Human Resources is often viewed as the department that hands out safety manuals and fields the harassment complaints. But as an HR manager, your job is much more complicated than that. In many ways, you are an advocate for both the employee and the employer. This puts you in a unique situation to have one of the most comprehensive views of the company. One of the keys to a good company is a high level of productivity. Here’s how the HR team can help build the foundation of productivity.

The Right People

There are two things upon which a productive company is built. The people and the prioritization scheme used.  You need good people if they are going to be productive. A car with a strong engine will drive much faster than a car with a worn out or unreliable engine. There are certain people who have a lot of energy and apply it to their work. It’s easier to hire people who are hard workers than to hire people who aren’t and try to change them. In order to build a foundation of productivity your managers and HR team need to work together to attract, hire, and ultimately retain people who work hard.

Prioritization

One of the key jobs for an HR manager is to bring balance to a firm. Productivity doesn’t come from being a cruel task master. Hard work should be balanced with fun, breaks, rewards, and other things which provide a psychologic break from the stress of producing high quality work. At some point, it isn’t just about working harder—it comes from working smarter. Start creating a way to break down tasks in monthly, weekly, and daily segments. Next, create a system to “rate” or “score” tasks due to priority. For instance, you might have a few categories such as “time sensitive”, “importance of task”, or “importance of client.” Use this priority score to determine what gets worked on first.

Reduce Onboarding Time

The third way human resources can help increase the productivity of a company is by reducing the amount of time it takes to find and bring on a productive new member of the team. It’s well known how expensive it is to hire a new employee because of the vast amount of training, time and resources the company must dedicate to ensuring that the new employees is ready and fit for work . Streamlining training systems and implementing systems to handle paperwork electronically is key. A digital, online system can help streamline the onboarding and training process, In addition, the HR rep tasked with manually entering the information will be thrilled to be able to devout his or her time to other matters.

If you need help taking your company’s productivity to the next level, contact SmarterHR. We combine all the human resource capacities into a single entry HR solution. We are the experts in seamlessly integrating the different aspects of human resources, especially digital applications, into one solution. The net result is efficiency, simplicity, and affordability.