Eight Main Roles and Responsibilities of Human Resources Department
Employees are a company’s most valuable asset. An organisation depends on the skills and abilities of its workers to reach its goals. This places the human resources department—whose responsibilities include recruitment selection, performance management, and employee retention—as a key player in a company’s success.
Understand the important role of the HR department through a glimpse of its functions and responsibilities. Here is a list of its main tasks.
- Planning and strategising
Because HR has to manage the entirety of a company's workforce, there is a lot of planning and strategising involved in the work they do. HR ensures that the fair number of candidates with the right set of skills are hired at a reasonable salary. Aside from this, they also work to avoid shortages or surpluses—shortages would negatively impact productivity and surpluses would be a minus to company profit.
The HR department also figures out ways to develop the knowledge and abilities of employees so they remain competent in their roles. They come up with strategies to boost employee retention and motivation so that valuable workers stay in the company. HR is responsible for formulating policies and procedures to ensure fairness in the workplace as well.
- Hiring
Job seekers may be familiar with the hiring process. It starts with the HR department analysing the needs of the role to be filled; it ends in facilitating employee onboarding and orientation. HR employees need to take meticulous care to hire capable employees who become assets to the company.
To break down the hiring process, an HR employee identifies the requirements of an open position, searches for candidates to fill the role, screens the talents, and conducts background checks. Afterwards, they lay down the job offer, discuss compensation and benefits, hire the qualified candidate, and then finally conduct new employee onboarding and orientation.
- Training and development
Training opportunities, which the HR department organises, allow employees to grow and develop the skills they need to excel at their job. This not only benefits employees as they get to improve and add to their skill set, it also results in higher productivity for the company.
JobStreet Laws of Attraction research reveals that Malaysian candidates, both in junior- and senior-level and across a wide range of industries, place great importance in finding a workplace that offers career and development opportunities. This means organisations are able to attract and retain candidates by providing training programs as well.
- Documentation and payroll
It is part of HR’s duties to manage the employee database and safeguard information about each employee in the company. The database typically includes a talent's work history, qualifications, performance appraisal results, salary information, and attendance record.
HR also manages payroll. Tasks for this include: calculating taxes and other deductions such as unpaid absences; tracking and carrying out reimbursements, salary raises, and bonuses; and processing payments so employees are paid on time.
- Performance and reward management
Performance management is the process of reviewing the performance of an employee during a given amount of time, usually over a year. Partly through this, HR determines if hired employees are doing the work that is expected of them. During performance reviews, HR and the employee’s direct supervisor can provide feedback and clarify role objectives and goals to the talent.
A well-constructed performance system, of which HR is responsible for, can motivate and develop employees as well. Part of how a company motivates its employees is through incentives and rewards—monetary or otherwise—that can be based on the performance system.
- Employee Relations
Employee relations pertains to an organisation's efforts to maintain a good relationship with its employees. HR plays a big role in this as it is responsible for preventing, addressing, and resolving problems that arise between talents and management. They create policies that affect workers. Usually, these include compensation and benefits and working hours, safe working conditions, good conflict management, work-life balance, and more.
A good relationship between the organisation and its employees translates to workers who are engaged and loyal to their work. Successful employee relations programs lead to candidates who feel that they are treated fairly and well by the company.
- Career and Succession Planning
HR supports the growth and development of workers through career planning. They provide skills training and development opportunities, create promotion procedures and selection criteria, assist with the transition of newly promoted employees, and more.
In succession planning, HR makes sure employees are skilled and competent enough that when a position becomes vacant an employee already within the company is prepared to take on the role. Targeted employee coaching and training is also a common strategy for this.
- Talent management
Talent management encompasses many of the HR department's responsibilities. In essence, it refers to the process of reaching the maximum potential of a company's workforce to drive performance and productivity.
This aspect of HR thinks long-term and looks at the big picture. Everything from recruitment, training and development, and retention have to do with talent management. HR talent management sees to it that each employee contributes to helping the company reach success.
Human resource professionals are hard-working, knowledgeable, and highly capable. Accountable for the management of an organisation, they look after each employee’s career growth, job satisfaction, and well-being.
Success hinges on employees. To get there, the journey starts with a good HR team.
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