Three Things HR Must Provide Your Staff

A good HR department is vitally important to the success of any business, especially the bigger your company grows. If you don’t have an HR department, you will start to see a massive HR shaped hole develop over time. In this article, I want to stress the three things of paramount importance that all HR departments need to provide staff. If you’re a boss whose HR department doesn’t provide these things then it’s time for a change – likewise if any employees reading this don’t believe their HR deliver on these things, bring it up with the boss.

Satisfaction

It is the role of HR department to ensure the employees of the company are satisfied. It is far easier and cheaper to improve someone’s happiness, then it is to hire an entirely new staff member when the old one finally decides they’ve had enough and quits. To ensure satisfaction you can issue regular surveys or questionnaires that will give you detailed understanding of the staff’s mental wellbeing in the role. Having an open door policy is also a must, as staff can feel like they have a place to come and vent or complain about the company or its leaders. The last thing that helps satisfaction is to enable access to training for staff members so that they feel they have the opportunity of advancement should they choose. It’s easiest to keep track of employee training by using a software platform the likes of which can be found at http://www.xcdhr.com. It’s no substitute for an HR professional, however, but when used in conjunction, can make the whole HR process easier.

Health and Safety

For most people, health and safety is not a concern … until something happens to them that means they need hospital treatment. HR needs to ensure that health and safety standards are met for two reasons. First: so that the staff are kept safe and out of harm’s way, especially if there is heavy machinery being used. Second: it avoids lawsuits. For example, if a workplace where employees are exposed to harmful airborne particles did not stock an army gas mask for said employees, it could face lawsuits from those who developed chronic conditions as a result. Safety has another aspect and that’s when there is the potential for a violent employee. Whenever a new staff member is hired, it’s very important that HR does all the necessary background checks to try to ensure that the individual being hired will be able to work with others without resorting to violence. It’s rare that a violent incident happens in the workplace, but it does happen more than you think.

Conflict Resolution

This ties in with the point about the open door policy. Employees have to trust that if they come to HR with an issue, it will be able to resolve it for them. Many grudges and office politics can get in the way of the successful running of a company and it’s up to HR to ensure that these issues don’t become major problems. An HR manager needs to make themselves inviting and open. The problem that many of them have is that they act as if the employees are a nuisance when they come to them with help. HR must be friendly and sensitive and the boss will thank them when they deter a giant argument from erupting between two staff members.

This is not a complete list of the duties of an HR department, as they obviously deal with a great many aspects of the business, however these three are extremely important and can often be overlooked.