Wrap up 2017 ticking off your HR Checklist.

As the year comes to an end, there is always a hustle and bustle present within the office premises with each department trying to achieve targets, goals and deadlines. Among all these business functions the area of HR tends to take a higher burden as it needs to cover the entire organisation as a whole. This can be a daunting and stressful task, making it human nature for things to slip of your mind. To make things a little simple, we have put forward a checklist that helps you to keep track of your HR essentials.

•  Goals & performance review

Probably present in the first place to kick start your year-end checklist would be to review your 2017 goals. It’s important to discuss with your team and review the goals that were set to be achieved and where you currently stand. If there are any pending, it is best to plan as to how to achieve them in the upcoming weeks or else making sure to effectively match it up for the 2018 plan. It is paramount to make sure that this plan goes along with the organisational goals and objectives as well.

This would be the ideal time to evaluate the yearly performance of your subordinates in order to design a plan and assign timelines on how to achieve future goals and who will be the key players working on them. Plan now and you’ll be able to give yourself a powerful start to the new year.

•  Administration

It is always nice to start of the year with a smooth flow. An up-to-date record on your employees that is crisp and accurate is a good feeling to work with when various reports have to be made rather than continuous changes and errors disrupting your work. Make sure you obtain all details from employees leaving no gaps. The other side of this task would be to get all organisational records, filing, documentation and even your information system in order. Which records need to be archived, disposed or filed is essential to start the New Year clean and fresh. Changes in these may also correlate to benefits, so it’s all the more important to have updated information on everyone.

•  Payroll

The basic idea of checking on payroll is to make sure that there are no or minimum outstanding payments being carried on to 2018 making sure all employees are taken care of. This would include the task of sending out reminders to employees to make claims that they’re entitled to get reimbursed for and provide receipts where necessary and at the same time use up any unutilized benefits that they may have left from the current year especially if it’ll lapse on January 1. Another important payroll related matter is to clear settlements of leavers. Though they may have left the company, your employer brand can still be negatively impacted by a disgruntled leaver.

•  Succession planning and recruitment

Usually as the year begins with its new quarter, succession planning and recruitment opportunities tend to trigger. It’s not easy though, especially since various functions will be chasing you to utilize their budgeted vacancies for the year. A good approach would be to reevaluate the current strength and analyze what essential and business critical positions should be filled. All other vacancies should be forgone or passed over, depending on the situation and strategy.

• The human resource

External and internal factors continuously alter the needs of employees and the dynamics of the market. Hence, while HR may get close to the goal of having highly engaged employees, it doesn’t really gets there in just one year. The truest testament of HR’s performance can be extracted from how engaged employees are as it directly links with the performance of teams making it crucial identify strategies in your yearend checklist.

As a result, ticking off your tasks one by one helps you to wrap up a successful 2017 while welcoming 2018 with a fresh start.