You Must have heard some wise people saying : “some people should not be confined with a designation”. Well! I heard my director saying this often and he has a solid reason in support to this; when you designate a dynamic person, you make him feel like President of India – highest position yet limited power. In consequence, the one at loss is the business because much more can be obtained from such a person.
You must be wondering why we are discussing statements mentioned in above paragraph. This is because, believe it or not, an HR personnel is one such person who, even though has designation but his/her nature of work is not at all confined or guided by fixed line of codes. So this means that lot is expected from HR and if you are about to be recruited for this position, read on to know what you should be ready for at the work place.
I have listed some category of work HR needs to take on at the work place and this data is based on HR profile at different industrial domain. I have also tried to connect the skills that would be needed for each of the mentioned work profile.
1. Consultancy, within & outside the organization
When your doubt is answered in a detailed way by professional, by considering all pros and cons and without any personal benefit of the organization, that is termed as consultancy. The HR will have to provide explanations to all the suggestions being given to people who are either directly or indirectly connected with thier business. The consultancy within the organization can be regarding the benefit policy which can be availed by employee, or to people outside organization, suggesting them appropriate service.
For such role, HR must have good real world knowledge, at least in the concerned domain and good power of analysis.
2. One-point-stop for queries
When something is to be asked, like about organization, its services, events, the person who is looked upon with expectation is HR personnel.
This makes it very clear that he/she must be on toes everytime to answer the queries and for providing correct answer, you must have understandability of the nature of question.
3. Understand company’s policy and check for its implementation
Policy makers have done their job of strategizing and have pen down the final policies or rules. Now the responsibility is of HR to broadcast it among relevant group of the organization. For this purpose, HR must make sure every point of the policy is understood by him/her, because if wrong is broadcasted, wrong will be executed by employees and the blame will all be on HR.
4. Does maximum of paper work for the company
Many have the assumption that maintaining documents like appointment letters, formal conversation letters, schedule design, promotional document design, etc. is the main job they will be doing if they are working as HR of a company. This is correct.
Document maintenance is very important and crucial task for any company. Every work, already mentioned or which I am about to mention in further points, requires support of documentation. Thus you need to be good in designing formatted document, both, as hardcopy as well as softcopy using MS Word or other tools.
5. Preparation of organization’s presentation for various business processes
All what is happening in the organization, whether business has attained growth,
has a culture to share, has some innovative plan, etc. needs to be presented. The
HR is generally explained the presentation content and given job to present it in
front of people, sometimes only from organization or sometimes to people apart from
company.
You must possess skills to confront public gathering, effective communication (not
necessarily in English), content knowledge and use of supporting tools like MS powerpoint,
projector handling, etc.
6. At time of recruitment
At the time of recruitment, HR prepares required documents like questionnaires,
arrange received applications to shortlist them as pre-process or according to the
job profile needed by management.
To co-ordinate the recruitment process effectively, firstly learn the process correctly
from your seniors and stick to the same otherwise the intent of management, associated
with recruitment, will fail.
7. Prepare handbooks and advisory documents for the employees
Most of the organizations provide printed documents called handbooks, for their
employees and such books contain all the guidelines that are applied over employees.
HR is sometimes asked to create such handbook, both on technical and theoretical
level.
For designing such papers, first analyze at your level what all should be included
in the document. This can be done by common sense or by keeping other known organization
in mind. But be careful for the latter case as your organization’s situation
may be altogether different from the organization which you are considering as role
model and adopting its working style might harm your company.
8. Advice employees on pay, grievance and other remuneration issues
Fights, disagreement, verbal and cold war within employees, issues over uneven appraisals,
personal tension with team member or some senior, skepticism, etc. are just few
of the examples of situations that you, being designated as HR personnel, has to
take care. You will be guided by management of course, but you will be the one who
will be facing the anger, resentment, tears and fears of the employees at those
times of issues.
You have to be patient, unbiased and clever to handle grievance and other some not-so-happy
situations at the work place.
9. Most important, maintain employee records
Maintaining of employee records is one of the daily work of HR. The records are
to be printed on the paper and making appropriate files or sometimes some uses software
to do this function. Whatever the mode of keeping records, important is the accuracy
of records.
This declares that you need full concentration while performing this part of your
job. So you can start making list of all those things that may distract you like
mobile phones, internet, chocolate, etc. and avoid using them when you will be recording
employee details.
11. Induction training to newly recruited trainees.
HR, in informal sense, can be synonym to public relations and interacting with people.
In this series, addressing induction program for new recruited candidates of the
company is also on the list of work for HRs.
For this work, again you need to have accurate knowledge of what is to be addressed.
Your seniors will help you in this.
12. Analyzing training need for a department and helps in administering the
same
There is one work that HR has to do in parallel to all the above mentioned work
and i.e. see if a department needs training. And after getting the answer in yes,
work on understanding the training need and proceed with administering the same.
For this, you should be analytical and must be aware about what is work of the particular
department, only then you can decide what is good for it and which is bad for the
selected department.
These are the work that I felt an HR does. The list may have room to accommodate
more points. Do let us know if you have some. This might help someone in designing
the job description for HR post.
Thanks in advance.
And yes, you are invited to download HR Cube, a sophisticated software for HRs and practice some of HR work with it.