HR’s job is not just limited to hiring competent staff, conducting appraisals, and maintaining a healthy work environment. HR professionals should also be aware of the local laws and regulations to efficiently handle the legal issues that could arise in a workplace. Knowing these laws can help them take proper steps against abuse and discrimination and avoid hefty penalties.
Here are the statutory mandatory knowledge HR professionals should have.
Ethical Work Structures
HR managers should understand labour and employment laws, allowing them to provide an ethical structure to company workings. Maintaining a work structure that follows proper ethics ensures a hospitable work environment that abides by local laws and guarantees the fair treatment of everyone. Without HR’s controlling and managerial actions, companies may find it hard to follow the rules and uphold ethical behaviour.
HR managers should employ their knowledge of the intricacies of state and federal laws, allowing the company to function every day. They are responsible for managing various departments, making them follow the rules, and maintaining upright and professional behaviour to establish an ethical work culture.
Promoting an ethical work environment is a moral and strategic imperative for organisations. HR plays a significant role in establishing and sustaining an ethical work environment, from prioritising ethics during recruitment to developing ethical policies. In doing so, HR can drive positive change at work, fostering a culture of integrity and accountability.
The work environment is crucial to the company’s overall reputation, affecting how consumers view them. Thus, companies depend on HR professionals to achieve a friendly work environment and establish a good reputation.
Recruitment and Payroll Processes
The overall success of the Human Resources Department will depend on how knowledgeable the HR staff is regarding recruitment and payroll processes. Regardless of the nature of the job market, HR must always approach recruitment with care and adhere to a legally defensible recruitment process. If HR fails to take hiring laws seriously, even a single misstep can result in costly litigation.
Aside from exposing companies to liability, ignoring crucial legal issues in recruitment can cause organisations to miss the best candidates, resulting in a less diverse workforce. Aside from adhering to local laws and regulations, applying some common sense can go a long way towards recruiting the best employees and minimising legal risks.
Another crucial reason for HR to know about employment laws is to take care of the employee’s wages, which is essential for establishing a good rapport and work relations. Therefore, HR professionals should know the relevant laws regarding employee benefits to provide them with everything they deserve.
The HR Department should know about the Fair Labour Standards Act to ensure timely payroll and overtime payment processing. Releasing appropriate salaries on time and providing appraisals, raises, compensations, and benefits to employees are some of the most crucial responsibilities of HR.
Learning and Development
Employees have the right to benefit from access to professional learning and development during their employment, and HR professionals should be aware of this. They are responsible for ensuring that employees adapt well to their job position and secure the maintenance of their capacity to perform their tasks well.
HR must continuously provide learning opportunities to employees, which can involve linking job descriptions to knowledge, skills, and competencies required for the position. Part of HR’s role is identifying the employees’ training and development needs and providing the necessary training or upskilling.
Every employer wants to see their employees thrive, and that could mean providing them with the tools they need to succeed. These are not necessarily physical, such as computers and software. Instead, they can be training and development, such as new employee orientation, leadership training, managerial training, professional and personal development, and more.
Training and development are an integral part of HR’s roles. Depending on the employee’s role, the training can be responsible for developing instructional programs that directly impact the organisation’s overall success. In fact, many colleges and universities nowadays offer degrees in training and development.
Employees Health and Safety
As mentioned, employers must provide compulsory training to employees in various areas, including human relations, customer service, and communication skills. But one of the most vital training above all these is safety training. All organisations are legally responsible for keeping employees as safe as possible at work, and the HR team should facilitate health and safety training for employees.
The law has specified the significance of providing necessary training, especially for new employees. If there is an accident at work due to the employer’s failure to provide adequate training, the employer can be legally responsible for the accident.
Of course, every company wants to provide a safe and healthy workplace. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA) mandates that employers offer companies a safe workplace for their workers. A crucial role of HR is supporting and developing safety training. They are also responsible for maintaining federally-mandated logs of workplace fatalities and injuries. In addition, HR should work hand in hand with benefits specialists in managing the worker’s compensation filings.
Equality, Inclusion and Diversity
As more and more companies are working to create a more exclusive, diverse, and inclusive workforce, the role of HR has become more crucial than ever. One of HR’s roles in these initiatives is shaping the organisational culture. HR can work with senior leaders in defining company values around equality, inclusion, and diversity. They can help develop policies and procedures to support these goals.
Another way HR can contribute to the company’s equality, inclusion and diversity initiatives is by developing training programs to help them understand these initiatives even more. They can work to ensure these initiatives apply in all aspects of the organisation, from recruitment to performance management, promotion decisions, and employee engagement.
A crucial step HR can take in supporting the company’s equality, inclusion, and diversity is to ensure a fair and equitable recruitment process. It means eliminating unconscious bias and establishing a more inclusive hiring experience.
