HR Time Challenges: Where Are You Spending Your Time? [INFOGRAPHIC]

In HR, we have a ton of responsibilities. That’s no secret. That’s why we sat down a while back and decided to do an in-depth study on what’s keeping everyone in HR busy throughout our days—and what you love doing and what you don’t!

HR has always had time challenges. There’s so much to do,. But until we wrote a whole list of all HR’s responsibilities, we didn’t realize just how overwhelming it was! There’s payroll and time cards, PTO, compensation, recruiting, onboarding, training’s, employee reviews, benefits, policies and compliance’s—wait, must take breath—then there’s reporting, terminating employees, legal issues, stocks, events, development. The list goes on and on and on. But I don’t need to tell you that. You’re well aware.

Mostly, since we’re in the business of relieving HR’s pain points—we created our HR software to make your job easier—we wanted to know what’s taking up your time and if that’s how you think it should be.

Of that huge, long list of responsibilities, HR professionals chose the top five tasks (which is why the stats don’t add up to 100 percent!) that were consuming their time. Amongst all those options, one overwhelming task is threatening HR’s productivity more than any other. 71 percent of respondents felt employee management consumed a lot or most of their time.

What exactly is employee management? For this study, “employee management” included things we do to help manage what our employees need—like answering employee questions, resolving workplace issues between co-workers or between employees and managers, discipline and recognition. Pretty much, things that help our employees stay happy in their jobs.

Of those respondents who felt like “employee management” was the biggest threat to their productivity, 48 percent feel they should be doing it less.

Company policies and compliance came in next. 54 percent of HR pros felt they spent a significant amount of time figuring out health-benefit laws, 401Ks, unemployment insurance, worker’s comp, and trying to nail down the best policies for employees.

Respondents felt recruiting (and everything that goes along with it like job fairs, reviewing resumes, interviewing, checking references and background) was the third most time-consuming task. 42 percent of HR pros feel they spend a lot or most of their time on recruiting.

While most HR pros would not say their time is misused on company policies and compliance or recruiting, they do wish they could spend some of their time focusing on areas other than employee management.

Where Would HR Rather Focus?

Of course, everyone is different. But no matter what people cited as the task that is taking up most of their time, the number one reason why is that it took time away from spending on more meaningful work.

So where would most of respondents prefer to focus their efforts?
· Professional development. 54 percent of respondents would prefer to focus on professional development so they can be even more knowledgeable and helpful in their positions.
· Training. 47 percent of respondents would prefer to spend their time training new employees, as well as focus on ongoing development for current employees, including managers.
· Managing and overseeing company culture. HR pros know that culture can make a huge difference in employee happiness, which is probably why 37 percent of them said they’d like to spend more time working on and managing their company’s culture.

The traditional role of HR is changing. This study confirms what we all suspected: HR pros are taking the reins and enhancing their roles to include tasks they feel would have the most meaning and value to their companies. Technology has stepped up and can take care of a lot of the paperwork and manual processes HR is responsible for.

For more details on the results of the study, here’s our infographic: