7 Top Responsibilities of Human Resource Professionals

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In a rapidly changing business landscape, most organizations are victims of issues like:

  • Lack of skilled employees
  • Below par performance
  • Regulatory compliance lapses
  • Lack of communications
  • Training programs not aligned with overall goals of the organization

To above if we add factors like cost of hiring, training, retaining top talent and the external competition, then it is evident that no company can afford to fail to address these areas effectively.

This makes Human Resource Management (HRM) function very crucial for success of any organization.

What Does HR Actually Do?

It is very important that Human Resource professionals understand overall goals of their company and where it wants to be in short and long term. Based on this understanding, HR should devise a strategy to build the kind of human resource skills required to reach the goals.

This underlines the fact that HRM needs to work very closely with the Management, to understand the top priority goals and needs to ensure human resources are aligned towards those goals.

Human Resource Management plays a very crucial role both as a management function and an operating department within an organization.

In the following article, we will cover 7 key areas required for a strong foundation of Human Resource Management, as well as a clear understanding of how Human Resource Management links with overall business strategy.

It is recommended that every HR professional should master these to succeed and to be a key contributor.

7 Key Responsibilities of a HR Professional

SL.NO 7 Key Responsibilities of a HR Professional
1 Organizational Development
2 Recruiting and Onboarding
3 Payroll and Compensation
4 Performance Management
5 career planning
6 Regulatory Compliance
7 Maintain Employee Records

Organizational Development

Human resource management plays a key role in helping any organization to achieve its key objectives. HR professionals need to ensure that they are working closely with company executives so that they have clear idea about company’s short- and long-term goals.

Based on this understanding, HR professionals should work out a strategic plan for human resource development. They should evaluate current pool of available skills set and do the skills gap analysis. Working closely with various department heads becomes a key to get this analysis right.

Skills gap analysis will give HR professionals a clear idea about what skills are already available in house, what skills can be built via training & development and what skills they need to acquire via hiring process.

Without clear understanding of organizational goals, any HR professional will be just shooting in the dark. Hence, mastering this becomes the first step towards acing this role.

Recruiting and Onboarding

Equipped with clear understanding about organizational goals and insights from skills gap analysis, now HR Professionals should be able to plan their recruiting and onboarding processes.

Human Resource professionals should set a clear timeline-based targets to ensure crucial skillset gap is filled. HR professionals should ensure right candidates are hired who have the skills to deliver on company’s goals.

An effective recruitment process should be backed with a solid onboarding process.

A successful onboarding process ensures that employees are hired with right expectations, new hires are aware of crucial policies and procedures, right people to contact and enable them to hit the ground running.

HR department can effectively achieve this by following some of latest industry practices as:

  • Making use of latest technology to streamline the administrative tasks
  • Using automation to accomplish more in less time
  • Making sure diversity and inclusion are core pillars of your hiring strategy
  • Using HR Analytics for effective data driven decisions throughout the hiring cycle

Payroll and Compensation

Employees should be rewarded and paid in proportion to the value they are adding at the end of the day.

Setting up a competitive and effective payroll and compensation plan takes proper research and strategic planning.

Effective compensation plan can vary from country to country. Some countries, such as the USA, expects employers to include health insurance as a part of a job offer, whereas, in other countries same is not mandatory. Hence, it is important to understand laws of the land related to it and plan accordingly.

Today Payroll and compensation plans are much more than just monetary rewards.

Employees evaluate companies based on what is included and not, before joining any company.

These days a comprehensive compensation plan should address areas like:

  • Career growth opportunities
  • Work-life balance
  • Company culture
  • Meaningful work opportunities etc.

Performance Management

Productive and Engaged employees are hallmarks of all top companies!

These are the outcomes of a System made up of:

  • Clear goal setting
  • Effective performance metrics in place
  • Open feedback system.

HR professionals play a very crucial role in successfully getting this system implemented and followed across the company.

Regular performance appraisals to evaluate the performance and areas of improvement are very crucial.

360-degree feedback system, where colleagues, managers and even clients have a say becomes very crucial.

Above system not only helps an employee to understand her strengths and weaknesses, but also gives a clear picture to management about what areas they are lagging in terms of skillset and plan their Learning & Development activities accordingly.

career planning

Helping employees with career planning not only can help you retain employees but can also attract external talent.

Employees with clear career path, aligned with their areas of interests tend to be most productive and engaged.

Companies with no clear picture about their employee’s career path will not only risk losing on top talent, as well as becoming obsolete in today’s fast changing competitive landscape.

Employees expect their employer to provide clear career development path in addition to a competitive paycheck.

Before employees can have clear career path, it is crucial for a company to be very clear on its overall goals and objectives. Hence, role of management is very crucial in setting clear direction for the company and HR professionals become crucial in aligning employees career path aligning with it.

In general, a career planning process involves following steps:

  • Identifying individual employees needs and goals
  • Analyzing career opportunities as per company goals
  • Aligning employees needs with available career opportunities
  • Formulating Action plans with clear stakeholders and set milestones
  • Performing periodic reviews
  • Optimizing the effectiveness of a career plan

HR professionals can help a company to set-up an effective career planning process which can boost:

  • Employee engagement
  • Employee productivity
  • Healthy Human resource pipeline

How well a company is performing in above 3 areas can decide how successfully it can navigate through external competitive landscape.

Regulatory Compliance

Compliance with Federal labor and employment laws is very crucial for any organization.

HR professionals need to ensure that they are aware of various federal, state, and local employment laws and regulatory compliance is in place, as expected.

Key Federal Employment laws in USA are:

  • Title VII (of the Civil Rights Act)
  • The Americans with Disabilities Act
  • The Age discrimination in Employment Act
  • The Equal Pay Act
  • The Pregnancy Discrimination Act
  • The Fair Labor Standards Act
  • The Occupational Safety and Health Act
  • The Family and Medical Leave Act
  • The National Labor Relations Act

 

Failing to meet compliance needs can result in workplace complaints, external audits which can result into fines and penalties, as well as damage to company’s reputation.

Workplace complaints result into dissatisfied employees, which in turn directly impacts their productivity and engagement.

HR department needs to ensure health and safety regulations are created and properly implemented across the company. Federal bodies expect employers to provide a safe working environment for its employees.

No, company should take the risk of missing out on compliance to laws, and HR professionals have a key role to play in this.

Maintain Employee Records

Record-keeping, of anything related to employees, is one of the key responsibilities of HR professionals. Maintaining proper HR records are mandated as per Federal labor laws.

Most companies make use of effective record-keeping system to track details like:

  • Payroll
  • Identify skills gap
  • Plan Learning and development
  • Succession planning
  • Benefits administration
  • Performance management
  • Time and attendance
  • Employment history
  • Demographic data

A company can have its own technical infrastructure to maintain the data or go for various cloud-based solutions.

Maintaining accurate and updated employee data records can make key process like recruitment, performance management, Learning and development etc. more effective. Hence, HR professionals need to ensure they are following best practices recommended in this area.

How does HR Support Employees?

For most organizations, human resource is their biggest asset and provide a major competitive edge. Hence, HR Professionals supporting employees with their career and emotional needs becomes very crucial in today’s time.

Many organizations run various career development and benefit programs to retain, as well as attract top industry talent.

Below are 3 quick ways HR professionals can work with management to build effective employee support programs:

  1. Offering continuing education opportunities: HR professionals should work together with managers to identify high priority learning needs. Accordingly, they should plan for additional training programs using resources available internally or making use of external training partners like
  2. Maintaining Employee Awareness: HR Professionals should ensure that employees are aware of development within the organization, major milestones achieved, policies updates, new benefit plans launched etc. Doing this effectively will not only keep employees informed about latest developments, as well as align them better with company goals, visions and value system.
  3. Personal wellbeing and providing Support for Domestic Violence Victims: Problems inside and outside the workplace can impact productivity of employees. Hence, HR function should ensure proper support system is in place at one-to-one level.

Let us know according to you which are the most important job functions of a HR Professional.

HR is a very dynamic role which helps companies to get most of their workforce.

As an HR professional, you need to ensure that you are constantly keeping yourself updated with latest industry practices and continuously working on building your skill set.

HRComplianceInfo provides variety of learning and development resources for HR Professionals to ensure they are equipped with proven strategies and frameworks and continue to lead their workforce confidently in the right direction.

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