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!

As an senior HR leader, I have had the opportunity to work for organizations that went through Mergers and Acquisitions on multiple occasions. The biggest takeaway I have learned from all of these experiences was the value of communicating with the employees before, during, and after an acquisition to help manage their expectations. Of course if you are a publicly held company, any communication prior to the acquisition cannot be shared with your workforce. However, ensuring you have a communication strategy developed and ready to launch when the news is broadcasted will help pave the way for a smooth transition. Let’s start by constructing a communication plan.

Onboarding: 1 Day Vs. 90 Days Effectively onboarding employees can go a long way in ensuring they become productive, engaged employees. Although the focus is finally shifting to enriching onboarding programs, there are still many companies that believe onboarding consists of having the new hire complete the required paperwork and turning them over to their supervisor to start their job. Unfortunately, I’ve been through new hire experiences like that, so I know firsthand how lost and unimportant I felt as a result.

Though international work experience has definite benefits for both employees and the businesses they support, the cost of a failed assignment cannot be ignored. Depending on the assignment package and location, some international assignments can cost a company three to four times the base salary. Failure can come in many forms:

I recently spoke with an HR leader who is considering moving to a new Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in the next year. Knowing that we are in the midst of implementing a new ATS, she wanted to know what kind of timeline she should have in mind. Generally speaking, to incorporate all recommended steps, it could take 4 to 5 months to make the change to a new ATS. In order to be fully prepared and have a process with some rigorous due diligence, consider the following timeframes:

We keep hearing that Millennials seem to be more liberal with time in that they come in and leave the office on their own schedule. That they quit every six months or have unreal expectations on promotions. They are often referred to as "Generation We", the "Boomerang Generation", and the "Peter Pan Generation". While some of that may be true, let's not forget, that every new generation entering the workforce has typically been seen by older generations as not being as dedicated to their careers. Each generation has unique life experiences that largely play into how they show up at work. Millennials grew up with technology which continues to evolve to become more and more sophisticated, which has largely attributed to characteristics like wanting instant gratification.