Beyond Workers Comp: A Human Resources Guide to Building Safety into Your Organization

But they also seek meaning and purpose in their careers; and appreciation and respect.

They want to take responsibility and be actively involved. In order to innovate and contribute, they must be allowed to manage themselves with significant autonomy and empowerment. This forms the basis for creating and honoring the new talent contract.

How to Structure Your HR Department As Your Company Grows

It is not only about understanding the drive of knowledge workers, but also recognizing the power shift that comes with it. Principle 8 — Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers Principle 9 — Decentralize Decision-Making. This, inevitably, also affects the way HR interacts and engages with both management and the workforce. Employees will claim a voice in shaping the way their organization takes care of them — not only when it comes to their career development, but across the whole HR value chain.

Like management practices, p eople operations must become less prescriptive and more flexible, empowering and accommodating. HR solutions become co-created and evolve constantly. This is an integral part of building places of work full of inspiration and engagement.

Enterprises with engaged employees have much higher returns. Yet the vast majority of employees worldwide are dissatisfied, disillusioned, and disengaged. Agile understands the power of bringing intrinsically motivated people together to form collaborative empowered teams. Anyone who has ever participated in one of their Program Increment PI Planning has firsthand experience of the enthusiasm and energy in the room.

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Unsurprisingly, SAFe teams are more passionate and involved. Simply, engagement—perhaps sometimes dismissed as idealistic HR notion, translates directly into better business performance and success. Figure 2 illustrates the realities of disengagement and the benefits of high employee engagement. Employee Engagement Engagement fosters retention. The best way to lower turnover is to invest in people. The concept of improving the market value of employees and making them more attractive for competitors may seem counterintuitive.

But actively developing people take away their need to switch jobs in order to improve and advance. Agile practices allow people to evolve through challenging work, powerful collaboration, constant reflections, continuous feedback, and relentless improvement — all deeply embedded into the workflow. In other words, Agile does not distinguish between learning and working: Working equals learning, And knowledge workers are learning workers. Hence, the goal of Agile Enterprises is not simply to retain talents, but to let them grow and thrive; and develop a flourishing talent pool. Building a vigorous workforce starts with identifying, attracting, and hiring the right people.

But finding top talent is increasingly difficult. When it comes to Talent Acquisition, Agile Enterprises get a competitive edge by considering the following:. Enterprises can — and should — build on their commitment to Agile excellence and use it to help build a strong employer brand. Recruitment starts long before a new vacancy comes up. The talent acquisition team must continuously reach out and connect with interesting technical people to pull them into the talent pipeline. Technical expertise is important, but Agile teams prosper when hiring candidates with the right attitude and cultural fit.

The tendency for heroism and over specialization must be avoided. After all, success depends on the collective and collaborative skills of the team. Something beyond the bits and bytes, and even beyond their local team environment is required. Helping candidates understand the larger purpose of the organization is the best way to inspire them. Strengthen this by being genuine and dependable throughout the whole process. Make a solid, team-based decision — Talent acquisition is a shared responsibility, and no hiring decision should be made without the backing of the team.

After all, no employee can thrive without team support. Therefore, the team must be actively included in the hiring process. Prior to that, however, pre-integration activities, interactions, and access to information can enhance the onboarding experience. Post onboarding support requires communication and touch points with the individual, to assure that they are happy in the role, and that management is content with their performance.

A high-quality recruitment process reduces the risk of bad hires and subsequent disruptions to the flow and performance of the team s. Performance management is the most criticized HR process today. But despite a long list of complaints, many organizations still invest top dollars into a broken performance appraisal practice. While Performance Management was initially installed to align goals and foster joint efforts —it has since evolved into this the pivotal point for an entire set of HR practices, especially Compensation and Talent Management.

No wonder, annual performance reviews have turned into a tense time for everyone involved. Managers tend to batch feedback, both negative and positive, into the annual feedback dump, depriving employees of the timely feedback they need to actually improve when it matters; and employees are nervous about their appraisal as it affects their upcoming compensation and promotional chances.

This means many companies excel at calculating ratings. But it comes at a high cost to the morale and motivation of people. However, the tides are shifting, and organizations of all shapes and sizes are already eliminating employee appraisals in order to respond to the challenges and interfaces to HR instruments. Figure 4 demonstrates the facts and trend of traditional performance management systems [3].

This challenges HR to push the reset button on performance management on all levels. Here is how SAFe can help re-optimize the system for performance flow:. SAFe shifts from month cycles to an iterative, interactive process measured in weeks and PI Plannings. These iterations reflect an optimal cadence and represent the new performance cycles. Utilize PI planning to share the vision, set inspiring goals, and clarify expectations — Being able to inspire people is imperative.

All members of the train come together to understand the business context and vision, set and synchronize goals, clarify expectations and dependencies, and commit to common objectives. This replaces static individual goals with verifiable collaborative objectives. Continuously inspect and adapt — Agile ceremonies like Iteration Reviews and Iteration Retrospectives are all about inspecting and adapting.

While iterations focus on the system under development, not the people, they do provide formal and informal opportunities in team retrospectives each iteration and Inspect and Adapt program retrospectives to provide feedback on individual and team performance. The focus is, hence, no longer on assessing individual goals, but on continuous improvement — not only on a personal but also on a program enterprise level something neglected in traditional performance appraisals.

Embed learning and development into the workflow — Companies must constantly evolve, and Agile ways of working are all about learning. This gives people the time and space to improve and innovate at their own pace. Cross-role, cross-functional, and cross-team training further enhance the skills, flexibility, and utility of the knowledge worker.

These mechanisms support the particular need of the knowledge worker and help the enterprise fulfill its responsibility to create a workflow that allows for active learning and growth. Eliminate annual performance ratings in favor of continuous feedback — Instead of employee ratings, Agile organizations shape a culture of mutual respect where candid dialogues and continuous feedback consistently take place between leaders, employees, and peers. This focus on relentless improvement is a key part in embracing agility and achieving its full impact.

It also fundamentally increases the intensity and quality of discussions on personal accomplishments and growth potentials.

1. The 13 Documents You Need to Start Your HR Department - Recruiterbox Blog.
2. Past Regrets.
3. Why 1:100 Is An Antiquated Guideline.
4. Bringing People Operations into the 21st Century with Lean-Agile Values and Principles.
5. Chrystal Heart.

These new ways of working fulfill the original goals of performance management far better than any annual performance rating. And by bringing a Lean-Agile mindset to all HR practices, people operations continuously engages, interacts, grows and recognizes talents — without the need for an employee appraisal to act as a trigger.

Thus, making annual ratings and forced rankings obsolete in an agile world. Performance flow in Agile enterprises is all about optimal cadence, responsiveness, and growth — not about monetary incentives. The industrial era belief that money is the strongest and only effective motivator for employees is firmly rooted in many organizations. Unsurprisingly, compensation and cash bonuses are still used as a predominant way to incentivize and recognize people — an expensive and ineffective approach for knowledge workers.

Company Growing? How to Plan Your HR Department Structure

You can also use a structure like this to determine reporting and salary grading in the future. Want to automate this? When your company is hiring just a few key positions, this almost seems like a moot point but having a plan you can refer to is crucial as the business scales. Who do you need to speak with? Sales, operations, product development and marketing. These people or teams should have a solid idea of how many widgets they want to make or how many contracts they want to sign and the people that you need to hire are part of that plan.

If you can calculate even roughly what a lost employee will cost your business directly and indirectly. Check out our guide for creating a long-term hiring roadmap to learn more. Most smaller companies start with an Excel spreadsheet and some scattered emails but with the software available to you now, that just makes no sense. Having your staffing plan will help you evaluate new products to ensure they meet your needs. Keeping track and contact with various candidates will soon become a big part of your routine, so find an ATS that can help you and your team do that.

This is by far the most neglected document in a small to medium business.

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Discover salaries for various functions within the company and compare and contrast those with fair market value for similar positions. Revise every six months to ensure that you stay competitive. If your company offers other forms of compensation like benefits, stock options, profit sharing or a work-flex environment; make note of them but keep them separate from the salary structure document. Find out what your managers might be able to swing in their departments. Can employees work from home? Can you purchase equipment or offer discounted rates from benefits companies?

You can use our compensation and benefits template to outline your policies. Do managers get Christmas Eve off but not interns? Does the executive team meet for an early Tuesday meeting? Which holidays does your company observe?

All of these are unique to your company, industry and occasionally location. But be clear about your vacation policy, sick policy, time off policy and holiday policy. Your employees WILL ask. Download our employee leave template and create an easy-to-understand policy for your staff. When creating your job profiles, find out how each person measures their success and write those measurements down. In addition, it helps you create the dreaded performance evaluation. The key is constant and measurable feedback, rather than the typical year review.

How will your organization handle this? You need a policy and a simple and easy to use application that allows you to track these expenses and travel. Luckily there are lots of consumer based apps that fit well into a small or medium sized business. We like Expensify, Shoeboxed and Harvest. If you are using per diem, calculate it per country to ensure that you are being fair.

Download our expense policy template and let your employees know how they can be reimbursed. If you are in an industry that frequently uses overtime structure, keep that in mind as well. Our free template makes it easy to establish an employee attendance policy.

Agile HR with SAFe

At some point you will have to fire someone…or someone will quit. Turnover is a part of life and must be addressed preferably before it happens on your watch. So how are you going to handle it? Are you going to conduct an exit interview?