HR professionals face a variety of demands at the best of times, but with the global pandemic shaking up the way many businesses operate, the past few months have proved even more challenging for them. Not only have they been forced to make sense of new regulations and guidance that sometimes changed from day to day, but they’ve had to manage dwindling – or in some fortunate cases, increasing – workforces, and often, in-house HR pros were (and continue to be) understaffed and under resourced.
If you’re a business owner or manager and are struggling to keep up with the many demands modern HR is throwing at you, it might be worth considering hiring the services of an online HR provider. Keeping themselves updated with changing laws and regulations, they have teams of payroll specialists able to manage all your HR needs.
Here, we look in a little more detail at some of the challenges HR professionals have been facing of late, and how their role has changed due to modern demands:
Forced to make fast decisions with limited information:
With many businesses forced to lay off employees – if they were fortunate enough to remain functioning as a business at all – despite the temporary help from unemployment insurance payments, terminating employees still required paying out unused vacation time that some smaller businesses simply couldn’t afford. HR professionals had to try desperately hard to find creative, lawful ways to cover these unforeseen costs, and pay the amount over an extended period of time.
While this was going on, HR specialists also had to try and sort through federal programs that on many occasions, seemed to be in direct conflict with each other, and give advice and counsel about which way to go. With so many changes to legislation, and in such a short space of time, even the most seasoned of HR professionals were left scratching their heads, trying to find answers to all their queries.
Promoting HR professionals to higher echelons:
Thanks in part to the increasing demands modern HR professionals have been forced to meet of late, their role has been somewhat elevated, and they have emerged as essential members of a businesses executive team. With so many regulatory changes over such a short period of time (not to mention the diversity quota’s that arose from the recent protests surrounding George Floyds death in police custody), HR pros have become the go-to people for managers, business owners and employees alike, and as such, their role has never been so important or worth investing in.
No longer is it possible for small business owners to assign HR related tasks to other employees who already handle other business functions; HR is not the domain of anyone other than those who know exactly what they’re doing. So, with this in mind, if you haven’t already invested in hiring HR specialists, or aren’t already benefitting from the services of an online HR provider, now might be the perfect time to do so.