Best practice oversights and auditing of your people processes from organisational psychologists.

What is best practice when it comes to all things people and why is it important?

As business leaders and HR professionals, there are so many different approaches you can take to hiring, onboarding, managing, and offboarding your people. Through our discussions with clients over the years, a common challenge many businesses face is identifying the best talent management strategy that provides both good people results and a return on investment.

Fortunately, there is an abundance of research that has been conducted over the past decades that provides us with great insight into the most effective practices in general, as well as across specific industries or employee types. Part of the challenge for organisations is in accessing, understanding, and applying this research (or even knowing it exists!), and because of this many organisations default to familiar or established processes, as they are easy and right there. However, sometimes doing thiscan result in outcomes such as:

• Hiring the wrong people
• Creating adverse impact for certain candidate or employee groups
• Creating poor candidate or employee experiences
• Negatively impacting employee engagement and organisational culture

This is where Organisational Psychologists come in – our value is in being able to understand current research, the needs of each individual organisation, and bringing these together to create unique and tailored solutions.

Why have an Organisational Psychologist audit your processes?

Organisational Psychologists are scientist-practitioners, trained to marry empirical research and evidence with applied practice. They are specialists in conducting and understanding organisational research, investigating and diagnosing organisational issues, and selecting appropriate evidence-based solutions.

The combination of best practice oversight, a research-minded approach, and deep understanding of organisational systems means that Organisational Psychologists are uniquely positioned to audit a range of HR processes and systems, and identify areas for improvement.

Which processes can be audited?

An Organisational Psychology audit could be carried out on any of the following:

• Recruitment processes (overall process, advertising, job descriptions, applications, scoring, shortlisting, assessments, interview approach, assessment centres, selection process)
• Onboarding processes
• Diversity specific audits (e.g. gender, culture, age, disability)
• Development and promotion processes
• Psychosocial risk
• Organisational culture
• Restructures
• Redundancies

How we do this

Our approach usually follows this process:

Advantages and benefits

Bringing in an external consultant with organisational psychology expertise to audit your processes can help you in the following ways:

• Providing an independent, third-party oversight over your processes
• Ensuring alignment with legislative guidelines
• Expert advice on improving your processes
• Ensuring you are using robust practices that are most effective for your needs
• Improving return on investment across your processes
• Enhancing candidate and employee experience

Examples

For examples of where we have assisted previous organisations with auditing their practices, please see the following case studies:

Gender Bias Audit: Conducting a desktop audit to identify potential points of gender bias

Providing best practice oversight to assessment centre processes

Contact us

Get in touch with our team today to discuss how we can help you align your people processes with best practice.