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Auditing Human Resources
It is the systematic assessment of your organization's HR service excellence. A good HR Audit should help you:
- Identify the HR programs that are most important to achieving your organization's objectives.
- Find out how well your HR department is delivering those programs.
- Benchmark your HR work to ensure continuous improvement.
- Promote change and creativity.
- Focus the HR staff on important issues.
- Bring HR closer to the line functions of the organization.
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Now You Can Assess HR Work Performance with The Scaled Comparison
In this section, we are not discussing whether HR programs are in compliance with existing laws and statutes. Any good textbook on Human Resource Management can give you a checklist of programs, benchmarks, reporting requirements and positions that will comply with legal requirements for HRM. This kind of audit is worthwhile, and needs to be done periodically, but it is not particularly challenging nor mysterious.
What is important, however, is to determine whether the HR function is adding value to the larger organization with its work and performance. It's no secret that evaluating Human Resource performance (or any staff functions, for that matter) is a real challenge.
The best organizations meet the challenge by changing the paradigm by which they view the HR / Personnel area. First, they stop seeing HR as a department with a budget, personnel, and tasks. Instead, they define it as an organization with resources, customers, and services to deliver. Then it becomes a matter of finding out what the "customers" think of the "services" they are receiving.
The Scaled Comparison is one of the premier tools for evaluating the quality of external customer service for entire organizations, and serves equally well as an internal customer service survey.
The evaluation is performed by both internal HR employees as well as individuals in other organizational units who have contact with HR. This allows comparison of perceptions of value and quality between HR and other units.
 This tool is available online or in paper and pencil format.
Using the Scaled Comparison, instead of traditional surveys, you have the advantages of:
A consensus, not an average - A consensus is what you would expect to emerge from face-to-face interactions between disagreeing people trying to reach a workable solution that is acceptable to everyone. You don't reach a consensus with a simple numerical average of checkmarks.
Ideal state defined by business objectives - The organization can compare its HR performance with an "ideal" determined by its own business objectives, rather than by a consultant or some other external viewpoint.
Small subgroups - Most surveying techniques require that groups or subgroups have at least 20 to 30 subjects in them. With the Scaled Comparison, subgroups as small as 5 or 10 people may be studied. This permits the delineation of viewpoints in and between small, but important decision-making groups.
Large number of HR tasks and programs - Conventional methods become cumbersome if they attempt to study more than a handful of HR programs, especially from more than a single perspective. With no significant increase in respondent time or effort, 40 to 50 or more different tasks or programs can be studied using the Scaled Comparison.
A "custom" study at an "off-the-shelf" price -You get a study that uses exactly the questions and HR tasks and programs you want, worded exactly the way you want them, at or below the cost of a generic questionnaire.
Complete control of manipulation - The Scaled Comparison protects the organization against errors in the results due to
- intentional manipulation
- inconsistent judgments
- misunderstood instructions or concepts
You get priorities, not preferences - Surveys that use "agree/disagree" scales will not give you a consensus on priorities for action. They won't tell you what trade-offs people will support, nor the trade-offs they will oppose.
Show me what Auditing Human Resources looks like.
If you are interested, you can contact us and tell us about your needs and situation. You can also click here to learn more about how we work together on a project like this.
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