Reflect, Refine, and Rise: How HR Reviews Set the Stage for a Strong 2026

In Summary:

• This article outlines key HR focus areas for 2026, including headcount compliance, handbook updates, benefits evaluation, HR audits, and pay analysis, to ensure organizations remain legally compliant, responsive to workforce needs, and strategically prepared for the upcoming year.
• By proactively reviewing these areas and addressing gaps, organizations can strengthen retention, improve budgeting and planning, and position themselves for a strong start to 2026.

Rebecca Tipton, SHRM-SCP
Putting the “Resource” in Human Resources Consulting

With the end of another calendar year quickly approaching, it’s time to identify what your HR goals should be for 2026 to get your new year started strong. Of course, each organization’s needs will vary, but if you aren’t sure where to begin, here are some common areas to review when setting your objectives for 2026.

Headcount

The “Why”: Prior year headcount is important for understanding your organization’s compliance needs for certain HR laws, particularly while the organization is still small. The three that stand out the most on the federal level are COBRA, FMLA, and ALE requirements under the ACA.

Action Steps: identify your organizational headcount in each month, if the headcount is more than 50, be sure to include the hours worked each month to complete a Full-Time-Equivalent (FTE) analysis as well. If the result exceeds the employer threshold for a regulation that did not apply to you previously, identify changes that will need to be met for compliance.

Handbook Update

The “Why”: Depending on when your handbook was last updated, it could be out-of-date with recent regulations or worse, no longer align with your organization’s actual policies and directives, or staff delegations.

Action Steps: First review your handbook for compliance with legal changes since your last update, including state-level changes for the states in which you have employees working. After you are sure legal compliance is updated, identify a committee to individually review and identify any policies that no longer reflect your organization. This is also a great time to reflect on the past year for any patterns and issues that should be addressed by introducing a new policy.

Benefits Evaluation

The “Why”: Benefits are a key part to a winning engagement and retention strategy. If your benefits are no longer meeting your employees’ actual needs, they may be at higher risk for attrition. Depending on when your benefit plan year begins, end-of-year may be an ideal time to survey your employees to identify which benefits would meet the most needs within your budget.

Action Steps: Create and distribute a survey to your employees that includes both close-ended questions, such as ranking and multiple choice, as well as open-ended questions to identify what your benefit plan may be missing according to your workforce.

HR Audit

The “Why”: Let’s face it, we all get busy, and sometimes those moments lead to small mistakes, which can build up over time. Therefore, it is important to give ourselves a gut check from time to time so that we can correct those small issues before they snowball into chaos.

Action Steps: Determine which areas are most at risk for you, such as benefit plan documents, notices, and processes; I-9s; training; workplace posters; or personnel files. Then create a checklist to guide your review and get to work. Ideally, you won’t find anything, but chances are that you will find a couple of small issues that you will be thankful to be able to self-correct before it becomes an issue.

Pay Analysis

The “Why”: Completing an annual pay analysis helps an organization to ensure that employees’ salaries are aligned with their responsibility level and with the current job market, which aids retention. Additionally, identifying what the current market rates are for your positions helps the organization to develop pay ranges in advance, helping to budget for any expected recruiting efforts in the impending year.

Action Steps: Pull a report of all employees, their pay, and any factors that affect their assigned pay (such as performance review scores, education, length of time with the company and prior experience). Next, pull market data for each position from a reputable source, such as ERI or CompAnalyst and identify the compensation strategy that your organization wants to follow (lead, lag, or match) and develop a goal salary range. Finally, compare your internal salaries both against other salaries for the same positions (taking into consideration the factors that may drive discrepancies) as well as against the goal salary range to identify any areas in need of adjustment.

While it can be time-consuming to review the above-mentioned areas, you will be thankful you did, especially when it comes time for HR Planning for the upcoming year. Having a strong handle on any upcoming compliance needs, needed pay adjustments, costs for future workforce additions, identified goals for your benefit package, and any needed external costs to assist you with bringing anything up-to-date will help you to frame your HR budget and action plans over the next year. Of course, if you do need some outsourced assistance to aid you in achieving these reviews and goals, BMSS HR Advisory is here to help.  You can find more information about our services by visiting our HR Advisory page or reach out to our team to talk to some directly by calling (833) CPA-BMSS.