What is Required to Succeed in Human Resources?
When I hear the words Human Resources, I used to think `department designed to fire staff` as a preconceived idea, which was likely from my first job in retail where all the staff whispered Human Resources Department like they were dirty words. However, as I got older & was starting to think about what I wanted to do when I left school, Human Resources was something I started to look into as a viable option for myself and started thinking and researching what would really be required to succeed in a Human Resources role.
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What are Human Resources?
To understand what is required to succeed in Human Resources one must first understand what Human Resources truly is. Indeed lists many available Human Resources positions on its website but also has a section now which outlines what different positions are. Human Resources, more commonly abbreviated to HR, is a valuable part of many organisations. It is the department that is largely responsible for establishing company policy and procedures, supporting staff recruitment and training, and addressing employee concerns. HR is also heavily involved with ensuring a company’s practices meet applicable legislation and employment law to keep the company and employees safe from liability.
What do people in human resources do?
The primary role of Human Resources has and always will be to support and guide employees, but they must also manage the staff. This could include ensuring a company is appropriately staffed with employees who can complete the duties and responsibilities. The converse of this is that HR is required to be the team responsible for terminating employment when required, so a person wanting to succeed in HR needs to be able to at times make the tough decisions. HR also gets to do fun activities such as onboarding a new team member which involves explaining the organisation's mission, vision, values, and culture.
HR undertakes other duties such as organising employee remuneration based on the person's experience along with guiding on things such as leave entitlements, superannuation, and other leave. The list of things that HR do continues but a quick sample includes retention strategies, training and professional development activities, performance / annual reviews, creation and implementation of policies (dress codes company guidelines, code of conduct, etc.), protecting the safety of all employees within the organisation and record keeping & updating of staff files.
Day-to-day tasks of a Human Resources guru
Whilst routinely being required to undertake the above, a HR professional will also have more day-to-day requirements that need to be actioned, ensuring you will be busy every day. Daily HR tasks can include things such as; maintaining personnel files, providing advice to management on workplace relations including policy, procedure, staff performance and potential disciplinary matters. It may also include studying and interpreting legislation, EBA’s or awards and wage management. In line with this would be staying up to date with employee entitlements and planning for EBA or contract negotiations, as well as remaining on top of organisation numbers including staffing needs and the labour markets and the future impacts this may have on the organisation's productivity.
Reasons for Human Resources for an Organisation
Each organisation will be different in many ways but the overall benefit of having HR is always going to be similar. Reasons for HR include ease of recruitment and hiring, as this takes the stress off the operational management team. Performance management allows somebody else to be the one to deliver the difficult messages to staff, expense management to ensure budgets are being strictly adhered to and information provided where they are not, attendance tracking to allow for patterns of absenteeism to be monitored and plans implemented to support where needed and risk mitigation.
Benefits of Human Resources
Many organisations, especially smaller businesses, feel they can handle things at a site level and don’t need a HR department managing their affairs. While this can be true, the idea of HR is to ease the stress of management at site level and let somebody else deal with the things that take away from the organisation's core focus. Another benefit of having a HR department is to facilitate securing the top available talent. Research has shown that getting the right person for your organisation takes on average 27 business days with a typical cost of $4000 per hire. With a strong onboarding process, HR can complete all the time-consuming tasks to onboard a person, and this also ensures your employees are all getting the same messaging from day one. This also supports employee retention as HR can check in with employees as to why they are leaving the organisation and get data from this. In addition, this supports employee satisfaction as exit data from HR will ensure that a passionate person who shares in company culture and values is sourced for future hiring.
Required skills of a Human Resource practitioner
HR professionals need a broad range of skills to succeed, not just in their role but within the industry. The key skills are being able to work within a highly administrative based role, cultural awareness, and the ability to provide coaching and mentoring without judgement. Also valuable are priority management skills, active listening and being highly analytical and data driven as they are regularly required to read through large quantities of information, along with having a sound understanding of ever evolving technological advances to make your work easier. Finally, the most important element will always be communication skills as you are dealing with potentially diverse employees and needing to ensure you are confident to do so.
How to start the Human Resources journey
Studying for a Master of Human Resource Management is the beginning of your journey into the world of Human Resources. Whilst there are varying study options available an amazing option is through RMIT where individuals are able to study 100% online, allowing them to continue in their current employment and complete studies when they are available. Courses in Human Resources cover areas such as global human resource management which will give individuals insight into human resources around the world providing differing global cultural, political, economic, legislative and technological contexts. Along with a unit on Employment Law around the world and diversity around the world showing how HR can be involved & affected. Not only will studying get you the qualification, it gets you a potential career almost anywhere you want to work in the world.
A growing field
If any of the above sounds like you and something you would enjoy doing, the statistics about the human resources field speak for themselves. Industry growth in Australia is expected to be 13.9% in years to come with a current 76,900 roughly already employed in the industry. The United States reports 5.6 Million HR employees in the industry with varying specialisations within the field. According to Grand View Research, the global Human Resource Management Market Size is currently valued at US 21 billion in 2022 and is expected to continue to grow at a rate of 12.7% from 2023 – 2030.
If all this sounds like you, then you are ready and have the skills to succeed in a challenging career in HR.