What is HR?
In a recent article on the CIPD’s website, the writer Claire Churchard explained that not enough young people know what HR is which hinders the development of HR as a profession. But this led me to think about all the times that we have been asked by managers, what is HR? So, perhaps it’s not just children that don’t know.
HR is an important business function and better understanding of what it does could be to everyone’s benefit. If people, or more specifically employees, understood what HR are trying to achieve, they might be more positive about HR initiatives.
For more information and advice on how to change the working relations between your managers and HR, we at Honeydew also wrote an article aptly named, Improving relations between line managers and HR.
A simple meeting could clarify the roles and functions of HR along with what they set out to achieve. To help, we have found a great blog called ‘Human Resources Explained’ which outlines many of the functions HR perform as a general profession along with easy to understand explanations. So, we have listed them here to answer the simple question, what is HR?
For further information on each function, simply click on the titles.
Recruitment & Selection has the ability to deliver enormous value to organisations through the HR team. It is through the process of recruitment and selection that organisations can identify strong performers, weed out weaker performers, and engage preferred applicants in an employment conversation.
Workforce Planning is the start point for HR. It’s where discussions about what kind of workforce and what skill-sets are required for the organisation. Like most of us will write down a shopping list prior to getting the groceries, workforce planning is an employee shopping list. .
Remuneration can make or break an organisation, essentially it’s how much to reward employees financially (salary, wages, incentives). Yet it’s much more than simply a pay check, paying too much or too little with dramatically increase costs, or place the organisation in the position where it is unable to attract the talent it requires.
Job Analysis is often referred to as the building blocks of HR, so many HR activities call on the information gained through a Job Analysis. For activities such as writing the job description, selecting the right applicant and career planning the information gained from Job Analysis is critical.
There’s a common saying about getting from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, HR has a variation on that saying, in HR Training and Development is all about getting employees from being ‘B Players’ to becoming ‘A Players’. Training and Development can turn poor performers into solid performers, and good employees into great ones.
Industrial Relations / Employee Relations / Employment Relations
Regardless of the currently in vogue title IR/ER is the legislative centre of HR, providing advice on employee legislation, drafting or consulting on policies, and managing risk for the organisation.
Organisational Development / Change Management
We all appreciate that change is the only constant, unfortunately change and progress are worlds apart – one happens regardless of our actions, while the other happens because of our actions. Organisational Development and Change Management are about planned progress, be it staying the course through rough seas or changing course completely to overcome new challenges and adopt to new opportunities.
We hear a lot about data don’t we, we hear how Facebook or Google is mining our online time to create more targeted advertising, refining our search results to provide more individual and relevant results. The practice is no less common in HR, while not at the individual level HR is constantly working with data to identify organizational wide indicators such as tenure, sick leave taken, annual leave taken, turnover rates and a variety of other factors that are typically recorded into an organisations human resource management system (HRMIS). However it’s actually much more exciting and interesting that I make it out to be.
If you need help with your departmental relationships or even need some back up with change procedures, get in contact with us for some great impartial advice or read some of our many useful blogs on the matter.