There are certain processes that any HR team must engage with, from onboarding new employees to handling issues that arise with worker’s comp. While these processes are extremely important, and ultimately mission-critical, they can also represent enormous time and energy expenditures.

While HR teams cannot abandon these core activities, they can seek ways to streamline their processes, allowing them to complete these mission-critical duties without nearly as much demand on their resources. FullHR can help you overhaul your processes to ensure greater efficiency and less hassle.

Which HR Activities Are the Most Demanding?

But first things first: What are the activities that tend to be the biggest time and energy drains for HR professionals? We’ve surveyed our clients to get their take, and these are the five HR processes that came up over and over again.

1) New hires

Bringing new recruits into the fold can be really exciting… but let’s be honest: There are myriad little things HR has to do to make certain new employees are ready to hit the ground running. Some common examples include:

• Processing employee information
• e-Verify
• Adding the employee to the time clock
• Adding benefit deductions

Again, all of this is important, but it can also take quite a bit of time and focus.

2) Onboarding

Along similar lines, there are a number of steps HR must complete to bring new hires up to speed on important policies and procedures. Examples include verifying and filing signed employee handbooks and completing non-disclosure agreements.

3) Payroll

It’s essential for HR teams to stay on top of payroll. This can be:

• Auditing time clock hours
• Contacting employees with missing time punches
• Contacting managers to verify PTO, commissions, etc.
• Auditing benefits deductions from new hires or terminations
• Periodically updating tax rates
• Printing worker’s comp insurance reports
• Copying employee hours into an Excel spreadsheet

These are just a few examples of the time-intensive steps required to maintain payroll.

4) Worker’s comp

Handling worker’s comp issues can also take a lot of time and energy. In particular, it can be grueling to enter payroll dollars for each job class into the carrier’s software.

5) Benefits

Finally, it can be time-consuming for HR to verify that employee payroll deductions match the totals on each provider’s invoiced premiums for medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.

What are the Hidden Costs of Your HR Activities?

These core HR activities all come with the same hidden cost: They simply sap a lot of time and energy, which can leave your department with insufficient opportunities for other value-adding endeavors, such as employee engagement efforts. (It’s also worth noting that these HR activities also require a lot of mandatory time for auditing and correcting errors from the incorrect translation of handwritten paper documents to digital records; and then there’s the expense of paying invoices for errors caused by incorrect benefit coverage or coverage of terminated employees.)

The good news is that, by partnering with FullHR, you can dramatically reduce the time and hassle required by these processes. We can help you make all of these core activities seamless and efficient; the first step is reaching out to discuss your HR needs. Contact FullHR to learn more about how you can minimize the time-sink of these and other essential processes.