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HR budgets are tight and are probably going to get a lot tighter. Here’s some HR stuff that you can stop doing that will save you money – and create a better people experience.

1. Strip back your employment manual that’s filled with policies that you have to manage and monitor, and instead create a culture handbook. You can store this on a platform like FB Workplace, which will save you money in design and will also be easy for your people to access. 
2. Ditch your probation period.  It’s not just a terrible word and gives the impression that we don’t trust our new people, but it’s taking up lots of our resources with review meetings, confirmation letters, chasing managers etc. Check on how many people don’t actually pass their probation? Bet it’s very few. Instead, encourage your managers to have more regular short check-ins with their new people to help them settle in.  
3. Question whether you need to make that training mandatory. If you have to chase people to complete it, get some insight into why that is and challenge whether it should be mandatory and why you in HR are even owning it?
4. Kill stupid rules. Ask your people to tell you the HR processes that get in the way of them doing a great job.  Guaranteed these rules will also be draining your HR time.
5. If you haven’t already, stop doing annual appraisals. If you work out the hours spent preparing for appraisals, managing appraisals, chasing appraisals and doing appraisals, it’s quite a big hit to our HR budget.  We already know that it’s an outmoded way of managing performance. Move to frequent check-ins and ditch the paperwork. Check out our Box of Conversations to give simple tips and conversation starters to managers.
6. If you are still planning to do an annual engagement survey, then maybe it’s time to question the value you have derived over the last few years? Apart from the Board feeling better because they’ve ticked the box called staff engagement, what has really changed? Instead, move to frequent, light touch pulse surveys. Create your own free survey (e.g. Typeform, Survey Monkey) and ask regular questions on themes e.g. “How could we make remote working better for you?” If you do have a bit of budget invest in a some of the great feedback apps like CultureAmp,  TINYpulse or Glint that focus on real-time feedback.
7. No budget for building your employment brand?  Ask your people to write a review on Glassdoor about what they think about working for you?  Discuss the reviews at leadership meetings, so that you can celebrate what’s great and how you’re going to work on areas you need to improve.  
8. Stop sending emails and set up different employee groups (leaders, new starters etc.) on your comms channel e.g. FB Workplace, Slack etc. A great way to start conversations and discussions.
9. If your leadership training budget gets cut, preventing you from bringing in external trainers, well, that might not be a bad thing– after all you know more about your leaders than anyone so why not do it yourself!
10. Stop sitting in on interviews.  Not only is it wasting valuable HR time but you’re making hiring managers more dependent on you and they’ll never develop their recruitment skills.  Run a workshop, share great resources, and then leave them to it.
11. If you’re still using the 9 Box Grid, you’ll know how much time and effort it takes. Big cumbersome processes that take months to complete are increasingly discredited and being replaced by regular discussions about talent movement and roles that need refreshing.  Check out our Box of Meetings which has a helpful template to help get those discussions going.
12. Ditch the hi-po programme.  Expensive, elite and they don’t deliver value according to research by CEB (73% of high potential programmes show neither business outcomes nor return on investment). 
13. Stop wasting hours of time creating HR reports with random stats and flawed people data. Instead, go to leaders with a more compelling narrative by using some of the tips in this blog.
14. If we want to role model efficiency in our business, we have to take a look at changes we can make to our own function without compromising on the value we can add.  Get your team online and share the problem.  Give them the safety of knowing that this doesn’t mean redundancies but instead you want their ideas and suggestions about how they might adapt to focus on what’s important – ‘What processes, activities should we stop doing?’