Top 10 Responsibilities and Roles of HR Manager

A company thrives because of its employees. Various departments across the organization, such as the development team, customer support, marketing, and sales, just to name a few, makes it possible for you to run the business successfully.

At the same time, you cannot ignore the HR roles and responsibilities. They help manage these departments across the organization, improve productivity, team coordinating, training of new employees, and retain employees. However, given the evolving landscape of the working environment, legal obligations, and strategic management of businesses, managers’ HR roles and responsibilities are widening.

So, let’s understand how the human resources department helps an organization. 

Top 10 Responsibilities and Roles of HR Manager

The HR department is responsible for a wide range of responsibilities, including human resource planning, job analysis, hiring candidates, and retaining them, to name a few. 

Let’s understand the HR manager’s roles and responsibilities in detail!

1. Human Resource Planning

HR managers are responsible for planning and achieving organizational objectives. They usually identify, prepare, and execute business goals with top-level executives. 

This makes human resource planning a critical role for HR managers. It helps ensure an organization has the right number of employees with the necessary skills to meet its goals. This involves forecasting future staffing needs and ensuring that the recruitment and training programs can meet these needs.
HR managers also play a key role in succession planning and guaranteeing a pool of talent is ready to step into senior positions as they become available.

This proactive participation in planning enables HR managers to understand the activities required to support the company’s sustainable growth. This, in turn, empowers HRs to assign the right resources to the right project and ensures the timely delivery. 

The HR roles and responsibilities also include analyzing and acknowledging team leaders (TL) about their expected vs. actual results. They also help TLs better understand their target and create strategies to achieve them.

2. HR Manager Job Analysis and Design

As mentioned above, human resource planning requires assigning the right resources to the right project. And if the right person is not in the organization, HR managers are responsible for designing the job analysis to hire them.

HR Manager job Description analysis includes

• Job description
• Employee’s position in the organization
• Who should the employee report to
• Resources the employee will need to perform the job efficiently
• Individual data related to the post, such as technical skills, work experience, etc.
• Work schedule
• Salary, incentives, and other employee benefits
• Personal attributes, such as personality, values, and interests

In addition to this, the roles of the HR manager include the following:

• Job rotation: Transferring employees from one task to another depending on the requirement and their skills
• Job enlargement: Merging previously distributed (similar) functions into one job
• Job enrichment: Adding more responsibility to an employee’s job 
• Creating high-performance working groups: Building teams to complete tasks that require high levels of performance

3. Hiring Candidates

Finding and hiring the right talent is a very complex process. Modern human resources departments do more than just post job requirements in portals to fill open positions. They develop strategic solutions to attract suitable candidates to fulfill the demands of the business. 

Source: Cloudfront.net

An HR manager might also be responsible for a company’s employer brand reputation—or guiding the branding strategy. Employer branding is critical to communicating a company’s culture and work-life balance to potential employees. 

As more and more candidates search for open positions via social media, managing employer brand will likely overlap with an HR manager’s job duties. From screening potential candidates on job portals and social platforms like LinkedIn to interviewing them, the HR department has to follow an organized approach to hiring the best suitable employee for the organization. 

Once an applicant is selected, HR professionals design offer letter documents, scan them to email them to the candidate and conduct onboarding procedures. If a candidate backs out at the last moment, HR managers are bound to convince them to join the organization. HR managers must repeat the recruitment process to fill open positions if they insist on not joining.

4. Training and Development

Hiring the best candidates is just half the job. First, the HR team must train and upskill them to maximize their return on investment. 

The Human Resources department is responsible for developing and administering training and development programs. Training and development programs are designed to improve employees’ performance and help them adapt to changes in the workplace. These programs can include classroom training, on-the-job training, and online training.

The type of training and development new employees require depends on their experience. For example, if they are freshers, managers might need to arrange skill-development training programs to ensure their work meets industry standards.

However, if the new hires already have a few years of experience, managers might only need to train them about company policies. 

Also Read: Biggest Challenges For HR Software Industry In The Coming Years

HR managers are also answerable for the quality of training. For example, suppose most of the recruits cannot pass the assessments. In that case, it indicates that either the trainer or the training program is not compliant with the industry standard, for which the HR manager will be held accountable.

5. Design Workplace Policies

HR manager roles and responsibilities also include designing workplace policies to reduce conflicts and legal issues and improve employee productivity. These policies are designed to protect the interests of both employees and employers alike. 

Though workplace policies differ from organization to organization, the things it includes remain the same in every company, such as  

• Standard operating procedures
• Anti-harassment and non-discrimination 
• Paid leaves, sick leaves, and time-off benefits
• Meal and break periods
• Time tracking
• Employee attendance and punctuality

HR managers must also comply with federal, state, and local laws while designing workplace policies. Some laws require managers to communicate workplace policies in writing. If you are an HR manager (or aspiring to be), stay on top of the local laws, including the national labor relations act, to avoid issues later.

Additionally, follow these best practices.

• Involve your employees in the early stages of developing workplace policies.
• Policies should be clear and concise, and easy to understand.
• Policies should be designed to achieve the desired outcomes and be flexible enough to accommodate changing circumstances.
• Implementation and enforcement of policies should be consistent and fair.
• Regular review of policies is necessary to ensure they remain effective.

6. Monitor Performance

General HR roles and responsibilities closely related to training include examining employee performance records to identify the scopes of improvement and arranging training workshops to upskill them. 

93% of employees say professional growth is a priority. You can create a positive environment and boost employee loyalty by providing employees with a chance to learn something new and grow professionally.

Besides, improving your employees’ skills brings additional benefits to the organization. 

• First, they feel they are a vital part of the company
• Second, due to increased job satisfaction, they will give their best in each task

Source: Profit.co

That said, here’s how you can monitor employee performance. 

• Define duties and responsibilities each employee needs to perform daily.
• Keep track of employee productivity levels.
• Compare employee productivity levels to company goals and objectives.
• Communicate with employees regularly to provide feedback and coaching.
• Encourage employees to set personal performance goals.
• Recognize and reward employees for meeting or exceeding performance goals.

The way you help employees improve their performance depends on the available resources. For instance, if you have a high budget, you can arrange trainers to analyze and train them to achieve better results personally. If not, you can enroll them to attend conferences, webinars, online courses, etc. 

What do you think? Isn’t performance a key role of an HR manager? 

7. Maintaining Work Culture

HR roles & responsibilities shape and maintain organizational culture. Therefore, it is essential to create a positive impression of the company from day one, so the new employees know what to expect. 

Besides, a person’s performance depends mainly on the environment he is working in. 

Therefore, you need to instill a certain level of comfort to eliminate any stressful atmosphere that might affect employees’ performance. 

Having an open-door policy is vital so employees can communicate their problems freely. This helps improve employee job satisfaction and retain talent. 

Additionally, consider planning company events where employees can showcase their non-work-related talents like singing, dancing, mimicry, etc. It enhances the overall brand image and spreads positivity throughout the organization.

8. Resolve Conflict

In every organization, employees come from diverse backgrounds. And when people with opposite opinions meet, the conflict chances rise significantly. Whether the issue is between two employees or an employee and the management, the human resources management has to be the mediator for conflict resolution. 

Source: Aihr

Besides, the HR manager must listen to both parties without being biased or judgemental. They also need to go to the root of the matter, which includes questioning other employees. 

Depending on the type of conflict, HR managers also hold the right to fire an employee. However, this situation usually arises in cases of harassment in the office.

9. Ensure the Health and Safety of Employees

Employees are an important asset of the organization. Unless they are safe and healthy, they won’t be able to give their best to the company. Thus, HR managers need to ensure the health and safety of employees. 

The way you plan for your employee’s health and workplace safety will depend on your company policies. For instance, HR managers must ensure they are coming and reaching safely for organizations that provide cab services to their staff. It usually requires them to track the GPS of company cabs, call the employee or driver, and keep a tab on the expected vs. actual arrival time. 

Other roles of HR manager, in terms of the health and safety of employees, include:

• Arranging an on-premise doctor for emergencies
• Arranging an on-premise ambulance
• Setting employee health benefits
• Setting up a sick room in the office for employees to rest if they are unwell.
• Organizing fire safety training workshops 
• Ensuring the food in the canteen (if you have it) is hygienic

10. Rewards and Incentives

Lastly, HR managers must reward employees based on their performance and other factors like punctuality. The biggest benefit of rewarding workers is that it creates a desire for other employees to excel at their job in the hope of getting incentives. 

The rewards and incentives could be anything, such as holiday packages, a word of appreciation and recognition, promotions, or bonuses. 

Source: Hifives

Additionally, you can consider giving the power to employees to choose the type of reward they want. For example, let them decide whether they want a bonus, flexible work times, leave, etc. It will make them feel valued, increase job satisfaction, and boost productivity. 

You can also involve organizational stakeholders to decide on the rewards and incentives they’d like to give individual employees based on their performance. 

Bonus: Use Technology to Your Advantage

Modern human resource leaders make the most of technology to streamline their work. Whether you want to increase employee engagement, enhance employee training activities, or improve employee relations across the organization, the right HR tool can help you with it. 

You can also automate payroll processing, stay up to date with legal regulations, understand the civil rights act, manage internal complaints, identify training needs, and minimize change resistance from one platform! 

There are various roles and responsibilities of HR that are critical to the overall well-being of the organization. Whether you’re one of those larger organizations with thousands of employees or fall in the smaller companies category, technology can be a game changer for your human resources department!

Conclusion

HR managers are responsible for creating and managing a solid team. Whether it is human resource planning, job analysis, hiring the right talent, or resolving conflicts within the organization, the HR manager handles these tasks. 

What do you think about the roles and responsibilities of HR managers in an organization? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments section!