Human resource roles and responsibilities

HR professionals can play an important role in a firm by being able to have a good understanding of transformation and change. An institution that is able to better the form and introduction of initiatives and to lower cycle times in all activities performed by the organization is effectively dealing with change. HR professionals are active actors who have to detect strategies the company needs to employ in order to efficiently restructure its activities.

It is also essential for a HR professional to acknowledge the importance of comprehending the employee's needs. A HR professional acting as an employee advocate has to listen to employees in order to be able to satisfy their needs whenever it is essential for him or her to do so. While many individuals are providing employees with little to no attention, listening to and responding to employees is a very important part of HR work and can sometimes make the difference between a successful company and one that fails.

The fact that HR functions became more common during the 1930s made it possible for personnel experts started to cooperate with a series of other employees in order to be able to gain a more complex understanding of the changes they needed to make in order to help the company thrive. "As the HR field evolved, personnel specialists began talking with line managers about how to design and deliver practices like staffing, training, appraisal, and compensation." (Ulrich & Brockbank, 2005, p. 70)

Human beings have long been perceived as a resource in businesses, taking into account that the abilities, experience, and intellectual power of employees have gradually come to be considered human capital resources. The relationship between humans being seen as a resource and success in business has always been one of the key aspects of HRM theory. HR employee advocates basically acknowledge the fact that some individuals hold great potential and that it is in the company's best interest for these people to be provided with everything they need in order to play an active role in helping the institution progress. HR professionals have to make sure that they are getting the best out of their resources and one of the best strategies to do so is to focus on exploiting individuals. "More specifically, people represent latent assets, whose value is unlikely to be realized if that latent contribution is left undeveloped." (Holbeche, 2013, p. 10) HR professionals focusing of being employee advocates thus have to concentrate on improving relations between employees and the company in order to obtain best results.

The idea of a change agent in HR did not evolve linearly, as HR professionals initially recognized that it was important for them to change their perspectives in some situations and gradually came to invest more and more resources in restructuring the institutions they were working with in order to make success less intangible. In spite of the fact that this domain experienced significant progress during recent years, many companies still experience problem when dealing with the idea of change. This often happens because some HR professionals cling onto the past and express little to no interest in the future. "For the HR professional serving as change agent, honoring the past means appreciating and respecting the tradition and history of a business while acting for the future." (Ulrich, 1997, p. 31)

HR is especially important because it holds a body of information that provides HR professionals with the ability to use their insight. "Functional expertise enables them to create menus of choice for their business and thus identify options that are consistent with business needs rather than those that are merely ones they are able to provide." (Armstrong, 2006, p. 80) HR professionals spend approximately 19% of their time dealing with issues involving employee relations and this means that adopting attitudes that are in accordance with employee interests takes up a significant time of HR work (Armstrong, 2006, p. 80).

Individuals in HR have to accept the fact that change is inevitable and in order to experience as little problems as possible as a result of it happening one needs to be well-acquainted with strategies he or she can employ with the purpose of helping his or her company experience a safe transition. Even with this, it is important for this type of assistance to be taken to a whole new level -- one that can also guarantee success in the future. A HR professional is often required to put across a positive attitude toward change, as this is likely to reduce the risk of him or her being influenced by emotions concerning the past.

One of the first things that a HR expert needs to consider when dealing with change is establishing personal objectives and timelines. This is likely to reflect positively on his or her understanding of the situation and to make change happen more rapidly. The HR professional has to be able to gradually gain control over the situation as things change and this can only be achieved as long as he or she also concentrates on his or her personal interests in addition to helping others.

As conditions within a company change, the role of a HR professional is also probable to experience a series of changes. This means that he or she needs to become an active part of the new institution by post-outsourcing jobs that need to be dealt with rapidly and that no one in the company is able to perform. Although mistakes are an important aspect of progress, a HR professional needs to pay more attention to successful activities than on learning through mistakes.