The HR Department's Activities and working from home

Can human resources' specialists work from home or not? Does the nature of their work involve their physical presence in the office or can these activities be carried out efficiently at home? These were just two of the many questions raised by the pandemic period of 2020-2021, to which companies answer depending on the nature of the company's activity, the resilience of managers to change (including HR managers) and the level of automation of HR activities.

Objectively, at a certain level of automatization, all the activities specific to the human resources department can be performed ‘remotely’. What is quite obvious is that certain HR processes / activities need to be rethought in the perspective of the reality of working from home.

1. Expansion of staff recruitment and selection. If by 2020, employers prefer to hire locally, once the work goes online, this limitation is no longer necessary, as specialists can work from anywhere. HR specialists face new situations such as: managing recruitment platforms to a greater extent, conducting interviews in a proportion of 90% online and not face to face. This situation requires the development of IT skills, basically involving a combination of relationship skills (usually manifested face to face) with IT, management of applications skills that are dedicated to recruitment and selection, interviewing and testing candidates, etc.
2. Integration of new employees online. The integration process involves those activities that come to the aid of new employees in order to integrate them quickly, to understand the organizational cultural aspects as soon as possible in order to achieve 100% efficiency. Activities such as a tour of the location or lunch with colleagues disappear when working at home. Thus, integration specialists must create activities that are specific to the virtual environment that meet the same need for adaptation and integration of new employees.
3. Facilitating the organizational communication process. Although working from home enjoys flexibility and autonomy, last year's studies show that employees who work from home tend to believe, to a greater extent than those who work from the office, that their work is not valued at its true value. They feel they’re not being involved in decision-making processes during projects, more often than those who work in the office. With these issues in mind, HR specialists need to pay more attention to communication processes, creating communication policies that target both office and remote work. Frequent meetings in teleconferences, maintaining constant contact between managers and their team members, even after business hours, are just two of the current concerns of HR specialists in the new context.