How to Set Priorities in HR and Work Effectively on Your To-Do List.

⏱ 12 min read

Last updated October 21, 2026

Setting a priority is important because it supports HR and the organisation to focus on what matters most, manage time effectively, reduce stress, and achieve goals more efficiently. Prioritising tasks ensure that the most critical and impactful activities are completed first, leading to better outcomes and more productive use of resources.

By strategically prioritising HR tasks, companies can enhance employee satisfaction, streamline operations, and ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

This approach not only addresses immediate needs but also lays a strong foundation for long-term success, supporting the organisation achieve its strategic objectives.

Effective prioritisation requires a clear understanding of the company’s goals, a comprehensive assessment of current HR needs, and the flexibility to adapt as circumstances evolve.

How to Set Priorities in HR?

Prioritising tasks in HR requires aligning HR activities with business goals and understanding employee needs.

Step 1. Align to Business Goals

Identify the company’s key objectives and prioritise HR tasks that support these goals. This alignment ensures that HR efforts contribute directly to the company’s strategic direction.

Translate these objectives into specific workforce needs. If the organisation plans to expand internationally, HR may need to prioritise workforce planning, local employment requirements and management capability. If the business is struggling to deliver its services, addressing vacancies, unclear responsibilities or skill gaps may require attention first.

Step 2. Understand Employee Needs

Conduct surveys to identify what employees need most, but also identify the needs of managers and HR executive stakeholders. This information helps prioritise initiatives that improve employee satisfaction, productivity and business continuity.

Combine surveys with individual conversations, focus groups and feedback from employee representatives. Review patterns in absence, employee turnover, recruitment and recurring HR requests to understand where problems occur.

Listening should lead to action. Explain which issues will be addressed, what needs further investigation and which requests cannot currently be prioritised.

Step 3. Focus on High-Impact Activities

Use frameworks like the Covey “Put First Things First” matrix to distinguish between urgent and important tasks. Prioritise tasks that have a significant impact on the organisation, such as strategic planning and talent development.

Consider the consequences of postponing an activity. A task may be important because it protects employees, addresses a legal requirement, prevents a recurring problem or enables other work to move forward. The most visible request is not necessarily the highest priority.

Step 4. Plan for the Future

Stay informed about legal developments and industry trends to anticipate future needs and challenges with the Human in Progress Free Newsletter. This proactive approach ensures HR is prepared to support the organisation in the long term.

Allow time for preparation, implementation and communication. A future deadline may require action well in advance, particularly where changes depend on reliable employee data, new processes, manager training or employee consultation.

Use the Covey Time Management Matrix

HR professionals are constantly working on requests from both employees and the business. From handling recruitment and onboarding to managing employee relations, benefits, and compliance, professionals often find themselves juggling numerous tasks simultaneously.

This continuous influx of demands can be overwhelming, making it challenging to determine which tasks require immediate attention and which can be deferred.

Introducing the Covey Time Management Matrix might be a powerful tool categorising tasks based on urgency and importance. By adopting this method there will be more focus on high-impact activities, and you will regain control over your time.

HR Professionals often find themselves overwhelmed with tasks, struggling to prioritise and managing their time effectively.

There is the constant influx of stakeholder requests, meetings, and business activities to perform. This high workload may lead to stress, one of the top 10 underlying causes of absenteeism in the workplace.

Covey’s Time Management Matrix is one of the most effective methods, meant to focus your attention on the tasks that matter most and can be used in your work and for your personal growth.

However, the matrix does not create additional capacity. If the volume of important work exceeds the time and resources available, HR and management need to agree on what will be postponed, reduced or reassigned.

Categories to Setting Priorities

Covey’s Time Management Matrix comprises four quadrants representing a different combination of urgency and importance and is a great instrument to organise and prioritise.

The 4 levels of prioritising tasks are:

1. urgent and important.
2. important but not urgent.
3. urgent but not important.
4. neither urgent nor important.

 

Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important => Do These Activities Now

These activities require immediate attention because delaying them could have significant consequences for employees or the organisation.

HR examples include:

• Responding to an immediate employee safety concern.
• Meeting an imminent legal or contractual deadline.
• Arranging cover when an unexpected absence threatens a critical service.

These situations cannot always be avoided. However, recurring emergencies may indicate a problem with planning, responsibilities or processes.

Once the immediate issue is resolved, identify what could prevent it from happening again.

Quadrant 2: Important but Not Urgent => Schedule These Activities

These activities support long-term performance and help prevent future problems. They are often postponed because they do not come with an immediate request or deadline.

HR examples include:

• Workforce planning and succession planning.
• Developing managers’ skills.
• Reviewing policies and preparing for legal developments.
• Improving onboarding and knowledge transfer.
• Addressing the underlying causes of excessive workload.
• Reviewing job responsibilities, pay structures and development needs.

Protect time for these activities in your calendar and assign clear ownership. Without this commitment, important work can remain on the list until it becomes urgent.

Quadrant 3: Urgent but Not Important => Delegate or Redirect Activities

These activities demand attention but may not require your involvement or contribute significantly to your priorities.

HR examples include:

• Routine requests that can be handled through an agreed process.
• Meetings where your attendance adds little value.
• Requests sent to HR that belong with a manager or another department.
• Repeated questions already answered in accessible guidance.

An activity can be important to the person requesting it without requiring immediate attention from HR.

Clarify who should handle the request, agree on a reasonable response time and make relevant information easy to find.

Delegation should include clear instructions, appropriate authority and sufficient capacity. Passing work to someone who is already overloaded simply moves the problem.

Quadrant 4: Neither Urgent nor Important => Limit or Drop these Activities

These activities use time without providing sufficient value.

HR examples include:

• Producing reports that nobody uses.
• Maintaining duplicate spreadsheets without a clear purpose.
• Attending recurring meetings without decisions or useful outcomes.
• Repeatedly revising documents after the necessary standard has been met.

Before continuing an established activity, ask who uses the output and what decision or outcome it supports. Where the purpose is unclear, consider simplifying or stopping it.

Next Steps

When we have multiple tasks to do, we like to make lists as it might help us organise and structure, but it could lead into anxiety, being overwhelmed by the length of our to do list.

The Covey Time Management Matrix offers a solution.

The key is to put all your actions in the matrix and focus proactively on quadrant two, important tasks but not urgent, lessening quadrant three, not important but urgent and killing quadrant four, not important and not urgent, by saying that all important word: ‘No”.

Classification per category also needs regular review. A planned policy update may move from Quadrant 2 to Quadrant 1 as its implementation deadline approaches.

Key HR Priorities

The right HR priorities depend on the organisation’s goals, workforce and current challenges. The following areas provide a starting point for deciding where attention is needed.

Priority 1. Employee Well-Being

Implement comprehensive mental health and wellness programmes to support employees’ physical and mental health.

Alongside these programmes, assess how work is organised. Persistent overtime, unclear expectations, conflicting priorities and insufficient staffing may require changes to workload or management practices.

For example, if employees regularly work late because approvals take too long, improving the approval process may have a greater impact than introducing another wellness activity.

Priority 2. Talent Acquisition & Retention

Developing strategies to attract and retain top talent in a competitive job market.

Start by identifying which roles and capabilities are essential to business continuity and future plans. Consider whether the organisation needs to recruit, develop existing employees, improve internal mobility or redesign responsibilities.

Retention also requires attention to the employee experience after recruitment. Review onboarding, management support, development opportunities, workload and reward. Repeatedly recruiting for the same role may indicate an issue that recruitment alone will not resolve.

Priority 3. Remote Work & Flexibility

Create flexible work policies and support hybrid work models where these fit the work and organisational needs.

Move beyond the question of where employees work. Clarify availability, communication, decision-making, performance expectations and access to development opportunities.

Assess whether working arrangements support collaboration and a manageable workload. Employees should understand when they need to be available, how to raise problems and how their contribution will be assessed.

For international teams, consider differences in working hours and local requirements when designing arrangements.

Priority 4. Employee Development

Investing in learning and development training courses to up skill employees and close skill gaps.

Prioritise learning that addresses an identified business or employee need. This may include technical knowledge, management skills, professional judgement or the ability to work with new systems.

Protect time to apply what has been learned. Training has limited value if employees return to workloads that leave no room to practise.

Include knowledge transfer and opportunities for less experienced employees to learn from colleagues. When technology changes or removes routine tasks, consider how employees will continue to build the experience needed for more complex work.

Priority 5. Workforce Planning & Organisational Design

Assess if the organisation has the right capabilities, capacity and responsibilities to deliver its objectives.

Workforce planning involves more than forecasting headcount. Identify critical roles, dependencies on individual employees, future skill requirements and gaps in management capacity.

Review how work moves between teams. Delays and repeated corrections may result from unclear ownership or unnecessary handovers rather than a shortage of employees.

Connect these decisions with the HR Life Cycle so that recruitment, onboarding, performance management and development support the same workforce needs.

Priority 6. Legal Compliance & HR Governance

Maintain oversight of employment requirements, policy commitments and relevant implementation deadlines.

Translate requirements into practical actions: what needs to change, who is responsible, what information is needed and when preparation must begin. Distinguish confirmed obligations from proposed changes when planning work.

Clear governance also means knowing who can make decisions, who needs to be involved and when specialist advice is required. Where applicable, include employee representatives early enough to accommodate the relevant information and consultation processes.

For organisations operating across countries, connect international HR principles with local requirements. A consistent approach does not always mean applying an identical policy everywhere.

Priority 7. HR Technology, AI & Process Improvement

Prioritise technology that addresses a clearly defined problem, such as duplicate administration, unreliable data or slow access to information.

Before introducing a new AI tool, review the process it will support. Automating an unclear process may create additional checking and correction work.

Assess the effect on the whole workflow, including preparation, handovers, review and follow-up. A task completed faster does not necessarily mean the overall process takes less time.

Where AI supports HR activities, clarify permitted uses, responsibility for reviewing outputs and how employee information will be handled. Include the time needed for training and oversight in the implementation plan.

Priority 8. Management Capability & Change

New policies and systems often depend on managers to explain and apply them. Consider their existing workload before adding implementation responsibilities.

For each significant change, identify what managers and employees need to understand and use a Changement Management model.

In this way HR’s plans will connect with the organisation’s capacity to put them into practice.

Turn HR Priorities into an Action Plan

A list of important topics becomes useful when it guides decisions about time, resources and ownership.

Select a manageable number of priorities for the next planning period. For each priority, define:

• The outcome: What should improve for the organisation or its employees?
• The owner: Who is accountable for delivery and decisions?
• The resources: What time, budget and expertise are required?
• The dependencies: Which approvals, information or other activities must come first?
• The milestones: What needs to happen, and by when?
• The measures: How will you assess whether the action has worked?

For example, improve onboarding is a broad ambition. A practical priority would be to introduce a consistent onboarding process for a particular team, assign responsibility for each stage and review whether new employees receive the information and support they need.

Review Priorities Regularly

Review immediate tasks weekly and strategic priorities at an agreed interval, such as monthly or quarterly.

Ask whether the original need still exists, whether the work is producing the intended result and whether new developments require a change in direction.

Pay particular attention to recurring urgent work. Repeated payroll corrections, recruitment delays or employee complaints may signal an underlying issue that deserves a place in Quadrant 2.

Effective prioritisation connects today’s decisions with the organisation’s longer-term needs. It helps HR protect time for the work that prevents problems, strengthens capabilities and supports sustainable performance.

More Information

• Use the Covey Time Management Matrix to Increase Your Productivity.
• Strategic International Human Resource Management (SIHRM).
• HR Life Cycle: What Every HR Leader Should Master.
• Understanding the Change Management Models.