Question

The role of a Human resource professional is often seen as an advocate for employees; an advisor to supervision/managers; and a defender to the organization (senior management). What kinds of situations might cause this to create challenges for the Human Resource Manager? Have you experienced a time when you were positively or negatively impacted by these roles?

Answer 1

It creates challenge for HR professionals in below situations:

1. When an employee is sacked for non-performance, the employee might see the HR negatively and might feel that HR has not done justice to his role.

2. When an employee in spite of good performance is not rated highly by his superiors due to other non-work reasons then this creates challenge for HR. HR has to fight for the employee since he is a good performer and at the same time explain to the employee the importance of non-work attributes.

3. During appraisal or promotion. company would try to keep its employee costs low and may not agree to high increments while a certain percentage of increments if not given may make employees leave.This is again challenging for the HR.

Once I was negatively impacted by these role when despite my good performance and efforts, I was not selected for one of the higher roles and instead a female employee was selected due to her rapport with the superior.