15 HR Skills that Every HR Professional Should Develop

15 HR Skills that Every HR Professional Should Develop

           HR professionals are crucial for the success of any business. They are the backbone of your organization. Their role is vital from improving business strategies to handling activities related to employees. HR is also involved in recruiting the best talent, processing payroll, overseeing benefits among others. However, human beings are in continuous change. They change how they live, think, learn, and work.

Therefore, practicing and being an excellent HR professional requires adaptability. You must keep up with the people you serve by adapting as quickly as they change. You also must stay updated on aspects like industry policies, strategies on marketing, changes in technology, and skills to manage workers. To work well as an HR professional, you need different skills. In this article, I will provide you with an overview of top HR skills you need to learn.

Being Organized

HR management requires you to be orderly. It is important to stay organized since you have too much to cope with. You should have organized files, strong skills in managing time, and be personally efficient to be effective. You will be pulled in many directions and interrupted all through the day so you need to be able to switch. To plan your day, you can invest in sticky notes, to-do lists, and software for managing tasks. These will help you improve your workflow and keep you on track in case of interruptions.

Multitasking

From administering benefits, creating recruitment strategies to engaging workers, you need to do all these and much more. On a normal day as HR, you will deal with employee issues, answer questions, and whole other things critical to someone. Priorities in business needs change fast. It’s from one thing to another, and you must be able to handle it all. You need to be a good multitasker to keep up with responsibilities and issues that arise during the workday with no notice. On one side, you must be able to handle issues with employees, while on the other side, you must be able to implement new policies from authorities. And still, carry out your everyday duties.

Communication Skills

As an HR professional, you communicate to managers, potential and current employees, and investors. From interviewing candidates to solving issues in the office, effective communication will help you face it all. You need to have excellent communication skills to clearly express ideas either verbally or in writing. You must be convincing and believable as the employees look up to you as a source of truth. Communication ways include memos, handbooks, and social media.

Problem-Solving and Conflict Management

In the place of work, not all employees relate well to fellow workers and this causes conflict. As an HR professional, conflicts between workers will find their way to you. You have to listen to both sides and agree on a solution. Skills for managing conflicts will help you deal with the issues. It is your duty as HR to ensure employees work together to improve productivity. Without the ability to solve problems that arise, you can’t be effective in saving a crisis.

Negotiation

You will encounter opposing views from different parties at work. To negotiate is to deal with the opposing views and find a middle ground that is acceptable to all parties. It is not easy to achieve a satisfactory outcome for everyone if you don’t have negotiation skills. You should learn and sharpen your negotiation skills so it won’t be a challenge to you. As an HR professional, you will face many issues that require your negotiation skills to solve.

Strong Ethics

In your daily activities as an HR professional, you will handle sensitive and confidential information related to the business or employees. For example, an employee will tell you an issue that he or she won’t want to tell anyone else. To have strong ethics means having a moral compass that you consult to influence decisions in daily activities. You are responsible for preventing sensitive information from falling into wrong hands. Also, when making snap judgments, your code of ethics must guide your decision without effort.

Active Listening

This means listening keenly to what an employee has to say. Not only does it involve listening but also understanding and getting the picture of what someone is saying. You are then supposed to give feedback from what you heard from them. This helps build trust and future positive communication from all your team members. As a leader, you should possess the skill of active listening and use it when communicating with workers.

Lead with Empathy

To lead with empathy means you can understand the experience, perspective, and feelings of another person. You don’t have to agree with their way of viewing things. Empathy lets you appreciate better what they might be going through. When you show empathy, you see people as humans. It allows you to build relationships based on trust and interactions that are meaningful.

Advising

As HR personnel, you are involved in advising employees, managers, and different stakeholders. You need to have the skill to advise them on different issues. These issues may include creating a reintegration plan for a worker, helping a manager formulate an email for a department, and restructuring the organization among others. Advice is strategic as it involves aligning your HR practices to the business. Advice is given verbally so also requires communication skills.

Coaching

To coach is to teach or add some knowledge. You use your coaching skills at work in one-on-one or group sessions to pass on information or train the employees. Not only do you coach in training and development, but also in onboarding, conflict resolution, reintegration, and in assisting managers with employee issues. Coaching encourages an employee to take action in his or her duties, therefore, improving engagement.

Taking Risks

You might not be encouraged or trusted to take a risk as an HR professional. But you must understand the need to take chances from what value they bring. You might find yourself in a situation that needs you to trust your intuition and take a risk. Although you might be making a mistake, you have to accept the unknown and take a leap of faith. Everyone makes mistakes but you should learn from your failure to grow professionally and also personally.

Recruiting and Hiring

Recruiting and selecting a candidate is a skill you should have as HR. You are involved in finding qualified candidates and selecting the best. You also explore if the candidate matches the company culture and the manager. When interviewing a candidate, you should present the company by talking in a worthwhile approach. To add, you must possess a skill that helps you spot the best practices from competing candidates.

Compensation and Benefits

HR should work closely with the management to come up with a constructive compensation and benefits system. Accurately framed benefits and compensation structures help you acquire and retain new talents in an organization. As the HR, you should use your negotiation skills to formulate the compensation and benefits structures as per the industry norms.

Data Analytics

Companies nowadays are using the power of data analytics to make better decisions. Skills have emerged that relate to working with data analytics. As HR, you must understand the key HR metrics. These metrics include recruitment, engagement, retention, and employee performance among others. This requires you to become comfortable with understanding and analyzing data.

HRIS Knowledge

HRIS are digital systems that assist in HR operations. Information on hiring, performance reviews, payroll, benefits, and more are registered in HRIS. HR personnel should train on how to use HRIS, and understand and interpret data in it. Today, knowledge of HRIS is a top technology skill that HR professionals should have. You can’t understand the systems without experiencing them, but, they are simple and intuitive to use in work. 

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