Proactive HR: Dealing with HR issues before they become problematic

What do you mean by “proactive HR”?
For many employers, HR is largely reactive. Responding to events within the organisation as they arise – grievances, high levels of absenteeism, collective action, operational performance issues. By the time issues escalate to this level it requires significant management attention to resolve.

The concept of proactive HR looks to identify and deal with HR issues before they become problematic and use up senior management time. 

HRTorque helps you to do this in a number of ways:

• We use a series of tools to identify “problem” areas before they escalate. This includes analysing data to identify employees who are disillusioned, not engaged or potential trouble-makers. We then, together with local management, proactively manage these employees before bigger issues arise. In our experience, HR ends up looking fantastic through this process because it allows them to:
  – Clearly show senior management where they are adding value;
  – Impress local management with their ability to see into the organisation (and keep them on their toes); and
  – Improve local management performance by identifying and coaching those local managers who were aware of an issue, but were not sufficiently skilled or proactive to manage their team themselves;
• Through daily experience with employee arbitrations, we know that employers tend to win matters consistently when they have the right documentation in place, have gone through a proper process with employees and are fair in their dealings with employees. The second pillar of proactive HR is therefore to get the basics right. This can be done at reasonable cost by just following a few easy steps and in the long run results in significantly lower senior management involvement, time and cost.
• The majority of collective employee disengagement, frustration and conflict stems from poor or no communication in the organisation. This is often a more difficult area to get the right balance. We use a number of tools to improve HR communication. This makes HR more visible to all and helps to identify bigger issues before they become problems.

If you would like to know more about proactive HR and how HRTorQue can help, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].