HR Function Review: 5 Business Benefits of an HR Audit

With spring in the air, the habit of spring cleaning often stretches beyond scrubbing the kitchen and perfecting the landscape around your house to streamlining and organizing your work life as well.  Perhaps you’ve taken a step back and looked at your HR department and thought to yourself “there’s got to be a better way to do this.” 

Maybe you’re anticipating growth within your organization, and you know that with more employees comes the need for enhanced processes and compliance requirements. Engaging with a third party human capital consulting firm to conduct an HR audit may be just what you need to hit the ground running with your HR spring cleaning!

5 Reasons to Conduct a Review of Your HR Department with an HR Audit:

1. To ensure compliance with Federal, State and Local employment regulations. With constant change in legislation, along with state specific regulations and a significant number of employment law requirements it’s important to ensure that your organization is compliant with all applicable laws.  An HR audit will inform you of those requirements and ensure that you are following them according to your organization size and where your employees are located.
2. To give you an outside perspective. If you have an HR function made up of a team of employees that have been in their role for several years, it’s often nice to get a fresh perspective.  A team of consultants can bring subject matter expertise, with the experience of working in numerous organizations of all sizes and industries, and objectively provide feedback on your processes and policies.
3. To determine if the structure of your HR Department is set up for success. The effectiveness portion of this HR audit surrounds not only your processes, but your structure as well.  This assessment will help you answer questions like: Is your team set up for success to be a forward moving strategic HR department? Is your HR Director the right fit for your culture and strategic plan?  Are you appropriately staffed in the HR department?
4. To identify the strengths in your current HR process. The HR audit is an opportunity to identify what your current strengths are as an organization.  It’s important to know what efforts are working well for the organization in order to understand how the other HR processes can fit into your organization successfully.
5. To provide clear guidance on areas of improvement. An HR audit provides your HR team with a clear path for success.  All immediate compliance concerns are addressed, as well as policies and processes that may need to be tweaked, re-vamped, or created from scratch.  As an organization, it’s helpful to understand the big picture of what your HR function needs in order to be a strategic and effectively functioning team so that you can build a project plan and timeline specific to your priorities and availability.

There are a number of benefits to conducting an HR audit and I’ve highlighted what I believe to be the top five.  If you’re considering a restructuring or reorganization of your HR department, or you just want to do a little spring cleaning – an HR audit is a great first step. For more information about Helios HR's approach to an HR department review, reach out to us for a no-obligation exploratory call.