How to Spring Clean Your HR and L&D Practice

With the clocks having finally sprung forward, we’ll start to find that the days become noticeably longer as spring… well, springs into action.

You only have to look outside to see how the changing of the seasons can provide the impetus to help us tidy up our lives, with birds starting to build nests and your neighbours starting to mow their lawns.

Spring can be a great time of year to tidy up your Human Resources and Learning & Development practice too, getting it ready for everything that the future year holds.

In this blog, we’ll be exploring how you can update your HR and L&D practice this spring and how you can get your processes and policies into shape.

1) Check that your policies and procedures are up to date

It makes sense to check all of the policies and procedures that you use the most in your practice – after all, you’ve been using them all year and you’ll be acutely aware of what things work well about them and which things don’t.

There aren’t many other times of the year when you’ll get a chance to review and refresh documents like this. Plus, there aren’t many other times of the year when you might have the motivation to do so.

The most important procedures to check are accurate include:

• Recruitment policies
• Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies
• Grievance, disciplinary and harassment policies and procedures
• Redundancy procedures and processes
• Employee handbook
• Health and Safety policies
• Leave procedures and policies
• Any relevant workplace-specific policies

2) Dust off your employee data

Your HR practice is only as good as the data that you have to work with. If your databases are stuffed with out of date, irrelevant data, the quality of your work as a department will suffer overall.

Whilst there might be a saying that a bad worker blames their tools, in the case of HR, there’s an exception – accurate data is essential to your practice and without it, you won’t be able to do your job properly. In some cases, you could even be putting your organisation at risk of falling foul of the law by failing to keep records up to date.

Refreshing, reviewing and tidying the digital record-keeping procedures of your organisation a few times a year is a good habit to get into. Many HR professionals consider it part of best practice.

Before the advent of computers, checking employee data would have meant cracking open countless filing cabinets and wading through dusty volumes of physical files. Luckily, with the advent of computers and digital record-keeping the process is a bit simpler now – an awful lot less dusty. Here are some of the key elements of employee data to check:

• Review employee data and check that details like name, address and emergency contact are correct
• Ensure records for any active or past grievance, disciplinary and redundancy processes are up to date
• Check the employment status of employees (ie. whether their contract is full time, part time, permanent, temporary etc. is correct and up to date)
• Check that employee appraisal and performance review information is up to date
• Double check the security of your data and ensure that relevant protections are in place

3) Examine your recruitment and retention processes

Recruitment forms an important aspect of the responsibilities of a HR department. The process is one of the key duties of HR and it’s incredibly complex and resource-hungry.

The fact that recruitment processes are generally carried out under extreme pressure and tight deadlines means that you can find it hard to find the time to update policies and improve them over the course of the year. Right now, in springtime, before the year starts to gather momentum and before things start to get busier, is a useful time to review your recruitment processes and tweak them, if needed.

Now is a great time to show your retention policy some love too. Retention, in particular, is crucial to the long-term health of a company but can often fall by the wayside, getting forgotten in favour of more immediate concerns.

Here are some elements to review when it comes to your recruitment and retention practice:

• Update job descriptions and salary ranges
• Ensure that employee benefits are up to date
• Make sure that onboarding processes
• Review employee induction materials and processes
• Check that contracts are accurate

4) Clean your workspace

If you work in a large workplace, it’s likely that your organisation already uses a cleaning service to keep your office tidy.

Still, it’s good to get in the habit of doing some additional cleaning every so often to help your office cleaner out – and spring is a great time to do that.

• Give everything a good dust
• Get rid of any unwanted clutter on your desk
• Check that your working set-up is ergonomic
• Ensure that you have everything you need to do your job, like pens, paper etc.

As well as potentially improving your health by reducing the build up of dust and germs, studies suggest that having a clean, clutter-free working environment can help to boost your mood and your productivity. Research continues to show that no matter your job role, a tidy environment that you feel in control of is more likely to spark creativity and efficiency.

5) Take a fresh look at your training and development approach

Learning and Development still plays a huge role in how organisations grow — but in 2026, expectations have shifted. Employees don’t just want training that ticks a box. They want learning that actually helps them build skills and progress their careers.

At the same time, organisations are under pressure to close skills gaps and adapt to things like AI and new ways of working. In fact, nearly half of L&D professionals say their leadership team is worried employees don’t have the right skills to deliver business goals.

With over a third of skills expected to become outdated by 2030, this isn’t slowing down any time soon. 

So, when you’re reviewing your approach, it’s less about “do we have training?” and more about “is it actually working – and does it still make sense?”

Here are a few areas worth exploring:

Start with what you’ve already got

Take stock of your current programmes. Are they still relevant? Do they reflect today’s priorities like AI, digital skills and working in hybrid environments? Many organisations are now moving away from one-off training courses towards continuous, skills-based development that evolves with the business.

Look beyond completion rates

Completion data only tells part of the story. The bigger question is: are people actually learning  and using it? Research shows only around 24% of organisations see strong application of learning in the real world, which highlights a big gap between training and impact.

Think about the learner experience

People are busy – and it’s a real barrier. Around half of employees say workloads leave little or no time for training. That means learning needs to be flexible, easy to access and genuinely useful in the flow of work.

Check in on engagement and feedback

What do employees actually think of your L&D offering? Career progression is still the number one reason people engage with learning, so if your programmes don’t clearly support growth, they’re likely to fall flat.

Move towards more personalised, skills-based learning

There’s a big shift happening away from generic training towards tailored learning journeys. AI and data are increasingly being used to recommend content and map skills in real time, helping create learning that feels relevant to each individual.

Make sure it’s connected to the bigger picture

L&D is no longer just an HR activity – it’s a business priority. Companies that invest in learning tied to career development and internal mobility tend to perform better and retain talent more effectively.

Ultimately, the goal is to move from “off-the-shelf training” to something that feels embedded in everyday work – practical, personalised and clearly linked to both individual growth and business success.

6) Revisit how you manage performance

Whilst we’ve covered performance management in a previous point, it definitely deserves a dedicated section all of its own. Performance management is one of those areas of HR that can’t be ignored.

As the department that acts as the one of the primary connections between senior management and employees, HR can find that they’re often called upon to ensure that employees are aware of key objectives and focuses.

In particular, performance management – monitoring, reviewing and improving the performance of employees – forms a key focus of many HR departments. As a result, it can make sense to whip your performance management process into shape to ensure that it’s fit to cope with the demands of the coming year.

• Familarise yourself with any upcoming announcements you may have to make to the wider company
• Examine your performance review process so that you can ensure that employees and line-managers are aware of the latest organisational targets, concerns and focuses
• Ensure that employee performance review data is up to date
• Explore ways that your employee performance reviews can be improved

Tidy your way into success at work

Whilst it can seem a massive pain at the time, taking the time to pay attention to those often-neglected areas of your practice and tidying them up can set you up for a greater chance of success in the long-term.

We hope this blog has given you some areas to potentially target when it comes to spring cleaning your HR and L&D practice this year.

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