HR sometimes gets a bad reputation, especially in popular culture where it’s portrayed as a hindrance rather than a boon to a company. A poorly managed HR department might feel that way, but when human resources is done well it can support a company’s productivity, growth and more. The following tasks are the most important things that HR does, and how, when they do them well, add an incredible amount of value to any company.

Hiring, Recruitment and Onboarding

The HR department has one of the most important tasks in a company — choosing who the right people are to join the team. This has significant impacts as an organization cannot function without good employees. If the HR department is good, they will select the very best candidates for the job. Not doing so and being sloppy can cost the company a lot of money in wasted salaries, wasted onboarding time and money, and impacted productivity.

There are many areas for HR to excel in this department. They will need to do adequate workforce planning, identifying long-term employee requirements, and come up with a strategy to fix talent gaps and develop employee skills. Onboarding is also vital as the wrong initial training can cause an employee to unnecessarily drain resources for the rest of their tenure.

Driving Productivity by Engaging Employees

Part of HR is to look for ways that employees can become more productive, more engaged, and more motivated. The other side of this coin is identifying any problems that might arise and targeting and addressing them before they start to have major costs to the company. These costs could be financial (e.g. impacted efficiency), but they could also be in the form of a damage to the company culture, creating a working environment that doesn’t nurture employees. They might use surveys to do this monitoring, as employee engagement surveys can increase proactive behaviors, increase retention and productivity, and facilitate honesty across teams according to inpulse.com.

Keeping on Top of Market Trends

It’s part of HR’s job to keep on top of market trends and forecast the requirements of their department and of the company as a whole. This involves looking at what competitors are doing, being aware of new technology, and looking towards the future. By doing that, an HR department helps to inform the company strategy in a way that most departments aren’t able to.

Setting Incentives

Incentives are needed to keep a workforce motivated, healthy, and happy and it’s consequently a very important and significant job. Incentives could be in the form of creating benchmarks for compensation (e.g. certain salaries that come from specific job promotions), creating formulae for compensation with the use of different software, using data analytics to help guide promotions and exact compensation packages, and alerting management when there is a certain individual that needs extra incentive and motivation.

HR is also responsible for goal setting in individuals and evaluating individual employee performance, which in modern times is greatly enhanced by analytic software and the magic of big data.