HR Best Practices
for Charities

5 Essential hints and tips to help your charity through to HR success

Employees and volunteers are the secret weapon behind every Charity’s success. Whilst larger Charities can often invest substantial amounts in Human Resources (HR), for smaller Charities with smaller budgets and less resources, maintaining good HR practices can be a little trickier.

Here are a few HR Best Practices for Charities that you can adopt today to help streamline your HR processes and procedures, and ensure volunteers and employees feel supported, valued, and excited to be part of your mission.

Your HR Department

The HR Department exists to support you, your employees and your volunteers, whilst enabling everyone to do their jobs successfully.

You could have a whole HR Department, or it could be a part of someone else’s responsibility, but they handle everything from ensuring your Charity is legally compliant, filing necessary paperwork, establishing a strong organisational culture, setting policies, overseeing recruitment, onboarding new staff members and compensation. HR teams are also responsible for supporting, training and evaluating staff.

Besides these core functions, HR teams can also have the responsibility of recruiting and managing volunteers, whilst ensuring both volunteers and staff remain committed and driven by the mission of your charity.

In smaller Charities, it’s not uncommon for many of these HR functions to be carried out by the CEO and/or Accountant. Handling all these functions can be a daunting task – especially if HR is only one of the many other responsibilities.

Here are a few critical HR Best Practices for Charities you can implement to save time, maximise efficiency and grow your organisation.

5 HR Best Practices for Charities

1. Manage Volunteer & Employee Onboarding Efficiently

Your onboarding process is the first impression for newcomer’s and sets a baseline for team morale and productivity. It is up to you to devise a strategy and onboarding process that introduces them to your mission, work environment, organisational policies and their new roles in a structured and efficient manner.

Small Charities often struggle with this, especially when there are a number of new staff and volunteers that arrive within a short period of time.

Checklists can help you save time and streamline your onboarding process. They ensure that you don’t miss critical steps during the process and can be easily tailored to different levels and types of team members. For example, volunteers might need only an hour or two of onboarding – whereas onboarding an employee may include sessions with different teams, background and reference checks, and setting up their technology.

HR onboarding software can also help make things easier by simplifying your onboarding process, saving you time and effort, and making sure you don’t miss out on anything important. If you’re looking for HR software, make sure it includes onboarding checklists.

2. Make Sure to track Holiday and Sick Leave

Whilst holidays and days off are extremely important – they need to be planned. This becomes even more important when you’re working in a small team, as one person can have multiple responsibilities critical enough that their annual leave could affect business-as-usual processes.

You can create a spreadsheet to track time off and manage employee and volunteer leave requests, but whilst this is easy enough to start off with, it can become more difficult over time.

This is where an HR System can help. You can set multiple policies for different levels or types of employees. For example, contract staff may not be entitled to any paid holiday leave, new staff may have limited annual leave and volunteers can take unlimited time off.

With automated HR software, all you have to do is enter the date of joining, type of employee, and their holiday and sick leave time is automatically set. The software also records any sick leave taken and can identify “patterns” of sickness and aid where necessary.

3. Keep Employee & Volunteer Information Up to Date

One of the most critical HR best practices for charities to follow is ensuring you have up-to-date information for all employees and volunteer staff. This is important not only for your records but, is part of your legal compliance.

Make sure your entire team (including volunteers) fill in their information as part of your onboarding process, so you don’t miss out on this critical step.

You can record the information in a physical form, spreadsheet or using your HR System. This software can be helpful as it acts as a central database for all employee records and can digitally store employee information, contracts and annual reviews – giving you a comprehensive history of an individual in a single glance.

For new employees, make sure you do a thorough background check and verify all their records before officially welcoming them and be sure to review the information periodically.

Finally – make sure all employee, volunteer and staff records are safely stored. Contracts, appraisals and employee history are sensitive data and must be stored as securely as possible and in line with current GDPR requirements.

4. Encourage a Culture of Transparency, Feedback and Inclusion

Prepare to make adjustments to any new policies or practices you introduce. Ask for feedback and listen to your employees and volunteers when they give it. This is particularly important to encourage an inclusive workforce, and will help put diversity and inclusion high up your agenda.

Feedback, and acting upon it, will not only make your whole team feel heard, but also help you understand their pain points, and accurately identify and correct problems – which will eventually improve efficiency, staff morale and make your workplace an inclusive place for everybody.

Your team is also more likely to adopt to new software and processes faster if they know their opinions are valued and will count towards a final decision.

5. Make Sure Important Documents are Secure and Easily Accessible

Information Management is one of the most essential, yet often neglected, areas of HR.

In many cases, critical information about the charity is stored haphazardly or resides with one person, making it difficult to access and share. You might also find yourself spending hours looking for the same documents every time the government or a regulating body asks you. This can get even worse if staff are on holiday or leave the organisation.

HR Software can simplify this process as it uses a secure central database to store important documents, like background checks, annual reviews and contracts. This helps you easily find documents, allow access to selected staff and cut down on the need for physical storage.

A centralised database also ensures the most up-to-date versions of documents are readily accessible and not saved on someone’s hard drive or inbox. You can also manage permissions so information is kept confidential and can be easily transferred to new HR team members or only accessed by those that require it.

We hope you found these HR Best Practices for Charities useful!

Your charity is an employer just like any other business and you need to ensure both volunteers and staff feel empowered and happy at work. Investing in an effective HR System is one just way you can help ensure your charity operates smoothly, with streamlined processes and improved efficiency.

There are a number of cost-effective and user-friendly HR System Solutions available on the market, some of which are aimed at charities and Not for Profits – we can help you find the right one!

If you think your Charity or Not for Profit organisation would benefit from a new (or your first) HR System, we have partnered with a number of HR Software vendors, and have recently helped a large number of Charities and Not for Profits up and down the UK to select a new HR system.

Get in touch to find out how we can help you!

Want to find out more about how we help you select an HR System?

Check out our HR Services page for more information – or simply get in touch with us!

Get in touch

or email us at info@lunarcloud.net

For the latest news and views, follow us on social

HR Best Practices for Charities