What do you do if your HR Operations encounter a major failure?

Avaliar o dano e o risco é um grande passo. Contudo, precisamos ter calma para não gerar outros danos e riscos. Precisamos ter cuidado para entender a extensão desses riscos e não medir esforços em envolver os demais times. Afinal, todos precisam participar ativamente dessa avaliação

Assess the Situation: Understand the scope and impact of the failure. Identify affected processes and systems to gauge the extent of the disruption. Activate Contingency Plans: Implement predefined measures to mitigate the impact, such as backup systems or manual processes, ensuring essential HR functions continue without interruption. Communicate Transparently: Maintain open communication with stakeholders, providing updates on the situation and action plans to build trust and alleviate concerns. Prioritize Critical Functions: Identify and focus on restoring critical HR functions promptly to minimize operational disruption.

Assessing failure and damage in HR operations often involves conducting comprehensive audits, gathering feedback from employees, reviewing performance metrics, and analyzing trends in employee turnover, grievances, and complaints. Additionally, conducting exit interviews, performance reviews, and surveys can provide valuable insights into areas needing improvement. Regularly monitoring HR processes and implementing corrective actions can help mitigate future failures and minimize damage.

Involve relevant stakeholders to conduct a thorough root cause analysis to gather diverse perspectives and insights, develop contingency plans to mitigate the impact of future failures, and continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of implemented solutions to ensure long-term resilience and organizational learning from the experience.

I always conduct an after activity review following a project and in that we use KPI's the constant review and assessment is present anyway. If the failure occured we'd map the process, review the data from that mapping, speak to those stakeholders involved in the process for feedback and to ensure we can meet their needs, develop an action plan for correction, and execute the plan.

Seja claro e evite comunicações difíceis. Fale com um tom de voz neutro, afinal, todos merecem entender com clareza. Não cause pânico nas palavras; esteja certo de que tudo é possível resolver, desde que todos estejam alinhados e falando no mesmo tom de voz.

As an HR professional, I recommend some key points to communicate HR operations failure: ▪️ Transparency: Be open about HR failures. ▪️ Impact: Explain how it affects employees and the organization. ▪️ Urgency: Stress the need for prompt action. ▪️ Employee Well-being: Highlight the importance for a positive work environment. ▪️ Organizational Health : Discuss how it affects the company's overall success. ▪️ Long-Term Impact: Address potential consequences of neglect. ▪️ Accountability: Take responsibility for addressing the issues. ▪️ Employee Involvement: Encourage feedback and suggestions. ▪️ Continuous Improvement: Emphasize ongoing commitment to improvement. ▪️ Support: Assure employees of assistance through challenges.

Processo de melhoria contínua é excelente para esses casos. Reavalie os processos da área. Entenda as falhas e lacunas. Mas não deixe de revisar e envolver todos os funcionários e demais áreas para palpitar através de coleta de feedbacks. Esteja certo de que tudo dará certo.

Like in any business process, learning from shortcomings and failures needs to be incorporated within the (HR) business practices. People should not feel bad when mistakes happen; that's life. I am a proponent of learning, not only by theory, but definitely also by doing. At the end of the day, that is why an organisation hires you. Making mistakes or encountering serious failures will happen from time to time. Do not panic; keep your cool. Analyze / assess and implement risk mitigating steps to prevent from happening again. Lots of HR Operations are still highly transactional; address the matter, resolve and close out. Not a major crisis, in my view. That is part of ongoing learning and improving within your HR business domain.

Establishing a culture of psychological safety is critical in any operations team. When things don't go as planned, it's critical to pause, create space and joint accountability for the problem, as well as the path forward. Empower and trust team members to deploy their energy against the issue, not the swirl. HR Operations is the engine of any HR function. The experience it delivers impacts employee engagement. The insights generated through digitized processes are essential for organizations looking to make strategic decisions about their business and workforce. That's plenty of expectation and pressure for any good operations team who cares about their customers.

It’s important to be realistic and accept that things will go wrong, someday, somehow. Build this into your processes by incorporating feedback loops and lessons learned. Establish a culture in which challenging assumptions and asking the hard questions are encouraged, normal, and not punished. These are essential to finding the root causes of system failure and turning them into opportunities for improvement.