Internal HR teams play a critical role in shaping company culture, supporting employees, and keeping organizations compliant, but as companies grow, HR responsibilities tend to expand faster than team size and resources.
Today’s internal HR teams are expected to manage recruiting, compliance, employee experience, performance, and day-to-day operations — all at once. Add global hiring into the mix, and the workload and complexity increase even further.
In this post, we’ll break down six common challenges internal HR teams face and practical ways to overcome them.
The Expanding Role of Internal HR
While internal HR once focused primarily on paperwork and policies, it’s now a strategic business function that directly impacts growth, performance, and employee satisfaction. Modern HR teams are expected to align people strategies with business goals while supporting employees at every stage of the lifecycle.
As a result, the list of responsibilities HR manages continues to grow, and many internal HR teams are simultaneously responsible for talent acquisition, onboarding, employee development, compliance, payroll, benefits, culture-building, and retention initiatives.
Juggling all of these priorities can be especially overwhelming for smaller HR teams. Limited bandwidth often leads to burnout and forces teams into reactive problem-solving instead of proactive planning and long-term strategy.
But with the right processes, tools, and support, internal HR teams can regain focus, reduce strain, and operate more effectively.
Challenge #1: Limited Bandwidth and Resource Constraints
As companies grow, many internal HR teams find themselves stretched thin. In fact, 57% of HR departments are understaffed and 62% work beyond their capacity, according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2025 State of the Workplace report.
HR leaders are often responsible for both strategic initiatives and numerous administrative tasks, and these time-consuming duties can take attention away from higher-impact work.
What This Looks Like
- Manual onboarding processes: When onboarding relies on spreadsheets, emails, and paperwork, HR teams spend hours repeating the same administrative steps.
- Repetitive documentation and reporting: Regularly generating and tracking compliance, performance, and employee records takes significant time.
How to Overcome It
Automate repetitive workflows.
Introducing automation tools for onboarding, documentation, payroll, and other HR processes reduces manual effort. For example, automated onboarding workflows can reduce the time HR spends on repetitive tasks and improve consistency and the employee experience.
Prioritize high-impact initiatives.
Use prioritization frameworks, such as Eisenhower’s Urgent-Important Matrix, to distinguish high-value activities, such as workforce planning and leadership development, from low-value work, like manual report generation. Another strategy is to regularly audit HR processes to identify bottlenecks and simplify processes.
Partner with external providers.
Working with external partners — such as payroll providers, professional employer organizations (PEO), or Employers of Record (EOR) can take operational tasks off your internal team’s plate. Outsourcing tasks such as payroll administration or benefits management gives HR more headspace to concentrate on strategy, culture, and employee experience.
Read more: PEO vs. EOR: The difference (And Which is Right for You)
Challenge #2: Staying Compliant With Changing Employment Laws
Employment regulations constantly evolve, and HR teams must stay up to date on labor laws, worker classification rules, termination requirements, benefits mandates, and other legal requirements that vary by location.
What This Looks Like
- Labor laws: Minimum wage thresholds, notice periods, and leave entitlements can frequently change, requiring updates to contracts and payroll systems.
- Worker classification rules: Determining whether someone is an employee, contractor, or in another category is critical, and misclassification can result in fines and legal issues.
- Termination requirements: Notice periods and severance obligations differ by jurisdiction, making termination compliance difficult to manage for HR teams stretched thin.
- Benefits mandates: Rules on statutory benefits, retirement contributions, healthcare, and other entitlements vary across countries, and can be hard for a small team to track.
How to Overcome It
1. Develop a compliance calendar and documentation system.
Create a calendar that tracks regulation updates, renewal deadlines, and upcoming legislative changes in every region where your company operates. Pair this with a documentation system for policies, contracts, and procedures, so you can quickly update materials as laws evolve.
2. Work with advisers.Partnering with employment law attorneys or HR compliance specialists ensures your team gets expert guidance on regulatory changes and their practical implications.
3. Leverage partners that specialize in employment regulations.Working with partners like an EOR can offload much of the regulatory burden for companies hiring across borders. These partners are experts in local labor laws and can handle payroll, benefits, contracts, onboarding compliance, and more.
Challenge #3: Scaling Hiring Without Breaking Processes
When companies hire rapidly, gaps in their HR infrastructure often come to light, especially when hiring across multiple countries. Without repeatable, structured hiring and onboarding workflows, HR teams can struggle.
What This Looks Like
- Inconsistent onboarding experiences: Without a standardized system, new hires can encounter different onboarding journeys depending on their team or manager, leading to confusion and lower engagement.
- Delays in documentation and setup: Rapid hiring increases the number of contracts, tax forms, payroll setup, and benefits enrollment that must be processed and managed, and manual steps can easily become bottlenecks.
- Difficulty maintaining culture during growth: As headcount expands, the original values of a smaller team can be diluted unless efforts are made to reinforce culture.
- International hiring adds complexity: Hiring across borders introduces multiple employment contracts, differing local benefits expectations, and payroll processes that vary by jurisdiction, increasing administrative work and the potential for costly errors.
How to Overcome It
1. Standardize onboarding.
Develop an onboarding framework that includes documentation checklists, role-specific training plans, and introductions to company values. Building consistent frameworks ensures that every employee starts with the same foundation, no matter where they’re based.
2. Create repeatable workflows.
Map out your ideal hiring journey from offer to start date, and build repeatable, documented workflows for each stage. Use tools, templates, and tech tools to automate tasks such as interview scheduling, candidate communication, and offer letters.
3. Document best practices.
Document hiring and onboarding best practices as soon as they’re developed. Early documentation makes it easier to train new HR staff and maintain quality as your company grows — plus it creates institutional knowledge.
Challenge #4: Balancing Employee Experience With Administrative Demands
Internal HR teams are expected to manage operational tasks and administrative work while also enhancing the employee experience. But when the admin tasks dominate HR’s time, there’s less capacity for initiatives that impact morale and engagement. This can hurt retention, hinder workplace culture, and reduce productivity.
What This Looks Like
- Administrative workload outweighs strategy: HR teams often spend substantial time on paperwork, compliance checks, and system maintenance, leaving limited time to design and implement employee-centric programs.
- Limited capacity for career development: Programs that help employees grow professionally require planning and investment that may be deprioritized when HR is overwhelmed.
- Reduced engagement initiatives: Activities that build connection and engagement, such as recognition programs and team-building efforts, require a time investment that busy HR teams may not have.
- Less support for managers: Coaching people leaders is vital to building strong teams, but HR practitioners may not have the bandwidth to do so.
How to Overcome It
1. Delegate operational tasks.
Use HR technology to automate repetitive tasks — reducing administrative burdens. Tools such as HRIS systems, onboarding platforms, and employee service portals streamline workflows. Partnering with external providers for payroll, benefits administration, or global compliance also frees up internal capacity.
2. Schedule time for people-focused initiatives.
Block out time on the HR team’s calendar for employee experience work, such as engagement surveys and manager training.
3. Use feedback loops to identify experience gaps.
Regularly solicit employee feedback to understand where HR support is most needed. Pulse surveys, focus groups, or suggestion platforms can help pinpoint areas for improvement and ensure HR initiatives are aligned with employee needs.
Challenge #5: Managing Global and Remote Teams
As companies expand into new countries, HR teams face new layers of complexity. Distributed teams bring coordination challenges, cultural differences, and varying benefit expectations. These added responsibilities can stretch HR teams thin, especially if they have little prior international experience.
What This Looks Like
- Time zone coordination: Ensuring synchronous collaboration becomes harder as teams span continents, often requiring careful planning or asynchronous work norms.
- Cultural differences: Variations in communication styles and expectations about leadership or feedback can lead to misunderstandings or disengagement.
- Varying benefits expectations: Employees in different countries often expect different benefit packages, complicating HR operations.
- Cross-border payroll challenges: Different tax laws, payment systems, and payroll requirements can bog down HR teams unfamiliar with international payroll practices.
How to Overcome It
1. Develop region-specific guidelines.
Create localized policies that reflect the employment standards, cultural norms, and expectations of each market where your team operates.
2. Provide remote-management training.
Invest in training for managers and HR practitioners on how to lead distributed and culturally diverse teams effectively.
3. Use partners that understand local employment.
Working with EOR providers, HR consultancies, or global payroll specialists gives HR teams access to expertise in local regulations, reducing risk and operational load.
Challenge #6: Data Fragmentation and Lack of Visibility
Many HR teams struggle to get an accurate picture of their workforce because data is scattered across multiple systems. Applicant tracking systems, payroll tools, benefits providers, and performance management software often operate in isolation, creating data silos. This fragmentation slows reporting and undermines internal HR efforts.
What This Looks Like
- Data scattered across systems: When employee information lives in separate systems, HR teams lack a single source of truth.
- Hard-to-track workforce trends: Without consolidated data, measuring patterns like turnover and engagement becomes slower and less accurate.
- Limited visibility: Disconnected HR data makes it difficult to understand why retention is falling or where engagement efforts are effective.
- Challenges in strategic planning: Strategic HR activities require high-quality, integrated data, but fragmented systems slow this work and lead to less accurate insights..
How to Overcome It
1. Consolidate tools.
Bring HR data into a more unified system to reduce silos and improve accuracy.
2. Standardize reporting processes.
Establish consistent reporting formats that pull relevant data from across tools into a central view.
3. Invest in platforms that integrate HR functions.
When consolidation isn’t possible, choose platforms that can integrate with one another through APIs.
Building a More Resilient HR Function
Many of the challenges internal HR teams face don’t come from a lack of expertise or effort — they’re simply a result of rapid growth, increased complexity, and limited resources. As organizations scale, the demands placed on HR grow faster than processes and infrastructure can keep pace. Building a more resilient HR function means intentionally addressing those gaps.
One of the most effective shifts HR teams can make is moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive planning. Anticipating hiring needs, compliance changes, and workforce challenges empowers HR to get ahead of issues rather than play catch-up.
Investing in process documentation early is another critical step. Clearly defined workflows, playbooks, and policies create consistency, reduce reliance on individuals, and make scaling easier. Documentation also helps onboard new HR team members faster and preserves institutional knowledge as the company grows.
Strong cross-functional partnerships are equally important. Close collaboration with leadership, finance, and operations ensures HR strategies are aligned with business goals and budgets. These relationships make it easier to prioritize initiatives, secure resources, and implement changes that benefit the organization.
How an EOR Can Support Internal HR Teams
For companies with employees in multiple countries, partnering with an EOR is one of the most effective ways to simplify HR operations. An EOR assumes the legal and administrative responsibilities of international employment, significantly reducing the operational burden on internal HR teams.
By working with an EOR, companies can offload complex tasks such as employment administration, locally compliant contracts, and onboarding in new regions. EORs also manage payroll and benefits in accordance with local requirements and assume responsibility for ongoing compliance.
Plus, EORs enable global hiring without the need to set up local legal entities. This makes it easier for HR teams to support business expansion and hire faster in new markets.
RemoFirst helps companies employ globally by assuming HR responsibilities for international hires. We manage employment contracts, onboarding, payroll, benefits administration, taxes, and local labor law compliance in 185+ countries. Thanks to a partnership with RemoFirst, internal HR teams can focus on strategy and people — not paperwork.
Ready to see what RemoFirst can do for your HR team? Schedule a demo.
