Running a team of any size involves a lot of admin. You have to organize payroll, administer benefits, oversee recruitment, and deal with queries from the team—all while ensuring that you stay compliant with labor laws.
As your team grows, so too does your administrative overhead. This can become a serious headache, especially during busy times like the enrolment window. You might find that you need additional help with HR just to meet your employees’ basic expectations.
The good news is that you can hire consultants to offer help with the HR basics. This is known as Foundational HR.
What is Foundational HR?
Foundational HR is the kind of day-to-day work typically performed by HR administrators. This kind of HR doesn’t involve the decision-making of Operational HR or the long-term planning of Strategic HR, but getting Foundational HR right is still essential for your success.
Foundational HR helps you deliver:
- Employee experience: Your HR administrators deal with employee queries while administering the things that matter most to your team, such as benefits and payroll. Getting this part of the employee experience right means higher engagement and lower staff turnover.
- Compliance: A Foundational HR consultant will understand the regulatory requirements you have to follow, such as FSLA and FMLA. They’ll ensure that you have all the paperwork you need to avoid fines and lawsuits.
- Talent pipeline: Foundational HR admins play a vital role in every stage of the talent pipeline, from recruitment and onboarding to training and professional development. They ensure that you always have the team you need.
- Internal communications: A great HR admin team can help bridge the gap between management and employees. They’ll help spread the word about policies and best practices, and they’ll be on hand to answer questions as they arise.
As you see, having access to skilled HR professionals is of vital importance. If you don’t have that kind of team in-house, you can flesh out your team with an Outsourced Foundational HR consultant.
How can outsourcing help with HR?
When you need help with HR right away, outsourcing is usually the best way to go. Foundational HR consultants have a substantial background in HR, so they have the tools they need to start supporting your business on day one.
Your Foundational HR consultant can help with every area of HR admin, including:
1. Recruitment
Foundational HR consultants might often help you to implement your recruitment process. This can include:
- Candidate sourcing: Your human resources consultant can help you place vacancy advertisements and monitor candidate responses.
- Interview scheduling: Consultants will arrange interviews, send reminders, and keep candidates informed about next steps
- Offer management: Your Foundational HR consultant can communicate offers to the candidate and facilitate communications during any negotiations
A smooth hiring process can be an excellent recruitme
nt tool. Your HR consultant will help ensure an outstanding candidate experience.
2. Learning and development
Organizing training is one of the key duties of the HR team. Your consultant can help with:
- Onboarding: A strong onboarding program improves the odds of retaining your new hires. HR consultants can help you deliver an outstanding first impression.
- Mandatory training: HR admins can ensure that everyone is up to date on all required training, such as OSHA and cybersecurity.
- Professional development milestones: Training and development often take place as part of a bigger professional development plan. Foundational HR consultants can keep track of individual plans and ensure everyone is receiving the L&D they need to support their career paths.
Learning and development plays a big part in reducing staff turnover. Your HR consultant will ensure that everyone gets the L&D support that suits their career goals.
3. Payroll and benefits administration
Your employees will always need HR support for their salary and benefits—even if you provide an automated self-service portal. An HR consultant can help with:
- Payroll queries: Employee queries about payroll are usually urgent, especially if there’s been a payment error. Your HR consultant can help your team when anything goes wrong.
- Enrolment changes: Your team might need to make changes to employee benefits outside of the normal enrolment window. You need knowledgeable HR support to deal with queries like these.
- System administration: Your automated systems require human oversight, plus someone who knows how to pull reports. An HR consultant will generally have good knowledge of how such systems work.
Issues with payroll and benefits can have a massive impact on the employee experience. Your HR admin team should be able to deal with any issue
s before they become a big deal.
4. Employee relations
HR often acts as the conduit between senior management (who create policy) and employees (who have to follow policy). HR consultants can help here by:
- Handling employee queries: Employees may sometimes need to talk to someone about policy or to report HR issues such as harassment. Foundational admins can act as the first point of contact and escalate to the HR manager if required.
- Team communications: Foundational HR can help communicate new policies to the team. They can also help local managers to figure out the best way to communicate with their direct reports.
- Exit interviews and stay interviews: Exit interviews are a vital tool for reducing staff turnover. Your Foundational HR consultant can conduct exit interviews—or run stay interviews with your incumbent team.
Your HR team plays a key role in making your employees feel valued, respected, and seen. The right HR consultant will help you deliver a consistent employee experience.
5. Documents and record-keeping
Finally, HR involves an awful lot of paperwork. Your HR consultant will understand vital record-keeping issues such as:
- Compliance: You may need to produce reports to prove that you meet regulatory requirements. Your HR consultant will help ensure that you always have accurate paperwork, and help keep you compliant with employment laws.
- Reporting: The HR department can be a rich source of internal data about your business performance. A great HR consultant can help you gather and analyze this data.
- Safeguarding: HR consultants understand the importance of security and confidentiality. They will handle all documents discreetly—and flag up any potential security issues.
Failure to keep adequate records can have serious consequences, including fines and lawsuits. A great HR admin team will ensure that your files are always in order.
Does your business need help with HR?
People are your company’s greatest asset. But you can’t protect that asset unless you have HR experts who can help attract, engage, and retain amazing people.
Need help with your HR right away? Book a no-obligation consultation call with Helios HR today, and let’s talk about how we can support your people.
