average, employees spend 28 per cent of their time reading and responding to email. With such a captive audience, HR teams should integrate employee data into automated emails for events like birthdays and work anniversaries. This boosts morale by making employees feel special and also saves time for HR teams – it’s a win-win.
Use mobile-friendly communications
Employee engagement is becoming increasingly important in the business landscape. According to Access Perks, disengaged employees cost employers between $450 and $550 billion annually. In order to improve this, HR teams need to think outside the box to connect with employees. Employees expect concise information that’s instantly accessible from their mobile devices, so your team should invest in virtual messaging and mobile employee engagement tools. People expect to be able to access and interact with anything and everything on their mobile device, and HR communications are no different.
These are just a few ways technology can streamline communication between employees and the human resources department. Making the effort to discover which methods work best for your team will go a long way toward improving communication across your business.
Miranda Nicholson is the director of HR at Formstack.