How to Build a Strong and Supportive HR Department

It’s a fact of business life that people are an organization’s greatest asset. The whole cycle of recruiting the right personnel and creating an environment where they can give of their best for the benefit of the business and themselves depends largely on effective HR (Human Resources).

A strong and supportive HR department will help an organization efficiently meet its objectives through the recruitment of the right people, and supporting them throughout their time working for the business. Creating an effective HR department will pay dividends.

An HR department has to, on the one hand, ‘look after’ staff in terms of the day to day admin tasks such as salary and payroll and completion of associated paperwork, but also provide pastoral care; this would be in areas such as staff training and development to ensure they ‘buy into’ the company’s culture and values and are skilled to more effectively do their jobs.

So what qualities would a strong and supportive HR department possess?

Convey company culture and values

An organization needs its staff to ‘sing from the same hymn sheet’ in terms of understanding the business’s objectives, relationship with their customers and the values the company adheres to.

Staff need to understand their employer’s key values and particularly its culture, and this comes through initial and ongoing training. Staff aware of and working in harmony with the organization’s culture and values fosters an environment where everyone is pulling in the same direction.

Specific roles for HR staff

Depending on the size of department, specific elements of HR tasks should be confined to certain staff as opposed to having too many ‘Jacks of all trades.’

So, you may have a HR staff member focused entirely on aspects such as admin and compliance while another would concentrate on recruitment and training. The two roles demand different skills, so better to have ‘experts’ in the respective posts rather than people trying to perform elements of each.

Consult with a HR expert

If building a HR department from scratch, it’s wise to bring in a professional to advise you. They can help to create a HR facility designed to help meet objectives and may have ideas of the right people to head it up.

A learning environment

An organization benefits from well trained staff and, in turn, they appreciate their employer taking an interest in them and helping to add to their skills and experience.

Creating a learning environment can mean encouraging staff to read and learn about aspects of business beyond their specific jobs and maybe even organize training courses (be that first aid or something more complex related specifically to their jobs or related topics such as business psychology).

Of course the leaders of an organization have to be amenable to providing training for staff, but an efficient HR department will be able to determine when and how respective staff require some learning and implement it accordingly.

Briefing the HR department

An effective HR ‘machine’ can only work properly if fed the right information in terms of what the company wants to achieve in terms of its objectives, culture and values.

Therefore, it’s paramount that HR heads and their staff are fully conversant with the organization’s ‘bigger picture’ so as to be able to help recruit the right people and ensure they work in such a way as to ensure values and objectives are met.