An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success". Said Stephen Covey, the author of international bestseller: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Steven also defined what is human resources, saying: "A human resources management is the management of people to help them perform to the best of their abilities and, as a result, achieve better performance of the organization". And this is so far the best understanding for: What is HR.
Human resources management started when women had to be involved in the workforce when a lot of men died in the world wars. It started as personnel management, which was responsible for hiring and firing. Then, in the 80s, human resources started to take another advanced concept relating to human resources to the company’s progress and productivity. Implementing policies that would make the organization more successful. Based on research, they found that human resources can have a big impact on the business by providing proper training, competitive compensation for the employees, which would increase the organization’s financial performance.
At that point, human resources management became less administrative and instead worked strategically alongside line managers.
What is hr in company? Hr administration:
We can divide that into 3 main categories:
1- 10% of HRM’s time is: Strategic
- Leadership development
- Organizational design
- Change management
2- 30% of HRM’s time is: Operational
- Staffing
- Education
- Compensation
3- 60% of HRM’s time is: Administrative
- Benefit processing
- Communication
- Personal information
How does HR support line managers and employees?
This can mainly be the list of hr duties and responsibilities:
- New hires, employee onboarding process, retirement and resignation.
- Applying the company’s policies, especially when it comes to discipline procedures. Apply to employee law and human rights law.
- Managing data and employees' records while maintaining privacy.
- Analyse their performance, and the effectiveness of their productivity.
- Provide them with the required training.
- Motivating, whether mentally by motivating words and highlighting their efforts, or objectively by rewarding them with bonuses and overtime.
- Problem solving, when there’s a conflict among one team, or between a manager and his staff, or between two managers. 40% of HR management time is spent on the conflicts inside the organization.
- Helping with the managerial structure, and making enhancements to this topic to make the workflow easier.
- Searching for and requiring skilled staff members.
- Make a balance between the benefits of the employer and the benefits of the employees.
- Repositioning for some staff members when needed.
- Assist in payroll.
- Create a healthy work environment.
New challenges that HR management is facing in 2022
- Being tech savvy
Especially after the Covide-19 pandemic, HR is now responsible for hiring remotely; keeping an organization's productive structure; hiring people after a Zoom interview; keeping employees committed to their roles; increasing their performance; giving them required training; compensating, rewarding, and promoting.
Another side of that is that HR has to deal with new technologies regarding employee data and records, and performance analysis types of software. New software is showing up every couple of weeks for HR use with a wide variety. It became a new challenge for them just to choose the right software for their organization.
- Talents management
Talent management is a systematic cycle of activities that attract, retain, and engage talented employees. It is pretty much an advanced concept for what HR is, and is new to HR in a lot of companies, especially in the Middle East. As a consequence of the creative field expanding, HR became responsible for taking the best out of the staff talents, having a vision regarding that, and positioning new hires according to their talents.
What do employees expect from hr? Answering the big questions: Is hr for the employee or employer?
Maybe the organization comes first most of the time for HR management, but there are some organisations that give their people a priority.
In an extraordinary accident, Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity Payments, cut his own salary to give his employees a much higher basic pay, an experiment some describe as ‘lunatic’, others pioneering. In April 2015, he announced that he was going to pay all his staff a minimum wage of $70,000 (the average salary had been $48,000), the amount he decided was needed to live a "normal life". This was not driven by political ideology but by a desire to be fairer. To help pay for this, he slashed his $1.1m salary to the same amount.
The HR management in the company is playing more of a parliamentary role for the employees and advocates for their well-being in the company. And in the end, it’s all feeding back to the organization with better performance, better employee loyalty, and, as a consequence, better financial performance.
The skills most needed in HR management
- Great communication and people skills.
- Negotiation skills.
- Listening skills and empathy skills. HR management has to deal with - the personal problems of each employee most of the time.
- Talent management skills.
- Conflict solving skills.
- Problem solving skills.
- Openness to learn.
- Have a solution-oriented attitude.
- Organizing and time management skills; they should even be aware of time originating technologies.
Finally, HR became a very strategic management in addition to its new challenges, and administrative tasks. It’s either a management that will treat humans as a material type of resource, or a management that will treat humans as a treasure type of resource, and the best investment of the organization.
A wise man once said: “Ultimately, there’s one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself,” Warren Buffett. And HR is the management which is responsible for making an investment out of every single individual in the organization.
So, creating a balance between the employer's benefits and the employees' benefits can be a work core for the hr.
Sources
https://hr.university/ https://smallbusiness.chron.com/empowerment-employees-becoming-important-organizations-11542.html https://www.aihr.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H__5wa30A9s https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/29/future-of-work-dan-price-gravity-ceo-cut-own-pay-to-give-staff-increased-minum-wage