Being one of the most important and influential departments within any company, HR departments has been gaining much popularity in Nepal too. Apart from recruiting & selecting employees, managing payroll, etc., the HR department also ensures smooth internal communication between management and employees along with communicating company news, keeping employees happy, and resolving employee conflicts.
Moreover, a group of HR professionals can help shape the business culture and improve the way your employees work both individually and within a group. A winning work culture is essential for the success of any business as this is what determines employee satisfaction and workplace happiness. This in turn leads to increased performance, productivity and more sales/profit for the business.
If you are looking forward to set up an HR department in your organization, simply follow these five steps:
1. Research on How it Works
The first step to setting up your HR team is learning about the working mechanisms of the department, role of the HR team & its functions. The number of personnel required in an HR department depends on the nature and scale of the organization. However, below is the basic structure of a Human Resource Department:
- The Director of Human Resources: The leader of the team and the one who creates HR strategies and reports to the upper management.
- The Human Resources Manager: Reporting to the Human Resource Director, Human Resource Manager focuses on retaining effective operations of human resources team.
- The Staffing Coordinator: responsible for recruiting, creating/updating job descriptions and scheduling interviews.
- The Development Officer: One responsible for creating training programs to train new and current employees.
- The Human Resources Generalist: as an entry-level role, this person helps with administrative tasks and helping out the director or manager.
Learning how a HR team works and which people it consists of is essential to adding the right people to your team and determining what their role is within your company.
2. Find an Experienced HR Manager
Once you’ve hired the director of the team, now move on to finding the HR manager. You need to be very cautious with this hire, since this person should be able to immediately take all of the department’s responsibilities and has a certain level of knowledge and experience in the field so that they can lead effectively.
When looking to hire an HR manager, you should first evaluate their way of working and find out what is their idea of a winning company culture. In the interview, ask questions that reveal their intentions and how they are planning to communicate with the rest of the team and what their role will be in your company.
3. Decide What You Need
Hiring an experienced manager is a must because it can help you get your HR department up and running, but, there is no strict rule that you have to get another five people on board. In fact, you can have two or three people working in HR handling all of the tasks. Alternatively, you can have people from other departments including marketing, accounting, legal, operations, and IT, get involved in human resources decisions.
4. Set Expectations
Now comes the part of outlining expectations from each of the team members. Setting expectations for each member is crucial, especially at the beginning. So make sure each member knows who they need to give reports to and so that the organization operations run smoothly.
5. Determine HR Activities
HR activities are focused on what they will be offering the company and employees. To create an effective HR department, you need to determine how these activities will be organized and controlled. It is important that this happens to ensure expectations between workers and higher management are the same. Considering that the HR team will be responsible for retaining current employees – and attracting new ones, there is going to be a need to keep your team engaged in their work and focused on company goals.
Some of the best ways to do that is by introducing incentive and reward programs, training and development and a performance monitoring system. Even though some employees probably won’t like having their work evaluated, it’s necessary so that you can monitor achievements which can lead to raises or promotions. Such activities will also help you determine who is not performing and do what’s best for the company to reach its goals easier and faster.
Having conducted these steps, now you are ready to kick start your HR department. For more HR related tips and queries, click here.
