When I think about HR, I remember Richard Williams and his ritualism geng in Living in Bondage. Between you and I, there's no need for HR in any company. See ehn, all these HR people have special table reservations in hell.
Maybe in your career journey so far, your encounter with HR professionals has left you sharing these sentiments about all of us, I hate to break it to you but you have been really unlucky.
It's not a lie that some of my fellow HR people need to be handcuffed, thrown in a black maria, and forgotten there! Some HR practices are just all shades of wrong. They can be very demeaning and highly unethical, to say the least. It's a shame really because the HR function can be so beneficial to a company and its people when practiced properly.
For starters, when people determine the products and/or services they'd like to offer in exchange for money, they sometimes don't properly consider the various skills that'll be needed to bring that business plan to life. HR is an important business partner to work with in figuring this out. We are typically responsible for figuring out the kind of people that have those skills, where to find them, and how to attract, reward, manage, upskill & keep them.
Finding the right people
People are everywhere o but you see, the right person for a job is relative to the company looking to hire for that job. HR has a responsibility to ensure that the job requirements are properly defined and that the best possible fit for those requirements is found and placed in the vacant job role. As you can imagine (or not...because you still no send HR like that), finding the right person involves a lot of other tasks.
For example, the company has to be positioned as a great place to work in the court of public opinion (in other words, must not have been dragged on Twitter or CareerBuddy ever), the company must pay at par or higher than the market rate for the role it's hiring for (which means HR must know that rate and be up to date at all times because inflation or not, akant must balance), amongst other things. If you're not already feeling for us at this point, you're somehow.
Promoting and rewarding high-performance
After hiring the right people, you'd think that our work is done. Nope, it's only just starting. We must still ensure that they are doing the work they were hired for and doing it properly. Managers can be very funny. Imagine expecting your team to rake in revenue of N1m in a week, but you don't let them know that's what you expect.
Someone will now go and do Jackie Chan, bring in N500k, and be expecting Chairman status. Then oga manager will say the person no try. Situations like that can be very demoralizing and HR needs to proactively ensure they don't happen by supporting the process of defining performance standards and communicating expectations across the business.
We have to also create an enabling environment where people can thrive and do their best work. People need to feel like we see and hear them because they matter. HR also needs to get creative with recognizing and rewarding exceptional performance. I bet you have a story (or a book worth of stories sef) of a time you felt unappreciated and how that impacted your work. Then there's the part where we have to help with detecting performance gaps as well.
A superstar employee can just stop performing because “breakfast was served” or a ton of other reasons. We have to dig and find out what the issue is and how we can support it. Other times, it could be that new tech is introduced or as we've been hearing a lot these days, "the world of work has changed". HR needs to step in and upskill their workforce, company leadership inclusive. It's not the time to be "firing" people because they don't have those new skills.
For example, none of us were really prepared to work fully remotely in the middle of a pandemic that we didn't even understand. Not even HR.
Staying compliant
Every country (yes, Nigeria as well) has laws that guide the operations of its workforce and we HR folks are responsible for ensuring that a company is compliant with such laws.
There are laws that guide against discrimination, unfair salaries, and benefits, working without taking time off, unnecessary deductions from salaries, and so many other things.
Yes, I'm very serious, Nigeria also has such laws. Every HR person needs to be familiar with these laws and advise company leadership of practices that may open them up to lawsuits. You don't want to know how bloody it can get at the labor court. Companies have lost a lot of money just because they didn't have an HR team or person that actually knows the work. Small expo, if your employer is not contributing to the pension scheme for you, you fit run them street. If you sue them and drag them to court, you will win. Casted!
Brethren, HR is a thankless job. We get dragged often and the question is often posed - "What really does HR do?" Don't forget, people are the lifeblood of every organization and those people cannot effectively be managed without an HR team wey sabi.