According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the main roles of the HR team are employee recruitment and management, as well as planning and coordinating your company’s administrative functions.
Now, with the growth of sophisticated HR technologies, the roles and responsibilities of HR teams have evolved. Automation and AI-backed tools give them the opportunity to streamline manual and repetitive tasks. Today’s HR management is also more strategic, focusing more on the people and building a solid company culture.
Want to learn more about the roles of HR managers and their impact on your organisational culture?
Keep reading!
Hiring and Retaining the Right Employees
In today’s highly competitive market, finding and hiring the right employees has become extremely challenging. Retaining them has become even more complicated. One of the major tasks of your HR manager is to find the people that are a perfect fit for your team. The goal is to find the most compatible candidates, as well as those with strong soft skills.
Only by hiring people that are willing to learn and collaborate will you be able to grow your business as expected. An HR specialist will probably ask questions that focus on an employee’s personality. If their values and perceptions of workplace culture don’t match yours, this means you should probably look for another candidate. They should also make sure that several people are involved in the hiring process.
This way, an HR specialist can get a wider image of their skills and compare them to choose the right candidate for the organisation. Above all, they need to maintain open communication, ask for feedback constantly, incentivise hard work, and track employee behaviours and relationships to keep employees satisfied and retain them.
Remember that retaining an experienced employee is simpler and more affordable than attracting a new one. Given the cost of hiring, on-boarding, employer marketing, and training, it’s not surprising that the average U.S. company spends about $4,000 to hire a new employee and takes 52 days to fill a position.
Conducting consistent employee training
Your employees expect you to help them improve their skills and provide adequate professional growth opportunities. That is where your HR team shines. It needs to provide your employees with the right training programs. Apart from helping them excel their skills, this will also motivate your staff members to push harder.
They could also provide training programs that focus on the importance of successful communications and collaboration. Training can be either internal or external. No matter what option you choose, always add gamification to courses to keep them more relevant and engaging.
Apart from inviting in-house or external consultants to host a training program, you could also empower your HR manager to find the right online training courses.
The options are multiple. For STEM focused learning, Clutch Prep is perfect for businesses that are hiring interns. This platform provides video tutorials that follow students’ course books. This way, interns will gain lots of practical knowledge and, if they keep working for you, contribute to your business’ growth.
Other online learning platforms you could use are Docebo, Udemy, Skillshare, and Adobe Captivate Prime. The role of an HR manager is to find the courses that meet the organisation’s values and resonate with its teams.
Improving collaboration across departments
To improve overall workplace performance and provide seamless customer experiences, modern businesses need to invest more in cross-departmental collaboration and eliminating the siloed business structure.
Every staff member is a significant cog in your company’s machine and, as such, they should work together. For example, your marketing, product development, and sales teams should customer data to understand them better and boost operation.
This is where your HR manager steps in. Their job is to foster stronger relationships between employees and ensure they will collaborate as a single team. An HR manager should also empower employees by explaining how each of them impacts the organisation.
Promoting company culture
As an entrepreneur, you probably often hear that culture is the key to business success or that people matter the most. While this does make sense, you should keep in mind that building a unique company culture would not be possible without hiring an experienced human resources manager.
They are uniquely positioned within your organisation to have the largest influence on your business’ success. An HR specialist is an architect of your company’s culture. Their goal is to hire people that fit your goals and values.
This way, they will build a unique corporate culture and help you build a recognisable employer brand that will build trust with your prospective candidates and attract top talent. As such, they are the biggest advocates of your unique corporate culture.
Improving workplace diversity
Fast Company says that businesses that invest more in employee diversity outperform those that do not have diversity and inclusion programs by 58%. In the era of social networks and numerous hiring platforms, HR teams need to be more tech-savvy.
They finally have access to the global talent pool, being able to hire top-notch employees, irrespective of their location. Their job is to find the right channels, know how to connect with potential candidates and intrigue them, as well as build a strategy that would help them interview, hire, and onboard global staff.
HR managers should also address global issues. When hiring global talent, HR professionals need to understand national cultural values in the countries where their company operates or whose employees they hire.
Based on that, they should tailor the work environment to their employees’ specific needs and educate employees to respect their colleagues’ national, cultural, gender, sexual, or religious identity.
Minimising conflicts
As the number of your employees grow and your company starts expanding to new markets, the diversity of your organisation will also be higher. As an employer, you should never forget that each employee is different.
They have different values, beliefs, goals, motivations, interests, backgrounds, education, experiences, and so forth. This is where conflicts may occur and it is HR professionals’ task to recognise and minimise them effectively.
Instead of punitive management methods, an HR specialist should be a mediator. They should listen to employees, try to understand their complaints and the causes of the problem, and help them find the solution effectively.
They should also develop clear rules and regulations, letting employees know what they can(not) do. An HR manager needs to build strict policies that will prevent any staff member from expressing offensive feelings that contradict your diverse corporate culture.
Image: Pexels
Importance of Equipping your HR Team with the Right Tools
The latest tech advancements have disrupted almost any sector, including human resources. The implementation of sophisticated HR tools is constantly growing.
According to the research study by Markets and Markets, the HR software market was worth $6.47 billion only in 2017 and this number is expected to reach $9.89 billion by 2022.
For you, this means that you will need to invest in the right tools and automate certain HR tasks to stay competitive. Modern HR software is not only a productivity booster. It is also a great chance to make your HR team more employee-oriented and build a firmer organisational culture.
With this in mind, let’s keep a few HR sector trends you should implement right now.
Natural language processing
These technologies have wide use in numerous industries, including HR. Let’s look at recruitment chatbots that can simplify employee recruitment. Namely, they can point candidates to the right pages on your website, ask for their contact information and resumes, learn about their skills and experiences, and guide them toward different stages of the recruitment process.
In other words, chatbots will automate the repetitive aspects of the recruitment process and let HR managers focus on complex tasks that cannot be automated.
Employee feedback and analytics
Modern tools let you collect employee data easier and turn it into a series of actionable steps. For example, with 6Q, you can create relevant employee surveys your staff will love. They will save your employees’ time and, at the same time, help HR managers gather their feedback regularly and have a better understanding of their current moods and satisfaction.
With augmented analytics tools like Veriato, HR teams can monitor employees’ online browsing patterns, their emails, etc. and use this data to monitor any changes in their satisfaction, identify employees that may decide to switch jobs, and take steps to prevent that on time.
Employee recognition software
The goal of any employer is to keep their staff happy and minimise employee turnover. One of the most effective ways to do so is to recognise their effort and incentivise them. That’s where employee recognition software can help.
With such tools, your HR staff will be able to monitor their colleagues’ performance in real-time, increase the security of the employee recognition program, engage employees effectively, and make it more transparent and easier to understand.
In Summary
The human resources department is vital for your company culture. These are just some of the numerous roles and responsibilities of the HR professional. They need to focus on developing and nurturing a strong corporate culture by investing in transparency, collaboration, communication, and workplace diversity.
The HR team should also mind your company’s values when hiring new candidates and focus on reducing workplace tension and conflict. Most importantly, their roles should be employee-oriented. They need to get to know each employee, collect their feedback, and turn this data into actionable steps that will improve and solidify your organisational structure.
About the Author
Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organisational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmark blog.
