“New year, new me!”
Once the feasting and festivities are over, January is prime time to get back on the self-improvement bike (both literally and metaphorically) and start planning your goals, missions and milestones for the year ahead.
Many people like to think of these goals as New Year’s resolutions and we are firmly in that camp too. Maybe you want to master a new skill, find a new job or, the classic, get back into shape after one too many mince pies during the Christmas period.
Whatever your goal, the New Year is a great time to start learning something new. But New Year’s resolutions don’t need to be purely personal. You should set yourself professional goals too. This can be done individually or in collaboration with your whole HR or Payroll team.
In fact, we think a great way to kick off the New Year is by having a relaxed team meeting together during your first month back, having a catch up and discussing your shared goals and plans for the year ahead is a great way to get everyone energised for 2022.
Setting yourself some professional goals at the start of the year is a great way to focus your energy and get back into the swing of your role. These goals can take any shape or size but we think it’s best to pick out some “bigger picture” goals to focus on.
Finishing a project two weeks ahead of schedule isn’t the type of goal we’re thinking about. We want to set ourselves goals that can revolutionise and change the way our department operates. These goals can be literally anything you think will help make your job easier, yourself more productive or have a net positive impact on your business.
We’ve listed our favourite professional New Year’s resolution goals below. If you’re struggling to think about what you want to achieve in the New Year, check out these suggestions.
Setting yourself New Year’s resolutions is tricky. You want them to be challenging but attainable. You also want them to be realistic. It can be easy to give up on your resolutions in the first few weeks if you just keep them in your head, so share them with your team and write them down. Ideally somewhere everyone can see them.
Working with your whole HR department on some shared resolutions is the best way you can all collectively achieve them. Below are a few suggestions we think would be great for HR teams to try and hit in 2022.
Diversity is more than just a buzzword. The most successful, innovative and productive workplaces are also the most diverse. Creating a diverse workplace isn’t about hitting quota or positive discrimination, it’s about encouraging a wide variety of lived experiences, perspectives and skills within your company.
If you’ve got a workforce all comprised of the same demographic with the same background, chances are they’ll come up with the same ideas. They also like each other’s ideas with no critical input or pushback. This leads to a stagnant company of “yes people” who struggle to innovate or solve problems.
Encouraging people to join your business who have widely different skills and backgrounds encourages thought, discussion and problem-solving. This gives your business a unique competitive advantage when stacked up against your competition.
There are many ways to get started on hiring a more diverse range of candidates. Changing up your job requirements or searching for candidates in unorthodox places is a great way to start.
You can also look at the current demographics within your business and see where you’re lacking. You can then tailor recruitment campaigns around the areas where you could use more diversity.
During stressful periods, running payroll can be a drag. Especially if you’re short on staff or you’ve recently hired a lot of new starters. This can put added pressure on your payroll team that could lead to mistakes or, in the worst cases, people not getting paid at all.
It can be tricky carving out some time to review your own processes. When things are moving so fast in a business it can feel easier to put up with the problems you know, as opposed to trying to find a solution to them and inadvertently making the situation worse.
Even if you don’t make the situation worse, you could lose a day or week experimenting when you could be inputting payroll data.
Taking time out of your busy schedule to examine how you are working is vitally important to making sure you’re being as efficient as possible. But more often than not, tasks get pushed back and rearranged to the point it’s never done.
Making this your New Year’s resolution is a great way to guarantee this task gets done. You could find you’re already operating at peak productivity but until you dedicate the time to finding out, you’ll never know.
HR software can also really help you improve your payroll processes. Making sure your current Payroll platform is doing everything it can to make your job easier is a good place to start when considering how to get the most out of your payroll team.
Sometimes outsourcing your payroll is the best option available to you. Whether you partially outsource your payroll function or give it all over to a third party payroll provider, offloading some of the work lets your internal teams focus on more value-add projects. If you’d like to hear how Phase 3 could help you with your payroll management contact us here.
Whatever you decide to do with your payroll setting, a clear goal before you start looking to improve your processes is key. You can’t improve something if you don’t know what you’re aiming for so make sure you set your goal first. Otherwise you’ll look back at the end of your resolution and it’ll be unclear what you’ve actually achieved.
The HR and payroll sector move fast. There’s new tools, technologies and methodologies being released daily that are helping to improve and reshape the industries. And all of this innovation has increased ten-fold during the lockdown periods.
If you want to stay abreast with the current trends and news in HR and Payroll the best way to do that is by staying ahead of them. News breaks fast, so you should be actively consuming industry-related content to make sure you don’t miss a beat, or miss the latest and greatest software that could give your HR team a competitive advantage.
We know it’s tough ear-marking time to read the latest news on HR Magazine or the CIPP’s website, but that’s why we think it’s a great New Year’s resolution. Committing 30 minutes a day or an hour a week (however long you can really) to read your industry’s publications, is the best way to keep yourself in the know and it’ll help you spot new tools well in advance of your competition. That’s the competitive edge you need to help you secure the best candidates.
What does your HR team have planned for 2022? Are you aiming to increase the diversity of your workforce or improve your internal processes? Whatever you’ve got planned if you need any assistance Phase 3 is here to help.
We’re a HR and Payroll consultancy that helps businesses improve their internal process, onboard new HR technology and strategies for the future.
If you’d like an external sounding board to talk over your New Year’s plans with contact us here to see how we could help you.
This blog has been written by Marilyn Summers, Head of Quality Assurance & Governance at Phase 3.
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Laura’s role as Head of Marketing sees her continually looking for new opportunities to tell the world how great Phase 3 is.
