Seven HR best practices The 7 Human Resource best practices
In these books, he proposes a set of best practices that can increase a company’s profit. When these HR principles are combined (or bundled), their impact is even more profound. These best practices are: Providing security to employees
Selective hiring:
Hiring the right people Self-managed and effective teams Fair and performance-based compensation Training in relevant skills Creating a flat and egalitarian organization Making information easily accessible to those who need it. We’ll go over them one by one.
1. Providing security to employees The first Human Resource best practice is employment security. Life is unpredictable and work is a stable factor that is very important to most people. Having an employer who enables the employee to provide for themselves and their family is, in essence, the number one reason why people come to work. There is both a formal contract (labor for money) and an informal contract (you put in some extra effort, we take good care of you) between the employee and the employer.
Employment security enables employees to go home after work and provide for themselves and their families. This concept of security is essential and underpins almost everything HR does. When this employment security is threatened, for example when there is a restructuring or a layoff, you see this immediately ripple through the organization. Employment security also benefits organizations because it helps them retain their people. When employees are laid off, for example, it’s usually the organization that pays the price. They are the ones who have invested in the selection, training, and development of these employees. This is a costly process. If the organization doesn’t work on retaining its people, they are more likely to leave and work for the competition. n 2020, a survey found that job security is the third most important factor for employees. 28% of 1,100 professionals surveyed in the UK listed job security as an important factor. Job security is important across global HRM practices.
2. Selective hiring: Hiring the right people The second HR best practice is selective hiring. This enables an organization to bring in employees who add value. You can’t just hire anyone; you want people who are fit for the job. Companies do their utmost best to hire exceptional people because they add the most value to the business. There also needs to be a prioritization of building a structured and fair selection process. This reflects legal requirements, internal diversity goals, and that a more diverse workforce, better reflects society. This can be hugely beneficial for understanding wider consumer behavior and the needs of different customers. Research shows that the difference in performance between an average performer and a high performer can be as high as 400%! This holds for different industries and job types, including researchers, entertainers, and athletes. Bringing in the right people is, therefore, a key to building a competitive advantage. In today’s digital world, there are a lot of different recruitment tools we can use to make the right selection. More and more companies vigorously keep track of their recruitment metrics to see how well they are doing in this regard.
Commonly used selection instruments are structured and unstructured interviews, IQ tests, personality assessments, work tests, peer assessments, and reference checks. These (pre-employment) assessments are used to uncover three key candidate characteristics.
Ability: Is the person able to do the job? Does the person have the right technical and soft skills? Is the person smart enough to do the job well? Trainability: Can we train this person to improve his/her skills? Has the person the aptitude to learn and keep developing? Commitment: Will the person commit to his/her work and to the organization? Will we be able to retain this person once he/she is up to speed and fully productive?
3. Self-managed and effective teams We all know that teamwork is crucial in achieving goals. High-performance teams are crucial for any company when it comes to achieving success. Teams provide value because they consist of people who are, and think differently but are working towards a common goal. This means that different ideas are generated to help achieve the goal. These ideas are then processed and combined, resulting in the best ones being selected. The best teams are cognitively diverse and psychologically safe. This means that team members can generate ideas that are different while feeling comfortable bringing these up and discussing them. Creating and nurturing high-performance teams is one of HR’s key responsibilities. Belbin’s Team Role Inventory is a popular tool for team creation and cooperation. Effective HRM includes directly supporting teamwork by involvement in how teams are organized. This can be done in several ways. Measuring team performance, rewarding team excellence, and advising management on techniques and tools to facilitate teamwork are some methods. Individual personality assessments also help understand how other team members think and behave. Understanding these processes is one of the main responsibilities of a manager. This is the reason why a lot of management courses focus on it. Different tools facilitate teamwork. Examples include communication software, feedback tools, project management tools, and other task and goal setting software. These can facilitate communication and help teams be more efficient. Finally, HR needs to encourage different teams to work together in the organization. A team is usually part of a larger entity, like another team or a department. These larger entities also need to work together. Facilitating this helps to build an efficient and effective organization. One of the tools that can be used for this is Organizational Network Analysis.
4. Fair and performance-based compensation Contingent compensation is the fourth Human Resource best practice. It has everything to do with compensation and benefits. First of all, if you hire the right people, you want to compensate them above average. These are the people that will add the most value to your company so you want to retain them and pay them fairly. This is an example that shows how different best practices work together to provide more value than they would alone, in this case, selective hiring, contingent compensation, and employment security. Paying people above the norm also has some potential disadvantages. For instance, it discourages bad employees to leave. However, if you’re consistently hiring world-class performers, an above-average compensation is a must. This sort of compensation package can take the form of financial (base) pay and employee benefits. You must follow market trends across your field, and adjacent fields (many of the best employees may come from other career areas). Then you will be able to understand the average rate of pay and where your company ranks in the compensation offer. Secondly, you want to couple individual rewards with the different types of contributions that employees make. These are performance-related rewards. By coupling organizational performance outcomes with individual rewards the individual is incentivized to maximize this outcome. It also creates a sense of ownership for the employee. Think of profit sharing, shared ownership, or stock options for instance. These are great ways to create employee commitment to the company’s long-term vision and retain high potentials. Compensation is a key element for successful talent management. In line with the previous, this type of co-ownership is usually not meant for all employees. Lepak & Snell (2002) offer a good model to assess how important individual employees are. AIHR-skills-value As an organization, you want to specifically retain your “Criticals”. They are people with unique skills (i.e. hard to replace) who are very valuable to the business. That’s why senior managers, most of which fit this category, are often offered these benefits.
5. Training in relevant skills This HR best practice states that companies should invest heavily in training time and budget for its employees. After recruiting the best people, you need to ensure that they remain the frontrunners in the field. This has become even more relevant today as the rate at which technology is developing is growing exponentially. This is where learning and development come in. AIHR-7-best-Resource-Practices How do we create an organization in which the rate of learning matches the pace of change? Learning has become a way to stay innovative, grow faster, and sustain a competitive advantage. Employers increasingly invest in skills-specific forms of training. According to the Economist’s Lifelong Learning special report, the number of on-demand courses has grown exponentially. Thanks to the internet, everyone is connected and can learn anything, anytime, anywhere. In addition to formal learning, on-the-job learning also plays an important role. Increased focus on feedback, coaching, and peer learning plays into this. 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 Learning is also becoming increasingly important for the latest generations, such as the Millennials and Generation Z. According to Gallup, younger employees rate learning and personal growth as much more important compared to older generations. The next generation of workers is actively looking for development opportunities and sees these as a way to grow in their profession. Not offering these opportunities is related to higher levels of employee turnover. Learning is, of course, also important for HR. To stay up to date and learn the skills needed to do HR in the 21st century, check out our courses at the Academy to Innovate HR!
6. Creating a flat and egalitarian organization This best practice in HR principles is rooted in the egalitarian practices of Japanese management. Although we just saw that some employees are more critical than others for the organization’s success, this shouldn’t be communicated in such a way. Every employee is a valuable member of the organization and should be treated as such. In Japanese organizations, this is expressed with common canteens, company uniforms, and similar sickness and holiday entitlement. Such an egalitarian culture shows that everyone deserves equal respect and could help in promoting the sharing of ideas.
7. Making information easily accessible to those who need it Information sharing is essential. This is an area where a lot of large companies struggle: How do you keep track of who knows what, so you know where to go with your questions? According to Pfeffer, there are two reasons why information sharing is so important. Firstly, open communication about strategy, financials, and operations creates a culture in which people feel they are trusted. It truly involves employees in the business. As an additional effect, it discourages hear-say and negative informal chatter. Secondly, if you want your people to share their ideas, they need to have an informed understanding of what’s going on in the business. Being informed about the business is also something that employees often mention as something they find important in attitude surveys, as well as having a chance to contribute to and influence decisions affecting their working life. HR activities often contribute to communication across the workforce. This could be by creating sub-groups for people from diverse backgrounds, such as women and LGBT individuals. HR may assist in or lead on, the production of internal newsletters and updates. Synergies between HR best practices: Bundles When these best practices are combined we call them ‘bundles’. Bundles create synergies. This is how Human Resource Management can create a competitive advantage for the organization. An example. Guaranteeing employment security will only benefit you when you have high-performing employees. Otherwise, what’s the use of retaining them? This means that the employment security best practice, combined with selective hiring leads to more value than individual practices. The same goes for selective hiring, extensive training, and contingent compensation. You want to select employees with growth potential, invest in them with learning and development, and reward them appropriately when they show superior performance. A third example is the reduction of status differences and information sharing. By encouraging open communication and sharing relevant information, you create a culture of improvement in which employees feel free to give suggestions and collaboratively help to improve the business. By leveraging these bundles, effective HRM can add tremendous value to the business and help the organization succeed in reaching its goals.
