Human resource department staff members are involved in five distinct types of activities: formulating policies and procedures, offering advice, providing services, monitoring to ensure compliance, and serving as consultant and change agent.
1. Formulating Policies and Procedures
The head of the human resource department usually plays a leadership role in initiating and formulating HR policies and procedures that are consistent with overall organizational objectives. These must also be compatible with current economic conditions, collective bargaining trends, and applicable employment legislation.
Often, though, the actual formulation of HR policies and procedures for approval by senior management is a cooperative endeavor among managers, non managerial employees, and HR department staff. A policy is a predetermined guide to thinking, established to provide direction in decision making.
Policies are extremely important because they define the organization’s position on given issues; communicate management’s expectations of employees; articulate acceptable or unacceptable behavior; ensure consistency in the treatment of employees and continuity and predictability in the course of action; and serve as standards against which performance can be measured.
To maximize effectiveness, HR policies and procedures should be put into writing; they are often compiled in a policy manual or made available online so that they are readily accessible. This helps to ensure that the same information is communicated to all employees, and that there is consistency in employee treatment. In addition, it means that some questions and concerns can be resolved without HR departmental staff assistance.
2. Offering Advice
In order to cope with increasingly complex HR issues and the ever-changing work environment, managers at all levels frequently turn to the HR department staff for expert advice and counsel. Members of the HR department are expected to be completely familiar with employment legislation, HR policies and procedures, collective agreements, past practices, and the outcome of recent arbitration hearings and court decisions, so that they can provide sound guidance and suggested solutions.
When assisting managers throughout the firm, the HR department staff members must keep their employee advocacy role in mind. This means balancing the department’s primary obligation to senior management with the need to ensure that: (1) managers understand how they are expected to treat employees, (2) employees have mechanisms to contest practices that they perceive to be unfair, and (3) employees’ interests are fairly represented when providing guidance and/or advice.
3. Providing Services
The HR department generally provides services in the following areas on an ongoing basis: maintenance of HR records; recruitment, selection, orientation, training and development; compensation and benefits administration; employee counseling; and labor relations.
4. Monitoring to Ensure Compliance
The HR department staff members are generally responsible for monitoring to ensure compliance with established HR policies and procedures. They may analyze data pertaining to absenteeism and turnover or accident rates, for example, to identify problems with policy implementation or failures to comply with specified procedures.
In addition, the role of the human resources department staff members play a major role in ensuring compliance with employment legislation. For example, they are generally responsible for collecting and analyzing recruitment, selection, and promotion data to monitor compliance with human rights and employment equity legislation. They also assess salary and benefits data to monitor compliance with employment standards and pay equity requirements, and examine accident investigation and grievance reports to monitor compliance with health and safety and labor relations legislation.
5. Serving as Consultant and Change Agent
In most firms, human resource department staff members serve as in-house consultants to the managers of other departments. Sometimes, HR department staff will recommend using outside consultants for assistance in solving HR issues or handling specialized assignments, such as executive recruitment and job evaluation, or suggest that certain functions or activities be outsourced.
Outsourcing, the practice of contracting with outside vendors to handle specified functions on a permanent basis, has emerged as a worldwide business megatrend. According to the Outsourcing Institute, the 2010 global outsourcing market totaled roughly $223 billion, rising to an estimated $753.5 billion in 2014.
While using outside experts to provide counseling services has been common for many years, more recently, the outsourcing of specific HR functions and payroll has become popular as a strategy to enable company staff to focus on core competencies and/or as a cost-savings measure. In 2012, for example, 58 percent of Canadian companies participating in one survey reported outsourcing employee training, 70 percent outsourced some of their benefits functions, and 40 percent outsourced their recruitment efforts. A 2012 study revealed that the thousands of Canadian businesses outsourcing their payroll functions were saving upwards of 50 percent of their payroll costs.
Today, as revealed in the following research insight, the scope of what is being outsourced is broadening, as are the kinds of outsourcing relationships that are being developed.