Whatever kind of business you happen to run, you need to make sure that you are managing your people well, and looking after them as well as you can. Business is really all about people, and it’s only by remembering that that you can hope to gain any real success with your business venture. In this article, we are going to look at one of the most commonly overlooked areas of running a successful business. But what is so important about HR, and how can you make sure that you are approaching it in the best possible way at all times?
What Exactly Is HR?
Human Resources is simply the term for dealing with the people in your business. Your people are the backbone of the company. Without them, you would not have a company to speak of, and you would struggle to achieve anything much in your business. If your people are left to flounder, then the business falls apart. We have seen this time and time again in companies around the world, and it would be as true for your business too.
Because of this, it’s important to have in place a set of protocols for dealing with people and managing them properly. Many of these protocols will be informed by law, and that’s another aspect to this which you should always be aware of, that you stay within the law at all times. At its heart, HR ensures that your staff are treated fairly, that they are working to their fullest capability, and that the company itself always remembers the human beneath the worker. Let’s look now into why all of these things are so important, and what it is that good HR actually looks like.
Monitoring The Culture
It can be very tricky to keep a close eye on what is happening for real in any workplace, because the culture of the working environment is not easy to pin down in any bureaucratic way. However, HR at its best manages to do exactly that. Good HR keeps a close eye on the working culture of the business, and ensures that it is operating in a way that you would hope. There are many ways that this is taken care of, but the fact that it is part of HR is always going to be important in any business and area of work.
There is a saying in some organizations that HR owns the culture. Whether you want to go down this route, or you would rather say that each employee has shared ownership of the culture, you can be sure that monitoring that culture is always going to be important in helping to stop corruption and poor power dynamics at their root. This is easily one of the most important things that HR does for any business, and without it the world of work would look very different indeed.
Building & Defending Company Reputation
How your company treats its staff is one of the things that will most strongly directly affect the public perception of the company itself. This is basically a branding issue, and one which can have a powerful effect on the future direction of your business as a whole. If you are treating people right, they are going to talk about it to others outside the company. Likewise, if you treat them badly you will find that they are going to tell people about that too. All of this comes down to how your HR is managing your people. If you are doing it well, they won’t have any complaints to make.
Having a strong reputation is vital for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones is to ensure that you are able to attract the best talent in future recruitment. As long as you can do that, you can expect the future of your business to be much stronger, and a lot more likely to succeed in all the ways you would hope.
Managing Employee Rights
You simply have to respect the rights of your employees, and the only way to ensure you are doing this properly is to look into having a strong and dedicated HR team. There are so many rights you have to think about, from those affecting how many hours people can work and what breaks they have, to how much people are paid and according to what strata. By having an HR team overlooking it all, you can make sure that you are not falling ill of the law, or that you are failing to show your employees the basic respect they absolutely deserve.
Good management of employee rights will lead to greater respect from them towards the business, a better reputation in general, and a lot of avoidance of some serious wrongs that some businesses fall prey to.
Defending The Individual, Defending The Corporation
If you find yourself wondering whether HR is supposed to defend the individual or the corporation, the answer is: both! Looking into this, we can see why it would be so important to make sure that your HR team is doing what they should be doing, and that they are the best team you can possibly get hold of in general. If you have a good HR team, that will mean that they are defending the individual and the corporation in equal measures.
In terms of what that actually looks like, you will often find that it is a case of having strict and clear guidelines in place. That means that the only arbiter is the rules, and as long as those rules are fair, you can be sure that the HR team knows how to look after everyone, and the company, as fairly as possible. This could well be the single most important reason to have decent HR in business, and it’s something that you should focus on as best as you can at all times to make sure your company is getting it right.
Pic Credit – CCO Licence
Building A Strong HR Team
Now that we have seen why HR is so centrally important to your business, it might be a good idea to work out how you can actually build a strong HR team, the kind that is going to help your business to become greater and greater every day, while also championing your staff to their highest possible level. Let’s take a look at some of the ingredients of a strong HR team, so you know what you should generally be aiming for here.
Hire The Best
Before you hire the people who hire people, how do you know who the best is? This is a difficulty many people find themselves in when they are building a business, but as long as you look in the right places you should be able to find top HR staff who can work together to form a fantastic HR team. One of the main things to look for is a real, genuine knowledge of people and how they work. Many of the best HR staff have a keen understanding of people, so look for graduates of online psychology degree programs and related qualifications when hiring.
Pic Credit – CCO Licence
On top of that, you should also look out for people with a keen desire to help people be their best, but who also have a strong ability to look into the corporate side of things and get that right too. If you can find someone with this ideal balance, you are going to find that it really helps things along nicely.
Finally, when you are hiring, pay attention to the applicants’ behavior in interviews. This will help to give you a reliable sense of how personable they are, and whether or not they are actually going to be good with people. That is one of the most important qualities of all.
Focus On The Person
From the outset, you should aim to encourage your HR staff to focus on being personable and on focusing on the person within their interactions with people. This is equally as important in their interactions with each other as their interactions with the other staff members in the business, including yourself if you are working there as a manager. The more that they are focused on the individuals from the outset, the more likely it is that they are going to be the kind of HR team everybody respects and gets on well with. That is going to make a significant difference to how people approach and treat them, so bear it in mind.
As you can see, HR is hugely important in businesses of all kinds, and you should make sure that you are doing everything you can to build up your HR team to be the strongest possible. Doing this will bring many advantages to the company and the individuals working within it, including yourself. All of this can take time, but it is all perfectly doable as long as you are happy to work at it diligently.
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