Human Resources can often be a confusing term, but it doesn’t have to be. The goal of any HR department should be to make life easier for the team, especially management. Here you will find the top 4 things human resources departments strive to accomplish for their companies.
Hiring employees may not be a difficult task, but hiring quality workforce with passion and the attitude to fit your company culture requires diligence and strategy. A good HR firm knows how to sort through the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Human resources departments strive to know the ins and outs of their company. How can someone help you hire employees if they don’t know your business? An expert HR department knows the intricacies of your staffing needs and your culture. Let’s face it, you can go hire some Joe-shmo off the street, but who’s to say you’re getting a quality employee. HR firms help sort through the facade of a potentially good employee and really gets behind the mask to find people that are passionate about your industry and who have the skills to execute tasks with precision.
They do this by assisting with job descriptions, job postings, and recruiting strategies. A well written ad has the effect of drawing high-quality candidates. Whereas a poorly constructed one attracts no one, or worse, dispassionate, low-skilled workers who will do more harm to your reputation than good.
In the same way, strategic planning on where to post and when to post job openings coupled with carefully planned interviews further elevates the hiring process so that good candidates surface and rotten ones fall to the waste side.
As a business owner there are fewer things harder to handle than HR issues – we’re talking about sexual harassment, discrimination, firing, and audits. It’s hard to know what to do when the business manager gropes the secretary, or an interviewee claims you didn’t hire her because she is a woman. What are the appropriate steps to take? What should and shouldn’t you say to each party? What should you do legally? And what is at stake?
These are all questions that can blind a business owner, keeping them from growing their business.
A good human resources departments strives to guide you through these events. They will also handle a large majority of these questions and proceedings. They will see the issue through until it is completely resolved and your company can return to it’s daily grind.
Payroll is a tricky subject. You want to pay enough to make your employees feel valued, but you also need to make enough money to keep the business profitable – that’s why you went into business in the first place. Human resources departments strive to find the balance. Your HR team should help you sort through payroll numbers:
These are just a few payroll questions that can be answered by a human resources department that strives to give good service.
HR can also field questions from employees. When does payroll start? How much is taken out for taxes, withholdings, and insurance? These are questions that can take up value time if you’re the owner or manager, so having a dedicated HR team member to answer these is invaluable to you and your employees.
Laws, laws, and more laws. It seems like the list of rules and regulations handed down from our government is never ending. It all becomes too complicated so quickly. Human resources departments strive to be extremely critical when it comes to navigating and compiling with labor and employment laws. Noncompliance can result in workplace complaints pertaining to unfair employment practices, unsafe working conditions, and general dissatisfaction with working conditions that can hinder productivity and ultimately, profitability. Your HR staff must be aware of federal and state employment laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the National Labor Relations Act and many other rules and regulations.
Josh Bersin, founder of Bersin by Deloitte says, “I’d venture to say that there isn’t a highly successful company in the world that does not have some form of world-class HR program in place”. They are the “Craftsmen of our talent strategies”, navigators of tricky situations, purveyors of payroll, and enforcers of compliance standards. When you’re juggling the balls of staff management, sales, inventory, customer satisfaction, not to mention personal life, friendships, relationships, children, households, it’s nice to know that you can count on the world-class HR team at PayTech to take some of the headaches off your plate. Just ask our current clients.
