The Value Human Resources Provides to An Organization
There are multiple ways in which Human Resources brings value to an organization. A major one being strategy alignment. If for example, the goal of the organization is to help customers reach a global audience and use cutting edge technology in its product or service offering, HR would look at these strategic business practices around this and look to align the HR strategy and practice to enable the best people fit.
Let's use examples from other business functions to illustrate the importance of strategic alignment.
Securing Potential Employees
For sales and marketing their passion and work goes into targeting and securing potential customers. For HR passion and work goes into targeting and securing potential employees. If the business is looking to attract a global audience, then it would seem fitting for a diverse workforce planning strategy. Once that customer or those customers have been found and secured, we'd look at creating an attractive package for them and the same would go for our employees. We will look to gain their commitment and secure them by creating an attractive package for them. If corporate social responsibility is a key factor for customers, then HR could look to adopt something similar for its employees such as offering one or two days per year for voluntary activities.
Risk and Compliance Management
The employee lifecycle is governed by employment legislation, the stages of the recruitment process, employment contracts, pay benefits, hours of work, the working environment, conduct, capability and so on. HR considers these factors and puts them into policies so that they are easily accessible for managers and employees. HR also sets the process to enable consistency and fairness in decision making and the application of these policies as well as creating templates to ensure standardization. Getting it right protects and organizations reputation while getting it wrong can be detrimental.
Budget Management
All functions within an organization will have a budget attached to it. The one allocated for HR would include expenditure items such as recruitment, training, pay and reward. The recruitment costs would cover things such as cost per head to recruit, the agency costs that may be incurred as well as costs associated with advertising jobs on job boards. The training aspect of it would cover any in-house training or external training, professional qualifications, essential qualifications, courses and workshops. The benefits aspect of it will look at pay and reward following internal benchmarking and external benchmarking with industry comparisons as well.
There is an element of gatekeeping attached to budget management especially when it comes to payroll costs. HR does have responsibility for ensuring that payroll costs do not fluctuate unnecessarily especially where labor cost or employee cost is one of the largest costs to most organization's. So, in conjunction with the finance department, there would be an analysis of the budgeted establishment sheet or the headcount report. Their managers would be challenged or ask to provide a rationale if there are discrepancies within their organization.
Data Capture and Management
The general data protection regulations makes it mandatory for data to be stored and shared for its intended purposes only. Breaches to this could implicate the company HR does not hold customer data as there is not a purpose for it to do so. But HR does hold employee data because information such as diversity, contracts of employment, training record, expiry dates and any other personal data has to be responsibly managed.
Employee Satisfaction
Understanding how satisfied employees are within their experience of their job role, their team, management and within the organization, helps an organization to understand whether what they are doing is working or whether it needs to adjust. There are several methods of data capture to enable meaningful analysis and to allow for effective and proactive solutions to be implemented. Methods include KPI such as sickness and turn over information, dashboards that highlight ethnicity or gender proportions, focus groups, engagement surveys, the nature of complaints and the reasons for sickness absence. These are qualitative and quantitative data capture methods and when used together they will help to set the context.