Task Management Best Practices for HR Teams

R teams are essential for any company’s growth and for fostering good relationships between managers and their employees. While HR teams have different roles based on the overall size of the organization and their own department, some tasks are always consistent.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the most common responsibilities HR teams carry out and supervise, such as hiring and organizational goal setting. Then, we’ll offer related HR task management best practices that can help streamline each one.

Making the Perfect Hire

One of the most important parts of an HR team's job is to hire new candidates. The average hiring process is around 24 days long, and there are many intricate tasks that need to be completed throughout that timeframe.

In 2020, a survey found that 60% of recruiters across all U.S. industries said screening candidates was the most time-consuming part of hiring. What is a simple task management best practice that can help streamline your hiring process?

Keep your inbox as empty as possible.

Email may seem like a simple way to manage hiring tasks, but with dozens of candidates flooding an HR team's inbox every day, those emails can become overwhelming. To keep your inbox uncluttered and to help you stay on top of your assignments, designate one hour of your workday to go through each and every email.

Create labels and specific email folders for certain workflows to help you find good candidates later on in the process. If some candidates are on the shortlist, flag and email their resumes to their would-be managers to get their initial feedback.

...and Training the Perfect Hire

Once you’re able to coordinate with relevant decision-makers and hire a new employee, it’s time to train them. However, the level of training required depends on the experience level of that person. For example, if they are new to the professional world, managers might need help arranging skill-development training programs to ensure their work meets their organization’s standards.

All in all, when a new employee is brought on, the flow of expectations and required training tasks needs to be clear.

Schedule weekly (or more) check-ins between teams

One task management best practice for training new employees is to create a schedule for regular communication. They’re new to the company’s processes and still getting to know their manager; in order to be efficient they need to be told how tasks are completed and reported on. During these scheduled meetings, you and their manager can monitor their task progress from start to finish. It's up to an HR team to help facilitate seamless communication between the new employee and their manager from the moment they’re hired and throughout their training process.

“In his book The Cost of Poor Communications, David Grossman found that from a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each cited an average loss per company of $62.4 million per year due to inadequate communication to and between employees.”

Society for Human Resource Management

Achieving Inclusion Goals

Every HR team is concerned about setting and meeting their organization’s inclusion OKR goals. However, it can be hard to track the company’s overall progress when these types of goals can’t be measured like marketing or sales performances. Promoting inclusion is important for employees to feel like they belong, which helps their productivity.

That’s why keeping a living document with these critical inclusion goals with detailed milestones is an important task management best practice.

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Create yearly, monthly, and weekly milestones

HR teams can set their goals into a collaborating document, and then list out the tasks they need to do to accomplish each goal below them. For yearly goals, HR managers can keep it very high-level, such as, “Create a productive work environment within my organization that is free of harassment.” Then a monthly milestone can be, “Draft a new inclusive policy.” One of the weekly milestones could then be, “Determine whether current practices and procedures are inclusive.”

Some organizations find that using collaborative software to help manage their individual and organizational tasks helps improve productivity, and thus helps them reach their goals faster.

Improving Employee Wellness

In 2021, company leaders are investing 88% more in mental health programs, and 81% more in stress management/resilience programs. It’s important for HR teams to support employee wellness and maintain it by working with managers and employees alike. Employees that are in good moods and are happy to come to work put more effort into their tasks. Human resources can create this healthy environment by creating an employee wellness program and setting internal wellness goals.

Here’s one task management technique to help you implement and maintain an employee wellness program in your organization.

Estimate the time commitment

One of the biggest challenges to employee wellness programs is that managers might not want their hard-working employees to spend large amounts of time participating in these programs. It might make the approval process smoother if an HR team can highlight the estimated time it will take to complete the initiatives, which allows you to point out how much time employees still have to support the day-to-day operations.

To start, you need to write out all of the tasks in the program, and estimate how long it will take a manager’s employees to complete. This way, managers have a concrete idea of the time commitment, and employees might feel more apt to participate if they know it won’t take all day.

Performance management

An important part of a solid task management strategy is to report on the process after you’ve set goals and implemented a strategy. A large responsibility for HR teams is reporting and analyzing employees’ performance data, and then helping managers understand and act on it. HR leaders need to know how their organization, management, and employees are doing and where they can improve internally.

Gather manager and employee feedback

The strategy of obtaining 365 feedback has been used by human resource departments since the 1980s. It can help managers avoid bias, see a different perspective on their team's performance, and better identify areas that need improvement.

Feedback from every team is an easy way to improve future task management because if the feedback is taken into consideration and implemented, it drives employee performance and engagement on other projects.

Reward Employees

Recognize employees for their successes and achievements. Studies demonstrate that employee recognition increases trust, engagement, drive, and reduces turnover. A survey by OGO discovered that 82% of American professionals feel they aren’t adequately recognized for their efforts. Rewards can help keep employees motivated with their tasks.

Apply These Task Management Best Practices to Build a Better HR Team

This task list doesn’t encompass every HR team's workload, but hopefully, these task management best practices make your project management easier. Whether it’s hiring a new employee or gathering feedback on how they performed, optimizing your task management strategies can only benefit you and your HR team.

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