8 ways to improve your HR department to increase productivity and profitability

How to boost HR performance and profitability:

• Align HR goals with business strategies for maximum impact.

• Offer competitive benefits, flexibility and strong workplace support.

• Focus on reducing turnover to cut hiring costs and strengthen teams.

• Equip employees with adaptable skills through continuous education.

• Ensure onboarding and training programs drive better outcomes.

• Create a seamless, employee-first environment.

Drive success with technology:

• Use technology to automate tasks and improve communication.

• Use content management tools to streamline workflows and protect data.

• Prioritize efficiency so HR can focus on value-adding activities.

Develop leader and plan for growth:

• Identify and nurture top leadership talent to inspire teams.

• Adopt a growth mindset to reimagine processes and prepare for the future.

By improving your HR department, you can transform organizational performance, ensuring long-term success.

While hiring the best people is the ultimate goal of any HR department, the trick is turning this objective into something actionable.

So how can HR professionals demonstrate that they add value to a company’s bottom line? We’ve got eight ways for HR to make an impact.

Here’s how your HR department can make a difference.

1. Know your business

Bottom-line impact: Depth of business knowledge means better returns on personnel.

How does your company turn a profit?

If you can’t articulate this, meet with someone who can help clarify it for you.

Insight about your organization’s business strategy, including market forces and the trends that shape it, will help you identify how to craft a supportive HR strategy. This will help you determine the priorities required to execute and support the organization’s overall vision as you hire, train and build business cases for your department initiatives.

When you understand how your company operates (and why), you can align your HR goals for increased HR impact.

2. Find the best ways to entice talent

Bottom-line impact: High-quality hires lead to high-quality productivity and thus, profitability.

With digital transformation trends demanding more and more hard-to-find technology workers — and in some cases, character traits like emotional and social intelligence, problem-solving and empathy — many employers face a skill gap that can trickle down and hurt the company’s ability to thrive. HR must have a strategy for identifying the best ways to entice high performers to join your team and vision.

Offering benefits and policies that show you value a happy workforce not only attracts and retains talent, but it also increases productivity and drives profitability. Examples could include:

• Reimbursing work-from-home expenses

• Offering more flexibility in the workday structure, especially flexibility dictating where employees work

• Providing increased mental health support

• Having the latest tech solutions and opportunities to work on exciting projects

These types of benefits are a boon in the hiring process. Top-tier candidates want an employer who has a feel-good answer to the question, “What is it like to work here, especially right now?”

3. Engage in competitive learning

Bottom-line impact: From data protection compliance to OSHA violations, proper training and education can impact fees paid out for violations.

In LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report 2025, The Rise of Career Champions, 91% of learning and development professionals said continuous learning is more important than ever for career success. Notable for HR firms looking to boost productivity, the same report found that organizations with a proven high interest in upskill programs are 32% more likely to be deploying AI training. In addition to leveling-up employee education, HR also needs to bring any new hires up to speed during onboarding.

Because HR is often responsible for managing human resources functions training and education, you need to be sure it effectively impacts employees in a way that translates into better outcomes on the job, and on the bottom line. Keys to a seamless training program include automated workflows, instant communication and an integrated relationship with business units, so the right training is available for the right people.

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4. Construct an employee-first experience to drive retention

Bottom-line impact: Hiring new employees costs an average of $4,700. An employee-centric company is more likely to retain employees and decrease turnover.

To improve your HR department, start by focusing on creating a seamless employee experience at work. Mobile accessibility, instant communication and exceptional collaboration. A positive experience yields higher profitability, better employee retention and increased ROI on new hires.

Connecting with employees on a personal level and building relationships amongst teammates is crucial to this, and increasingly, technology helps provide that connection point. Look for HR technology that helps you focus on high-value work by:

• Automating time-consuming HR tasks such as managing employee records and overseeing retention practices

• Using enterprise-wide search functionalities, making all employee records and processes quick and easy to access by anyone with the rights to see them

• Making HR content accessible on any device, from anywhere with an internet connection, to keep business moving

> Learn more | Understanding, calculating and preventing high employee churn rates

5. Expand your vision of what HR can do

Bottom-line impact: When you drive efficiency, you drive productivity and profitability.

We live in an age of unending technological advances. If your HR department wasn’t taking advantage of technology and using it to improve the flow of HR duties before the coronavirus hit, it’s likely looking for ways to do so now.

For instance, content services solutions for HR departments are growing in popularity. This type of solution helps HR teams:

• Create one source of truth for the entire digital employee file

• Protect sensitive HR documents

• Minimize risk with records management and policies and procedures

• Expedite the audit process

• Integrate with existing HRIS systems

Explore ways to optimize your HR technology to enhance operational agility.

> Learn more | Infographics: HR from anywhere

6. Hire the right people and keep them engaged

Bottom-line impact: Bad hires — whether ineffective or lacking longevity — can cost up to 30% of an employee’s annual salary, as well as have a negative impact on morale and engagement.

HR practices are integral to an employee’s lifetime value to the organization, which are affected by four inputs: hiring, onboarding, development and culture. To help identify the revenue impact of your hiring process and employee engagement, ask the following questions:

• Are our new hires good fits?

  Best-fit employees are more likely to bring value to the team and stay with the company longer.

• What is the attrition rate of new hires?

  Quality onboarding can make or break a new hire’s experience. One in 25 people leave a new job just because of a poor (or nonexistent) onboarding program, according to a Human Resources Executive report.

• How valuable is training, including manager training?

  Excellent training for management and development results in improved performance.

• Why do employees stay or leave?

  Culture plays a large part in employees’ decisions to stay and can contribute to longer tenures.

7. Find good leaders

Bottom-line impact: The ability to properly identify effective leadership creates a more successful workforce and thus, increases profitability.

Leaders drive employee performance and profitability. Unfortunately, many companies either don’t focus on effective leadership or they don’t appropriately evaluate it. According to Gallup, nearly 60% of managers feel they are doing a good job recognizing their team's hard work and contributions, but only about a third of individual contributors (35%) agree. And worse, in another way survey Gallup found that companies fail to choose the right managerial candidate 82% of the time.

To ensure your hiring processes add value to your company’s bottom line, look for leaders who have the talents to:

• Motivate every contributor to take action

• Engage employees with a compelling mission and vision

• Drive outcomes

• Overcome adversity and resistance

• Create a culture of accountability

• Relationship-build in ways that creates trust, open communication and transparency

8. Embrace a growth mindset for HR’s impact on the future

Bottom-line impact: HR is the place to reimagine tomorrow’s workforce and workplace for a more profitable future.

Since the coronavirus hit, both business and HR leaders have become more confident in HR’s ability to help organizations navigate future challenges, according to Deloitte.

Decisions made by your HR team have ripple effects throughout the organization, from corporate reputation and team morale, to the very character of your company as measured in the quality and fit of its employees.

> Learn more | Freeing HR teams to focus on long-term transformation

HR is the first line in ensuring the success of your company — after all, without the right people in the right roles, a company just can’t thrive.

As an HR professional, it’s your job not just to look at the human side of your business, but to diagnose how each person can create positive change where it’s needed and provide leadership that drives the entire organization toward increased customer satisfaction and, ultimately, increased profitability.