HR Management Tools

Human resources tools for an enhanced team efficiency

Integrated video conferencing and team chat
Cloud-based file storage and sharing systems
Unlimited 50 min. video meetings - 100 participants
An candidate employee being interviewed by the hr team

Human resources (HR) departments are the backbone of any successful business. Often overlooked, HR staff are the ones who ensure that business operations run smoothly, employees are satisfied, and organizational conflicts are avoided. 

HR employees have a lot on their plate. From handling payroll to dealing with internal conflicts, to recruiting new staff—the life of an HR professional is never boring. 

Most companies are aware of the crucial role HR plays in business success. Yet, so many HR teams out there aren’t operating at their full potential. Instead, they’re wasting valuable time sending emails back and forth, tackling painstakingly tedious administrative tasks, and chasing up documents and files from employees. 

In this article, we’ll provide some tips for boosting your business’s human resource efficiency to improve business operations. We’ve got a lot of HR talk to cover, so let’s jump right in.

Human resources team having a meeting on how to boost their efficiency

What is human resources and why is it important?

HR is a crucial department for any business—big or small. The HR definition tells us that HR is a business department that’s charged with managing employee operations.

At a basic level, HR is about finding, developing, and maintaining human capital. But the HR job description involves much more than that. The main objectives of business HR teams include:

  • Ensuring employees are happy, supported, and motivated in their roles.
  • Finding and retaining the best employees to fuel business growth.
  • Improving efficiency and productivity among teams, and implementing new tools and processes where they see fit. 
  • Facilitating a company culture that drives employee satisfaction and business results. 
  • Ensuring employee compliance with rules and regulations.
  • Ensuring information is made accessible to those who require it.

The role of HR is vital to the success of businesses and organizations. HR departments are responsible for managing and aligning human capital with wider business objectives while maintaining thriving company culture.

What are the main functions of a human resources department?

Human resource departments are in charge of managing a variety of core business functions tied to human capital and employee satisfaction. Below are some of the main functions HR teams are responsible for.

  • Human resource planning:
    Similar to workforce planning, this HR function is about understanding the needs of an organization and how this will impact HR department functionality. 
  • Talent acquisition and selection:
    An organization’s HR department is in charge of finding the best-qualified candidates and handling talent management. Today, this involves using social media as an efficient and cost-effective recruitment tool to engage with a wider audience.
  • Onboarding new employees: 
    HR teams manage all onboarding tasks involved in introducing new hires to the company. 
  • Performance management: 
    This is all about managing people and ensuring they’re efficient and productive. It includes performance reviews, personality development, and providing 360-degree feedback to employees. 
  • Learning and development:
    HR teams are in charge of ongoing learning and employee development. They implement HR programs to facilitate personal growth and ensure employees are up-to-date with tech skills, safety regulations, and more. 
  • Regulatory compliance: 
    HR staff understand employment laws and the regulatory requirements for businesses. 
  • Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS):
    HRIS simplifies and automates HR tasks. HR staff use these systems to compile, analyze, and track HR metrics and workforce data to improve business operations. A key part of any HR role is understanding how these systems work.

Signs of effective human resources management

Human resource management (HRM) is all about managing human capital to improve a company’s efficiency and performance. There are plenty of things you can notice about businesses and organizations with effective HRM.

1. High-levels of employee engagement

It’s true that the role of HR is to manage team relations and ensure employees perform well by being equipped with the right workplace learning tools. But keeping employees happy is another important aspect of the job. 

When employees are well prepared with everything they need to do their job properly, they’re more likely to feel engaged with their work. HR effectiveness ensures employees understand their role, undergo regular training, and have a clear career progression path set out in front of them.

2. Better employee retention

Happy employees are more likely to stick around longer. It’s that simple. 

Some things HR teams can offer to improve employee retention rates include employee benefits and bonuses, workplace learning and internal promotion opportunities, and improvements to workplace procedures and regulations. When HR teams work effectively and efficiently to ensure employees feel satisfied and engaged with their jobs, they’re likely to see better retention rates.

3. An attractive company culture.

HR managers and leaders are responsible for ensuring a positive company culture that aligns itself with values and objectives to build business success. A great organization culture is one that values each staff member, champions workplace involvement, and acknowledges the shared values of a company and its employees. 

When HR teams are effective in ensuring their staff are well-looked after and equipped with the tools they need to communicate and collaborate, company culture thrives.

Manager having an online meeting with her human resources team using RingCentral Video

Tips to boost your HR efficiency

When your HR team is running at peak performance, you’ll soon start to notice the rest of your organization doing the same. When HR teams work efficiently, they’re using their time and resources to facilitate exceptional employee performance. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Improve communication among HR departments.

One of the most important factors of being efficient in any field of work is having the right communication tools at your fingertips. These communication tools act as more than a way to stay in touch with other HR professionals in your business, they can also facilitate open communication between HR departments and employees. 

In today’s world of expanding remote work, having the right digital tools to stay connected is crucial. When your teams are online, an employee can’t simply come to the office for a face-to-face chat about a problem they’re having. 

The shift to an online company culture requires HR departments to think creatively, using the tools at their fingertips to create an environment that mimics the office chats, social events, and real-time communication that takes place in colocated workspaces. 

To do this, they need an effective business communication tool in place. 

There are plenty of team collaboration and communication tools that facilitate real-time conversations across platforms. However, we’re yet to find one quite as robust as RingCentral Video. RingCentral Video offers integrated video conferencing and team chat so your HR team can keep in touch with business owners, stakeholders, and employees—even when they’re remotely located.

HD video conferencing is ideal for conducting interviews,and guess what? RingCentral Video gives you an unlimited amount of it. Meeting attendees don’t have to download the RingCentral Video app to participate in video calls, they can simply join using the meeting link. Extra video conferencing features like screen-sharing, screen annotations, and noise reduction make RingCentral Video the perfect tool for carrying out training sessions with existing team members or onboarding new ones. 

With RingCentral Video’s team messaging feature, your HR team can stay involved across departments and teams. This makes it simple for employees to take their queries or concerns directly to the HR department in a matter of seconds. 

For those times when messaging isn’t enough, you can also switch from a team chat to a video call with a single click.This reduces time spent switching between chat tools or following up on emails, because with RingCentral Video, you can do everything from within the app, thus allowing your HR team to work more efficiently.

2. Streamline and automate administrative tasks.

If there’s one thing HR staff think about day and night, it’s how to better spend their time and resources to improve efficiency. All the administrative tasks that HR has to deal with can be time consuming. Nowadays, technology can help to automate administrative tasks like time tracking, payroll, and talent onboarding. 

First of all, it’s a good idea to take a look at your existing HR operational processes. Where are your HR team spending most of their time? What challenges do they face? When you understand which processes aren’t running efficiently, you can begin taking actionable steps. Like those to reduce time spent switching between improperly integrated HR management systems and management tools, or to begin streamlining operations to improve efficiency. 

A couple of ways you can do this include:

  • Make the switch to cloud-based file storage and sharing systems
    Gone are the days of stacks of paper and intricate filing systems. Storage has been digitized with the cloud. Instead of printing and filing all your HR administrative documentation, why not keep it all stored in the cloud? RingCentral Video offers free unlimited cloud file storage, so you can upload and share a limitless amount of resources for onboarding, payroll, training, feedback, and whatever else. 
  • Implement employee self-service.
    There’s nothing that boosts your HR team’s efficiency like providing employees with the ability to find their own answers to their problems. Creating a self-service HR system is a great way to empower teams to search for solutions without having to consult HR staff first.

    This can be as simple as using a centralized storage system to store important documents, files, training materials, webinars, etc. As we’ve already mentioned, RingCentral Video offers unlimited storage, so your team can store and share documents and files any time, from any device.

3. Implement an effective HR training and feedback program.

Training is a big part of HR. From onboarding to employees’ personal development, the learning never stops. To ensure employee competencies are up to scratch, HR teams need to develop efficient training programs that align with company objectives to ensure your business has a competitive advantage.

Efficient HR training for remote teams can be carried out with robust communication tools. RingCentral Video can help here, too. With RingCentral Video, you can hold face-to-face training sessions to ensure your employees understand exactly what’s required of them. 

HR managers can chat with up to 100 participants on the free plan and up to 200 on the RingCentral Video Pro+ plan, which is ideal for group training sessions. What’s more, you can take advantage of RingCentral Video’s video conferencing tools like screen sharing and annotations to increase efficiency. Moreover, your team can tune in to training sessions on the go with mobile and desktop apps—so your team can stay connected with any device. 

RingCentral Video can also be used to facilitate better feedback initiatives between HR departments and their teams. HR practices like performance management and annual performance reviews can be streamlined with in-chat file sharing. Easily send and store important feedback documents in RingCentral Video’s centralized storage base, and access everything you need with a simple search.

4. Track important HR metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

A key task for any business department is to prove how you’re contributing to the organization in the first place, and helping it to achieve its objectives. HR metrics and KPIs refer to the ways you measure your HR department’s success. They should reflect organizational HR performance while being relevant to overarching business goals. 

Some HR KPIs you should take note of include:

  • Absence rate
  • Employee satisfaction rate
  • Internal promotion rate
  • Quality of hire
  • Turnover rate
  • Training effectiveness

There are plenty more where those came from. The HR KPIs you choose to focus on depend on your business goals and HR objectives. To track and manage KPIs, you’ll need to implement robust systems that manage and track business data and algorithms. 

Using a tool like RingCentral Video to store and share important business data between business leaders, teams, and departments enables your team to more efficiently track key metrics. With this data, HR teams can take further action to improve business operations and employee relations.

Improve your HR efficiency with RingCentral Video by RingCentral

Human resource efficiency is all about implementing the right tools to facilitate essential HR functions. Depending on your business goals, the tools you implement should enable real-time communication, instant file storage and sharing, or features that streamline administrative HR tasks. What if we told you you could do all that—and more—from a single app? Well, you can. 

RingCentral Video users can enjoy unlimited team messaging, video calls, and file sharing for free. That’s right—for free! With RingCentral Video’s help, HR departments can stay in touch with employees from all areas of a business via team chat channels, or start one-to-one or group video calls when face-to-face contact is required. 

Moreover, RingCentral Video can help to streamline all the administrative tasks involved in HR with unlimited cloud file storage and sharing. What other team collaboration software offers unlimited storage from the get-go? 

Efficient HR enables businesses to reach their goals and objectives much faster. It’s about streamlining time-consuming processes, carrying out effective training, and ensuring employee satisfaction, while creating a company culture that aligns with your company’s mission and business goals.

Human resources team using to have a video conference and send messages at the same time

So, what are you waiting for? Get in contact with our sales team today and view a free demo of RingCentral Video to see how it can boost HR efficiency within your business.