Organizations can’t operate efficiently if plentiful of Human Resource best practices don’t exist around. As they originated, they have served as guidelines for many HR professionals, and today also they are practiced diligently by every good-sense business. However, the relevant question is “what do they entail, and why are they so important?
What Are HRM Best Practices?
Typically, best digital HR practices are a set of Human Resources Management processes and actions that work interchangeably. Especially with HRM research comes two schools of thought on how to manage people. The first one is the best fit; the second is best practices.
- The best fit school suggests that in order to add value, human resource policies should sync with business strategy. This means that HR should access both the needs of the organization and its employees.
- The best practice school argues that there is a set of universal HR processes that drives superior business performance. According to its proponents, there’s a proper realm of HR activities that support companies in achieving a competitive advantage regardless of the organizational size or setting (Redman & Wilkinson, 2009).
Head over further to this article to discover the best practices and top digital HR trends.
1. Providing security to employees
The first and foremost one is employment security. There is both a formal contract (labor for money) and an informal contract (if you put in some extra effort, we take good care for you) between the employee and the employer. So, employment security basically encourages employees to go home after work and provide for themselves and their families. It is essential in one organization because it reinforces almost every HR action.
Similarly, employment security benefits organizations by helping them retain their people. It’s because when employees are laid off, the organization pays the full price. This is a costly process.
2. Selective hiring: Hiring the right people
This practice supports an organization to hire potential employees who can add value to it. According to research, the estimated difference in performance between an average performer and a high performer can be as high as 400%! This has been proved for different industries and job types, catering researchers, entertainers, and athletes.
And in today’s digital world, there are several recruitment tools that we can use to make the right choice. The common ones include structured and unstructured interviews, IQ tests, personality assessments, work tests, peer assessments, and reference checks. Note that these are all used for (pre-employment) to unveil three key candidate characteristics.
1 Ability:
Is the person qualified for a specific job? Does he know the practical use of technical and soft skills?
2 Trainability:
Can this candidate be trained to improve his/her skills? Does he have the required aptitude for learning and growing?
3 Commitment:
Does this person stand by a commitment to deliver his/her work? Will the organization be able to retain this person once he/she get hold of speed and productiveness?
3. Self-managed and effective teams
Know that teamwork matters the most in achieving goals. This one of the reasons why high-performance teams are considered first when it comes to achieving success. These teams provide value because they have some people who work day and night towards a common goal. This means that the company generates a variety of ideas that are then processed and combined, resulting in the best ones being selected.
Creating and nurturing high-performance teams comes in the HRs key responsibilities. For this purpose, individual personality assessments are used as they help in understanding how other team members think and behave. Plus there are different tools that facilitate great teamwork. Examples include communication software, feedback tools, project management tools, and other goal-setting software.
4. Fair and performance-based compensation
The fourth best one is the contingent compensation that has all to do with salary and benefits. When you add the new people, you want to compensate them above average. Again, these are the people that will return the most value to your company, so you want to retain them and pay them a nice reward. This example shows how different best practices work together to generate more value than one would do. By not doing so, bad employees leave immediately. Secondly, try coupling individual performance-related rewards associated with the different types of contributions that employees make.
This creates a sense of ownership for the employee.
5. Training in relevant skills
The last HR best practice suggests that companies should make a steady investment in training time and budget for their employees. Once you recruit the best people, you want to make sure that they remain the front-runners in the field. Moreover, it’s equally necessary to create an organization in which the rate of learning matches the pace of change? Don’t forget that relevant learning has become a secret of staying innovative, grow faster, and sustain a competitive advantage.
According to the Economist’s Lifelong Learning special report, the number of on-demand courses has grown exponentially in this regard. To further keep up with the formal learning structure, on-the-job learning also plays a vital role. This is part of the often quoted 70|20|10 rule:
- 70% of learning is from challenging assignments
- 20% of learning is from developmental relationships
- 10% of learning is from formal coursework and training
Conclusion
Here we’re winding up the 5 Human Resource best practices that include everything from hiring and training to offering job security and promotion of a free culture in which people can share their knowledge and ideas.
At last, digital HR practices also need to align with core business objectives and other strategies.
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