Wikipedia says: In organizational management, human resources refers to the group of employees or collaborators of an organization. However, it is more commonly used to refer to the function that deals with acquiring, developing, employing, and retaining the organization's collaborators.
When we talk about the area of Human Resources, some paradigms usually appear that are worth analyzing:
- It's only necessary if it's a large company. Otherwise, "we'll manage."
- They're the "soft" side of the organization, meaning they're always on the loose. They're the sentimental ones.
- They bear the brunt of the costs: salaries, absenteeism, licenses, awards, courses…
- "We already have someone who pays our salaries and delivers our clothes twice a year."
As always, we believe it's worth challenging some ideas to encourage debate and enrichment. So, here we go!
- There is no specific company size for deciding to create a professional Human Resources department.
When we meet with our SME clients, the question is inevitable: do you think we need someone to take care of that? If we're only 25, 50, 200... And the answer is also inevitable: YES! And here I'm going to beg to differ with the folks at Wikipedia. Human Resources IS NOT "the function that deals with acquiring, developing, employing, and retaining the organization's employees."
Human Resources is the knowledge center that facilitates, accompanies, assists, collaborates, guides, and educates the entire organization at all levels, so that each person, in their respective roles, acquires, develops, and retains their employees.
This is the area that, aligned with the company's strategic plan, forecasts, sets policies, and works together with all leaders so that the organization achieves a true competitive advantage through its people. - Working with, for and by people does not imply sentimentality, but it does imply feelings. .
Working with people in a people-oriented way involves, among many other things, being open to dialogue, listening with understanding and empathy, finding innovative solutions, and eliminating judgment. It involves putting yourself in the other person's shoes to help them develop throughout their time at the company.This doesn't mean the area should ignore other, more difficult but equally key issues. For example:
- Have a Strategic Human Resources Plan aligned with the general plan, a strategic plan broken down into its primary and secondary actions: recruitment and selection, education and training, promotions, potential development and career plans, performance evaluation, compensation and rewards, social initiatives, and severance pay.
- Budget for the area that allows us to use resources (abundant or scarce) in the best possible way for the company and for people.
- Management indicators: These are not just the traditional measures of absenteeism, turnover, hours lost due to accidents, or training hours per person. We go further: we want to know, for example, what the organizational climate is like, what current and future skills are required and where their development is headed, and what the level of job satisfaction is.
- It's true! Money is spent in this area, but what about the return on a properly executed investment?
Perhaps I'm at one of the most critical points here. Because in Human Resources, we often fail to measure the return on the investments we make in terms of training, improving working conditions (dining rooms, clothing, changing rooms, etc.), and rewards. When we talk about people, feelings, and "climate," it's not so easy to find a way to measure the economic impact of our actions. However, today we have sufficient know-how at our disposal to determine the indicators that indirectly show us whether the investment we are making in this area is the right one: productivity, accident rates, quality. - Human Resources. Or beyond the Personnel Office.
Finally, we are now aware that companies cannot achieve excellence with just one of these two pillars. We need a personnel administration office that handles legal aspects: compensation, social security, agreements, medical checkups, etc. But we also need, to the same extent, a department that addresses people as a whole, that is, their intelligence, their aspirations, their goals—in short, their development.
The challenge, then, is to change the questions. And the next time you're faced with the question of whether a human resources department is necessary, I invite you to ask yourself: Aren't we already overdue?
We continue in the next one
