In order for your business to be successful, you need your employers. Your company not only needs the top talent to support the needs of your business, but your employees also need to be on the same page about expectations, goals, and more. This helps maintain productivity, build culture, and create the most consistent workspace.
One of the responsibilities of HR is to set and maintain expectations for employees, from daily job tasks to overall company policies. Without these guidelines – and the communication of them – it’s impossible to maintain productivity or reach overall business goals. One of the best ways to improve accountability is through HR automation tools. Not only do automation tools help streamline HR tasks and improve the quality of business communication, but they can also make life easier for employees too.
How can HR automation improve accountability in the workplace?
What are the ways that businesses can promote workplace accountability with the assistance of HR automation?
1. Onboarding
You have the first opportunity – and responsibility – to share expectations when you bring a new employee in. Making a company and position expectations part of every new hire experience is how you can more readily establish a culture of transparency and accountability. HR automation software helps you customize and streamline your onboarding process, ensuring consistency across the employee experience.
2. Training
Relatedly, HR automation tools help you outline and schedule employee training. Regularly training – in things like data safety, harassment, and more – are important to help keep employees on track and enable HR to improve accountability business-wide.
3. Employee feedback process
Communicating with your employees is foundational to helping establish and maintain accountability. Employees who know that they’ll receive regular feedback are more easily able to meet expectations. Using HR automation tools to monitor timeliness, attendance, time off requests, productivity, and more helps you give tangible, actionable feedback to employees to improve accountability, and using workflow process tools help guide employees through projects and keep them accountable to project timelines. Additionally, better employee-employer review processes will lead to better employee relationships – not only will employees understand what they are doing well (and what needs to improve), having a positive and communicative relationship with their boss might further incentivize them to perform to standards.
4. Empowering employees
HR automation tools – like those that allow employees to easily request time off, switch shifts, and even offer feedback to management or leadership – can help employees feel more empowered and involved. Employees who feel trusted or valued in the workforce are more likely to take ownership of their work, maintain productivity, and stay engaged, leading to better employee accountability.
(Also Read: Best Employee Engagement Strategies and Its Challenges)
5. Managing changes
In some businesses, the focuses will shift and change. For startups, especially, there are times when the expectations will change. Having the right HR tools can help you communicate changes quickly and clearly. Companies who have an employee self-serve dashboard that enables them to see their PTO, benefits, pay stubs, and more is a great place to automate process changes. In addition to emails and employee-manager meetings, using HR tools to automate certain company announcements is a way to improve accountability through consistent communication of expectations.
6. Hiring the right talent
One of the smartest ways to improve accountability is to hire the right type of employee from the onset. HR automation tools can help with recruitment by identifying the right kind of character, behavioral, and personality traits that will result in a responsible and capable employee.
Slacking on company accountability can quickly snowball into negative consequences. From reduced employee productivity that can lower revenue or reduce positive customer services to lack of security awareness that leads to data leaks, accountability is an important part of HR’s role in business. From the entry-level workers to C-suite executives, every employee is accountable to the business in some regard.
What are your employees most accountable for? Is it the daily tasks of their role? Respecting their coworkers and managers? Protecting sensitive account and business data? Earning customer business? Protecting the company reputation? No matter what you are tasking your employees with, it’s your job to make sure that the expectations are clear, can be understood, and can be completed repeatedly over time.
How HR automation can prevent a lack of accountability in the workplace.
Growing a culture of communication keeps managers accountable for sharing expectations and keeping employees on track towards meeting them. It also enables and encourages employees to speak up, ask questions, and otherwise communicate with managers and each other in case of confusion or lack of clarity. HR automation is one tool that businesses can use to encourage strong communication from an employee’s first interaction with a business. One of the major benefits of HR automation software is that every employee will interact with it to some degree, plus it helps to manage tasks unrelated to accountability specifically, such as payroll, compliance, and more.
Do you have the tools in place that you need to keep your employees accountable to their responsibilities and the overall goals of the business? Making your HR automation tools work for you is one of the best ways to improve accountability in your organization and keep your entire operation running more effectively with everyone operating from the same playbook.
