What Should I Do as a Former HR Head in a Company Without an HR Department?

Role of a Former HR Head in a Company Without an HR Department

Please explain to me what role I should play as the former head of the HR department in my company, which did not have an HR department for the last 8 years?

Thank you!

Regards

First of all, you can start with:

1. Organisational chart with the help of senior management + department-wise.
2. Statutory requirement audit to identify any discrepancies.
3. HR policy formulation (attendance, recruitment, payroll, leave, promotion, welfare, etc.).
4. Process establishment for the HR department.
5. Coordinating activities with other departments like finance, accounts, administration, etc. (flow chart for HR/salary payment).
6. Implementation throughout the organisation.

Regards,
Ravi

Dear Vindya S. Samaraweera,

Thank you, Dear Ravi, for the good suggestion. Dear V. S. S., first, you should follow the first point of Ravi's suggestion, and after that, you can engage in such activities.

1. Start the day by greeting your staff.
2. Know your staff by name, even if they are a sweeper. Personal touch is the basis for HR function.
3. Browse your emails. Segregate them into urgent and important. Attend to the urgent ones first.
4. Go through your date diary and check whether any statutory compliances need to be met on that day or any meetings scheduled for that day. Make diarising dates a habit.
5. Solve grievances promptly; if not, they may escalate into potential disputes later.

These are a few basic functions to start your work.

Additional HR Functions to Implement

Apart from these, you should implement all these things in your organization:

1. Manpower Planning
2. Recruitment
3. Induction for new joiners
4. Training
5. Motivation
6. Performance Appraisal
7. Promotions, Transfers, and Demotions
8. Retirement. In addition to these policies, provide welfare to employees.
9. Employee retention
10. Full and Final Settlement

All of the above work is generally carried out by the HR Department. However, you will have to perform the tasks as assigned by your seniors, which may include statutory compliance, HR & IR related issues, formulating HR policy, liaison with government bodies, etc.

Thanks & Regards

Take the Three-Tier approach to HR, with HR operations, Legal, and finally HR Strategy.

There are HR operational processes that are already in progress. Start by mapping them. See how long it takes for one process to run and what the bottlenecks are. Set a manageable Turn-Around-Time if required. Acknowledge where you have dependencies and build a parallel process or support for it. Identify the start-to-end path for each process and which team member delivers what. Cite the points for escalations and name the leaders who are handling them. Add resources to your team if a process is under pressure. In case you can't hire anyone new, pool the responsibilities among the existing members, who might have lesser tasks to deliver during that time.

Once you have fairly stabilized your Operations, list out all the legal standards to be maintained and annual audits. Identify what has been managed by your peer firms and what the industry benchmark is. Involve an external legal consultant to ensure timely service. Check for all the areas for outages and deviations. Learn how to avoid them from an expert. Keep a list of experts and officials to be contacted if required.

Finally, look at the business goals and identify the Human aspect in it. What would your team require to deliver in order to achieve the goal? Acknowledge existing issues towards Employee engagement and compensation. Review the current pay compared to industry standards.

Check for employee satisfaction and find out the gaps. Identify the near-term and long-term goals to address them.

Draw the Organization chart to review the information flow and decision-making chart. Check if an authority has lesser decision-making capabilities than his span of control. Identify the touch points and build a dotted line reporting if needed to support.

I am certain you must have identified a few challenges, no matter how preliminary they might seem. Please consider sharing them. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards