Key issues in HR auditing

[John Robinson]

The importance of HR auditing can be gauged from the fact that it is about employees, an organization’s most valuable resource. It is through HR audits that an organization evaluates its strengths and weaknesses of its most important resource. HR audits have come a long way from the earlier times, when they were considered a set of checklists to be ticked. Today, HR audits in organizations consist of a whole gamut of sustainable and continuous audit activities that relate to critical areas such as governance, compliance and management in the organization.

Important benefits of HR auditing

HR auditing helps organizations:

o  Zero in on not only existing problems relating to HR, but also potential ones

o  Assess the efficacy of HR management practices

o  Understand the deficiencies of the HR internal control processes

o  Evaluate human capital and risks, both from the strategic and compliance-related perspectives

Rightly done HR audits enhance the value of an organization's human capital and its competitiveness and bring down its susceptibility to employment practices liabilities by advising the management on what corrective steps it needs to take to resolve HR internal control processes.

Most importantly, HR audits should take human capital related risks and opportunities from the standpoint of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), which leads to higher interaction between HR and management.  

Proper ways of carrying out HR auditing

Although most organizations understand the importance of HR auditing and its uses; it is important for them to get the exact ways of implementing it. Getting their HR auditing right is the stepping stone to many important useful and corrective steps.

Risk management is the single most important ingredient that has to go into HR auditing. The proper ways of carrying out HR auditing will be imparted at a two-day seminar from GlobalCompliancePanel, a leading provider of professional trainings for the areas of regulatory compliance.

The Director of this seminar is Ronald Adler, a president-CEO of Laurdan Associates, Inc., a veteran owned, human resource management consulting firm that specializes in HR audits, employment practices liability risk management, HR metrics and benchmarking, strategic HR-business issues and unemployment insurance. Ronald brings vast and deep experience in all the areas of HR including HR auditing.

Professionals who wish to benefit from this learning can register for this seminar by logging on to http://www.globalcompliancepanel.com/control/globalseminars/~produc... .

The Director of this seminar will help organizations direct and focus their attention on their human resource management practices, policies, procedures, processes, and outcomes.

Asking the right questions

The foundation to sound HR auditing is to ask the right questions. Sharp, thoughtful, perceptive and insightful, they should prod management into getting into the depths of HR auditing. The ways by which to ingrain the habit of asking the right, meaningful questions will be the major learning this seminar will impart. Ronald will show the ways by which HR auditing needs to learn to throw up a structured and systematic series of questions about core areas such as key compliance, risk management, internal auditing, and human resource management issues to HR, which after all, is the real purpose of HR audits.

An understanding of how to ask these questions should be out of the realization that no two employees that HR auditing policies are focused on are alike. This way, Ronald will give clarity on the distinguishing nature of HR auditing.

HR auditing from the ERM perspective

A core aspect of HR auditing is that it should be inseparably linked to Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) for it to become effective and successful. To make this happen, HR auditing should take a broader and comprehensive view of human capital risks bring the interrelationships and interactions between HR and other functions relating to management and the organization in alignment with each other.

Ronald will explain these, as well as the ways by which HR auditing can help the organization identify and capitalize on potential opportunities and reduce risks.

HR professionals and others related to HR auditing, such as CFO's, Internal Auditors, External Auditors, Risk Managers, Compliance Officers and COOs can benefit from the lessons learnt at this seminar.

He will cover the following areas at this seminar:

o  Review an overview of employment related risk management and HR Audits

o  Assess human capital risks

o  Develop HR metrics

o  Explore the HR audit model

o  Assess strategic alignment

o  Assess HR management related documents

o  Assess HR management processes and practices

o  Review the practical applications of HR audits.