A crucial and potentially costly mistake for HR is to dismiss or minimize concerns from employees who reach out to them. HR needs to show they care about the employees' concerns and provide steps to help resolve those concerns, says Evan Lassiter, senior talent acquisition specialist at Atlanta, GA-based Cloudreach.
It also is important to present a defined pay increase plan. "If your employees notice a trend in their salary increase, it may become an expectation for every following year," says Tiffany Servatius, HR manager for Scottsdale, AZ-based Scott's Marketplace. "Companies can prevent this mistake by creating salary caps for each position and identifying both quantitative and qualitative measurements that would warrant a salary increase."
HR also needs to ensure that managers are properly trained in important areas to prevent huge headaches down the line. "An illegal question to a potential candidate, a manager who can't flex their management style according to employee needs, a set of salary reviews that clearly skew against a protected class--all these can be done out of ignorance and put the organization at risk," says Pamela Potts, senior vice president of HR for Washington D.C.-based NeoSystems Corp.