The human resources department is an integral part of any company that wants to make it in this ever-evolving and competitive business world. They’re the single tie between the people up on the top and the common employee, and it is their job to make sure the workforce is helping to improve the company instead of dragging it down.

It takes a lot of experience and a load of trial and error to become a good HR manager that your employees will not only look to for guidance but will also know that you’ll be able to provide it to them. Today, we want to talk about a few things that make a good HR manager, so that you can start applying them to your own situation and improving your relationship with your subordinates.

Communication with Employees

First and foremost, you can’t be a good HR manager if you don’t spend a substantial amount of time communicating with your employees. Whether this is in person or via various surveys and chain e-mails, it’s very important to stay on top of your employee’s needs and wants, as well as take any kind of feedback that they might have into consideration.

Team building events and employee training programs are also a very good idea, as it helps you get to know the personalities behind the employees, and that bit of information is always important to consider when making business-oriented decisions. In short, the better you are acquainted with your workforce, the more efficient your decisions regarding your workers will be, and both your employees and the entire company can only benefit from something like this.

Motivating the Staff

A good HR manager is a motivator and a leader. Unfortunately, many people misunderstand the term motivation because it is often used incorrectly – or rather, they’re getting excited about the wrong aspects of motivation. When motivating someone, your main goal is to help people become who they already are. You need to focus on their strengths and divert them towards tasks that they’ll be more successful at accomplishing because that will not only increase efficiency and be beneficial for the company in the long run, but it will also work to improve the employee’s confidence – and the more confident your workforce is, the more independent and efficient they become.

This is your ultimate goal; to develop a workforce that is pretty much self-sufficient and requires only rudimentary attention. This way, your workload will be lessened, and they’ll feel better about themselves and their position in the company. It’s a win-win situation, but only if you approach motivation in the correct manner.

Detecting Talent

Another very important ability that a good HR manager is required to possess is to witness potential and find a way to bring it out. A new employee might not be all that knowledgeable and experienced, but if he has the right kind of talent, they can quickly and easily pick up on anything they need to with the right kind of training. The only problem is that you are the one who has to notice this kind of talent before the employee is even hired because actually paying them before you’re certain they’ll actually be able to contribute anything to the company is an unacceptable waste of time and resources.

The best way to do this is to come up with an effective employee training and screening program that all new employees have to go through before you even consider them to be an asset. Fortunately, nowadays, there are numerous excellent tools that can help you with coming up with such a system, so all you have to do is use them and get the results that you need.

An examination software suite like YouTestMe GetCertified allows you to quickly and easily put together an efficient and modern computer-based training program so you can test many different employees at once and select the ones that you consider to have the most potential. Just make sure that you put together a type of test that doesn’t necessarily depend on how knowledgeable the new potential employees are but are more of a test of their actual abilities and talent because that’s what you’re screening them for.

A Serious, But Positive Tone

As an HR manager, you shouldn’t be your subordinate’s best friend, but not their worst enemy either. It’s important to maintain a  positive atmosphere with the employees while still maintaining a position of authority and leadership. Never scream, shout at or threaten your employees as a means of displaying authority. This is the part that comes hardest to many managers, and it is this aspect of their work that keeps most of them from developing their careers further.

Authority isn’t always simply a God-given gift. However, it can be practiced and perfected, but only if you’re serious about it. Think about what authority represents for you, and then try to impersonate it until it becomes a part of you, no matter how cryptic that may sound. You need to be the person that will solve problems such as inefficiency in a civilized but effective manner, resulting in an outcome that everyone is content with, if at all possible. If you can do that, you’ve got it made, and you will become one of the most valuable assets of your company.

Conclusion

As you can see, if you want to become a good HR manager, there is quite a number of things that you need to pay attention to, and now that you know what they are, you can do just that. Don’t expect it to happen overnight, but as long as you keep working at it, we’re sure that you’ll be able to turn yourself into a manager that your subordinates will always be able to rely on and that your superiors will continue to treasure for years to come.