Leave It to the IT Experts: 3 Tasks HR Should Avoid
Human Resource professionals play a crucial role in supporting an organization’s workforce. Recruitment, employee relations, training, compensation, benefits, record keeping, and workplace safety/wellness are all part of the job description when navigating a day in the life of HR. Many business owners and decision makers feel compelled to place seemingly miscellaneous tasks from IT into the hands of the HR department (or in some cases, one person). It may make sense to them, for example, to lump onboarding a new employee with finding that same employee a new computer or to purchase their email licensing. But this is where trouble can strike.
Without an IT Team, these tasks become time-consuming and often executed incorrectly. Below are some of the responsibilities that are commonly handled by HR but should be handled by an IT expert.
Device Procurement
When computers break or reach the end of their lifespan (typically around 5 years), HR professionals often purchase off-the-shelf equipment from a local retailer and leave it at that. What many outside the field don’t realize is that buying consumer-grade machines can leave employees with equipment that’s too underpowered for their daily tasks. By the time email, documents, and specialized software are installed, there’s often little storage or processing power left for anything else, causing the computer to slow down significantly. This makes a brand-new desktop or laptop quickly become ineffective because it wasn’t the right machine for the job.
Industry standards for workplace machines are constantly changing. Having someone who knows your business and who keeps up with the latest and greatest information out there is essential to making sure your team always has the right tools for the job.
Onboarding & Offboarding
Facilitating the integration of a new employee into the workforce can be one of HR’s prime responsibilities, and with it comes making sure that the new employee has the tools they need. Purchasing additional licenses for emails and programs specific to your business and installing applications can get very tedious. On average, an individual can spend about 1-2 hours per device simply setting it up for use. Multiply that per every employee that the company hires, and the amount of time dedicated to just set up gets out of control fast. That time becomes compounded by the fact that if HR is the one that sets the machines up, they’re the ones employees go to when they have issues. IT doesn’t stop when the computer leaves the bench – forgotten passwords, application training, and “user error” will quickly become a normal part of human resource’s day.
Offboarding an employee can have its own challenges depending on the nature of the departure. If an employee is terminated or quits suddenly, offboarding protocol steps can be missed, such as forgetting to reset passwords on email or revoking access to financial applications and documents. This leaves a major security gap that can have some serious financial and legal consequences.
Cyber Security
Speaking of financial and legal consequences, with the rise of online threats, cyber security is no longer an optional luxury for businesses. Many organizations now know that it’s important, but very few know exactly what it involves. HR professionals may be tasked with making the organization more “secure”, but a quick Google search will leave most without industry knowledge spinning. What is encryption? What are access controls? Where do we get cyber security training? These are questions an IT provider like Solve iT knows right off the bat. A team dedicated to security services can have a plan to help protect your business; working with HR to implement and enforce.
The more the HR department must focus on IT, the less time and resources they must focus on your people. If you’ve delegated any of these technical tasks to your HR department, it may be time to consider asking for help from an MSP like Solve iT that can automate those tasks and continue to support your team.