Human resources professionals are a necessary part of any successful organization. They oversee recruitment, training, and employee development. They also ensure a company is compliant with local and federal employment laws. As more companies realize the importance of an HR team that focuses on employees’ emotional and physical well-being to prevent high turnover rates, HR is becoming increasingly popular.
Unfortunately, far too few people understand what human resource managers do, so small businesses typically lack a robust HR department that caters to the employees’ and business’ needs. This article will discuss tasks HR managers do that you may not know.
Candidate Recruitment
Every business needs to hire employees at some point, but a quality recruitment strategy can help you find and vet suitable candidates to move into the interview stage. An HR manager must understand the organization’s needs and maybe even the specific department. For example, it would be difficult for an HR manager to hire a marketing manager if they don’t know what skills are necessary to perform the job.
Recruiting candidates is not as simple as you might think. Yes, HR managers write job descriptions and put them on job boards like Monster and Indeed, but they also need to understand what their bosses and department heads are looking for and the budget for a new employee.
Once the job ad is posted, the HR manager still needs to research the position to ensure they’ll be recruiting the right person for the job. Some research tasks might include scheduling calls with department heads to understand the role and what type of individual they’re looking for. Recruiting is time-consuming and expensive but finding the right candidate can help your organization grow. Hiring the wrong candidate can destroy a business’s reputation, so it’s essential to put time and energy into the recruitment process.
Hiring Employees
Once candidates are recruited, the HR manager must find the right employees to hire. HR managers arrange interviews, coordinate hiring, and onboard new hires. All these tasks require tons of HR and legal paperwork, so it’s important for an HR professional to have organizational skills since they’ll have to organize and manage files for each employee. Hiring employees might also mean negotiating salaries. An HR manager needs to understand the salary ranges and what the company is willing to pay a new hire for their experience.
Payroll Processing
While the accounting department can process payroll, it falls into the hands of the HR manager to ensure all employees are paid correctly and on time. Payroll is a huge undertaking because it requires you to take taxes out and collect hours. Additionally, any expenses are reimbursed with raises and bonuses added. Doing payroll is similar to doing taxes, but it happens every two weeks instead of once a month, with different salaries to manage.
Payroll becomes even more complicated for HR managers managing a remote workforce. Not only do you have to worry about taxes, but you’ll need to understand different state tax laws to take the right amount out of your employees’ paychecks if they live in different regions.
Disciplinary Actions
One of the more difficult parts of being an HR manager is taking disciplinary actions when employees misbehave. Corrective actions must be handled in a certain way to avoid an employee quitting, poor business reputation, and even lawsuits. When handled well, disciplinary actions can make an employee more successful. For example, if an employee has been coming in late, an HR manager might write them up. Still, a great HR manager will take the time to discuss how the employee’s behavior impacts the company and their coworkers. By offering an open-door policy, HR can help employees be more productive, increasing their overall happiness at work.
In the case of an employee who is consistently late, HR managers might find out they’re late because they need to take their child to daycare at a certain time every day. The HR manager could come up with a few different solutions to help the employee come to work on time, including setting a more flexible work schedule for parents who must take care of children or allowing employees to choose whether to work remotely.
Unfortunately, disciplinary action can’t solve all problems. Sometimes employees come to work late because they simply don’t care about their jobs or who their behavior negatively affects. In some cases, HR managers will decide when it’s best to let an employee go.
Policy Management
HR managers need to stay updated on new company policies to serve the organization and its employees better. For example, if there’s a dress code change, the HR manager is responsible for informing employees, so they don’t get in trouble. HR managers can also suggest changes to current policies to help employees succeed in their roles.
Support Employee Wellbeing
An HR manager’s role is to support the employees as best as possible, including their mental health. We all know the toll having a stressful job takes on overall happiness, but happier employees are also more productive and less likely to leave their positions. HR managers understand the importance of having happy, healthy employees and are responsible for finding solutions to complex problems that might be contributing to burnout.
An HR manager can support employee well-being by finding ways to make employees less stressed and helping them deal with problems they might be having with coworkers and managers. For example, many people leave jobs because of their managers or bosses; HR aims to solve this problem by helping employees and managers forge better relationships that don’t encourage a toxic work environment.
Is an HR Department Necessary?
Depending on the size of your business, you might not need a full HR department with more than a few workers; instead, make sure you have an HR manager who can take care of many of the duties of the HR department while focusing on finding quality employees for your business and supporting their needs. If you find you still need more HR help, you can always outsource some of your HR tasks or hire more professionals as your business grows.
Matt Casadona
Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys San Diego life, traveling, and music.
