Lean, Mean HR Machine: 3 Ways Lean HR Teams Can Endure the Pandemic
Dan Sines, CEO of Traitify, discusses how HR teams must juggle the simultaneous concerns of keeping furloughed employees engaged, re-recruiting the company’s workers, and preparing to re-onboard members of the team while maintaining a positive candidate experience.
Dan Sines, CEO of Traitify, discusses how HR teams must juggle the simultaneous concerns of keeping furloughed employees engaged, re-recruiting the company’s workers, and preparing to re-onboard members of the team while maintaining a positive candidate experience.
Furloughs spread rapidly through the American workforce amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with entire industries decimated by statewide lockdowns and cratering demand. The initial economic shock has continued to reverberate, with an additional 10.6 million people temporarily laid off in June, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
While furloughed workers remained optimistic through the spring months, 47% of those laid off temporarily now believe their jobs are gone for good. This has understandably led many furloughed workers to begin updating their resumes and looking elsewhere for employment, altering their job trajectories or even their careers.
3 Productive Actions Lean HR Teams Can Take
This situation presents a multitude of problems for HR teams. They must juggle the simultaneous concerns of keeping employees engaged while they aren’t on the payroll, re-recruiting the company’s furloughed workers, and preparing to re-onboard members of the team while maintaining a positive candidate experience.
To make matters worse, HR teams have felt many of the same losses as the rest of their businesses. Fortunately, there are tools and processes you can implement to put your company in the best position to rebound.
1. Identify top performers and prioritize their return to work
While we all hope for a sharp, “v-shaped” economic recovery that sees the hardest-hit industries rebound as quickly as they faltered, it seems more likely that HR teams will be reassembling their workforces piecemeal. With limited resources, prioritization becomes the name of the game.
As SmartRecruiters founder Jerome Ternyck highlighted in his book “Hiring Success,” in complex occupations, the highest-performing employees are up to 8 times more productive than their peers. That gap is much smaller for low-complexity jobs like food service, but the difference remains between 50% and 85%. A productivity gap that large can sink a company’s entire profit margin.
That’s why your first order of business is to retain and reintegrate the highest-performing, most adaptable employees within the company’s pool.
This is especially important if the company will rely on employees to cover some responsibilities that may have previously been outside of their purview.
If your team struggles to identify the most productive employees after combing through performance reviews, instituting a new data-driven approach might be necessary. Incorporate qualitative and quantitative data from the hiring process through the employee’s most recent review, and to avoid data bias, look to collect as much relevant information as possible.
Learn More: 7 Recruitment Tips From Hiring Leaders You’ll Want to Listen to
2. Automate to improve workflow
With a lean team, there are simply too many tasks required of too few HR professionals. Traditional HR workflow is heavy on pen-and-paper processes and outdated technical solutions for tasks from talent acquisition to expense reporting. Moving these processes to cloud-based software solutions can soften the blow for HR teams already dealing with a larger pandemic-induced workload.
Technology can rapidly overhaul the hiring (and rehiring) process by prioritizing those applicants best suited to the positions available and automating the flow of information to the talent acquisition team.
Data-driven hiring begins with a quick and easy personality assessment to get the ball rolling. With the data from the candidate experience, HR teams can have software automatically tailor the onboarding process and set goals for the first 30 or 90 days after a new or a returning hire.
More than 70% of companies have at least one HR function in the cloud, and that number is only increasing year-over-year. Throughout their employment at a company, employees leave a trail of data in the form of personality assessments, performance reviews, attendance records, and sales numbers. It’s incumbent on the company to put the platforms and solutions in place to collect that data and utilize it to make decisions.
Learn More: Recruitment, Virtually: How Going Fully Digital Has Changed the Way Corporations Hire Forever
3. Reposition HR as a growth center
Unfortunately, many C-suite leaders view human resources as a cost center rather than a driver of revenue. This line of thinking is apparent even in the best of times, but an economic crisis has thrown it into stark relief. It’s also incorrect. Your talent is your business, and HR is a revenue generator in the long term.
Simon Sinek, the author of “Leaders Eat Last,” has it right. “The responsibility of a company is to serve the customer. The responsibility of leadership is to serve their people so that their people may better serve the customer,” he once opined on Twitter.
Given the breadth of layoffs within HR teams, the talent acquisition and employee management functions of human resources are being crammed into a single job. Automation can help one person manage these disparate responsibilities, but HR professionals need the backing of senior executives to reverse this shortsighted trend.
How do you keep employees happy? How do you engage a furloughed staff? You could follow the lead of companies like Bartaco and feed furloughed workers or establish an employee support fund to build trust among your team. I know that HR investment at a time like this can look to a C-suite executive like the worst kind of profligacy, but the equity your brand can establish with employees and customers is one thing the pandemic can’t prevent.
HR Professionals Have Always Been Crucial to the Success of a Company
HR professionals have always been crucial to the success of a company and never more than now. As businesses bounce back, it will become clear that a well-equipped human resources team can drive revenue impact and provide direction for recovery. It is incumbent upon HR teams to identify employees who can rebuild and sustain business operations in these most trying of times while making sure they don’t lose quality candidates through a bad candidate experience. HR support from the C-suite is critical moving forward, as only through quality, right-fit employees will businesses be able to maximize their economic recovery.
What criterion have you considered to keep furloughed employees engaged while they are not on the payroll? Do let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.