Objectives and Purpose of HR Audit

The purpose of an HR audit is to spot the strengths and weaknesses of all the HR functions and to identify the scope for improvement. Organizations that hire HR consultancy services for HR audit purpose should understand to perform a comprehensive audit of their HR department functions, they have to be honest and correct in providing info on their current practices, procedures, and policies.

They even have to allow the HR consultancy services doing the audit to benchmark them against

alternative organizations from an equivalent trade or of comparable size.

HR auditing involves a review of varied areas that embody legal and statutory compliance, compensation, benefits, performance appraisal systems, HR policies and practices regarding various matters related to health, safety, termination, and security of employees. HR auditing isn't routine for many organizations and there aren't any rules that make it necessary for employers to conduct HR audits. However, so as to accord with labor laws, organizations have to depend on either their lawyers or on external HR consulting firms to review their policies and practices. Larger organizations develop their own in-house review processes. But, for smaller organizations, it gets difficult to develop in-house auditing processes, so they can outsource this work to HR consultants who can do this job perfectly in line with the organizational goals. The end result of an HR audit is meant to assist organizations to  confirm what changes have to be enforced, and how these can impact the organizational goals and what are the areas and functions that are to be prioritized.

What are the best practices?

Even before the start of the audit, it's advisable to be prepared with a checklist as it is essential to outline the goals of the audit and its success criteria. Along with these, a checklist ought to be got ready to assess the presence and absence of specific practices and to match these practices with policies applicable. Some questions that the organizations can put to themselves at the time of HR audits are – what are the policies and practices that have to be audited, what are the records that are to be checked, and what kind of analysis is required from the audit.

One of the best practices of any audit is asking open-ended questions rather than close-ended questions. The same holds true for HR audits as well. Questions should be framed in such manner that they bring out a descriptive response instead of non-descriptive one. Once all the descriptive information is gathered from different sources, it needs to be checked if the information gathered is accurate without any discrepancies and miscommunication flaws. In order to achieve this, HR consultants should gather information in such a way that the information can be used for quantitative analysis.

It is not just sufficient to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current HR functions with the conduct of HR audit. An HR audit purpose is solved only then when the practices to be followed in the future are suggested that are in line with the organizational goals and are remedial to the existing flaws in HR functions.

For all the audit needs of your organization, consult one of the best HR consulting firms in Hyderabad, Accuprosys.