Introduction
Most organisations view the department of Human Resources (HR) as an administrative function and ignore the need and opportunity to align it with its strategic plans.
Human Resource is a huge and important role contributing to an organisations success.
The role of HR has changed a lot over the years as it is a much bigger and complex strategic role than just administrative functions; it is about supporting line managers and their staff, ensuring the company has the best employees to meet their goals and strategic plan. This is an account of how HR functions support their staff and also support the organisations strategy.
Findings
How 3 HR activities support the organisation strategy
Recruitment
Human resource plays a big part in the function of recruitment within all departments of a business. HR practitioners have a wide span of knowledge and skills they can demonstrate by supporting the Line Manager in this process. Having the option of HR to do this is a great help and can add value to a business if the right employees are hired and help the business get where it needs to be in the long term. HR practitioners have the responsibility to complete all the admin that comes with recruitment, from ensuring all parties are aware of times and locations to ensuring all paperwork is checked, sent, chased and recorded. This saves the line managers recruiting time and allows for other important business to be completed.
New or inexperienced Line Managers may not have much experience within recruitment. In this case HR practitioners may work alongside the manager to train them on interviews and the selection process. They can provide them with application forms, interviews questions and make sure they are aware of what they can ask and what they can’t ask legally and by best practice. Once the interviewing stage is complete, HR and Learning & Development Professionals can assist Line Managers on the selection process and ensure that the best candidate is chosen that would best suit the position available and best suit the company to achieve their aims and goals.
Training and Development
Training and development is critical to employees and their continued personal development and is aimed at improving the performance of individuals which in turn helps achieve the organisation strategy and also their mission statement, which for this company is “Quality, Quality, Quality, Quality people, Quality product, Quality service”. Training and development is an on-going learning process which involves changes to behaviours to improve the performance of employees. It improves the employee’s skills, productivity, aids in organisational development, decision making and problem solving. HR professionals are responsible for the welfare of an employee from the moment they apply for a job. A good way of keeping track of your personal develop is to do a development plan and put everything on this from shadowing in an interview to doing a course at college. HR functions should keep an up to date review of all employees’ qualifications within the workplace. A newly employed persons qualifications would be checked by the HR team as to what qualifications they currently have, whether or not they would be required to do further learning i.e. NVQs or whether in house training would be suitable both for the person and that would also benefit the company strategy in the means of profitability, knowing what they are selling, customer service, so ensuring customers both internally and externally are looked after and dealt with correctly and also attitude and behaviours. It has been suggested that “Conflict” is the number one reason for people leaving their jobs. As author Dr John Coach, ` workplace relationship authority and executive coach`, points out “Temping as it is, nobody ever enhanced his or her career by making the boss look stupid”.