 Welcome to Intro to HR Concepts. My name is Koji Makai, and I'll be serving as your instructor. Before we talk a little bit more, let me share my experience and my education as well. I hold a BA in Psychology and Speech Communication, a Master's Degree in Business Communication, and a PhD in Applied Management and Decision Sciences. Now I know that sounds like a lot, and it sounds like it's a lot of words, but at the very basic level, I care about human beings. I care about human beings in the workplace, which is why I'm teaching this course right now. One of my experiences, at least my very first experience out of college, was working at a Target, and that's a place that I got to learn a lot about people, what moves them, what motivates them, what drives them, what excites them. And my interest in HR and organizational behavior only increased from there. At this moment, I am teaching courses both in business, as well as in communication, because I believe those two things are linked, and there's great value in how people do their work day to day. I am very interested in how people perform their work because I know that most people are going to spend most of their days at work. We have 8,760 hours every single year, and we will spend up to 70% of those either at work or in work-related activities. And my goal is to help people function a lot better at work because it helps them function a lot better at home, and on the whole it makes people better human beings. As a consultant, I spend time with HR departments, but also with executives, trying to find ways to make work much more meaningful for people. And that's why it's my pleasure to work with you in this course to help you become part of that process of ensuring that work becomes much more meaningful for people as they show up day to day. The HR assistant assists with the administration of the day-to-day operations of human resource functions. This basically means you could take on the role of helping an HR manager or an HR specialist as they do the work that they do. You are going to be the go-to person for taking care of the basic aspects of HR administration. Now the HR assistant is going to have multiple responsibilities, and some of these are listed. Let's start with the first one, department development. When it comes to department development, just like any other department inside the organization, it's your job as an HR assistant to ensure that your department functions effectively and efficiently. So not only are you assisting in making sure that everybody else is taking care of within the organization, you also make sure that the department itself is functioning and flourishing. But you're also going to deal with HRIS, which is the Human Resources Information Systems. This is the computer system or software that handles all the information that comes in that is pertinent to HR. That means applications come through this process, resumes come through this process, birthdays, and all the other information that is contained within the organization pertaining to HR. This is a vast system. It can spit out information for us that we need at certain times. So it's important for you to know that information. But the other side you're going to be dealing with is employee relations. That means you get to be the interface between management and the employees themselves. And being that interface, you get to be the face of what it means to connect to the organization as a whole. So when a person comes in and they're first hired, you get to be that person that orients them towards what the organization is about, what the culture is, what the heart of the organization is. And that's related directly to training and development. In training and development, which is my favorite thing to do is we get to really look at a person and say, what are the potentials that you have? And how can we develop those potentials to unnamed heights? And so in training and development, we develop people personally and professionally. And that's going to be part of the work that you do. I think it's exciting work because you get to work with people and see how valuable they are when they come in and how much more valuable you can make them. Another part of the work that you'll possibly be doing is benefits administration. And the benefits administration section, you start to work with the extra money that people make. It's the money they don't see in their paychecks, but it's the money that comes in the form of benefits such as healthcare. You get to administrate this part of a very, very important piece of why a lot of people tend to work is so that they can have benefits. The other side is compensation. Everyone likes to make money. Now, most of us aren't driven by money, but we're okay with the little money that we do have. You get to be a part of that. You get to be a part of understanding what motivates and drives people and how can we compensate them in the way that makes them feel great about themselves? The organizational development piece is another one that excites me because it starts to look at the organization as a whole. What does the organization do well? What does the organization do poorly? How can we benchmark everything that we do? How can we go from being over here successfully to being over here successfully? You get to be a part of that. And organizational development is a huge component of HR work. The executive administration part is sometimes either running the HR department itself or helping the organization run different departments. So you might be interfacing with managers and supervisors of different departments, but in your role, you get to have a cookie from each part or each plate of the departments. The other side is employment law. It's very, very important for you to know the laws that govern how employment ought to be. And so you get to be the person that explains not just to the executives, but also to employees what laws govern their rights and how they ought to behave. Now going a little deeper, there are a few objectives that the HR assistant is going to have to take care of. And I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about each of these. The first one is safety of the workplace. Now in this one, it could also read as safety in the workplace. Your job as HR assistant is to provide a workforce and a workplace that is safe. That means people can ergonomically sit comfortably. That means the interaction between technology and them. That they can sit at computers that will make them feel comfortable. That they can work in a position that doesn't hurt their back, for instance. Your job is to provide safety. That means you hire the best type of people, not people who are unstable, but you also provide tools that can help people really work successfully within the organization. You're a part of providing the balance that's required for work. You know, a lot of people are looking for work-life balance. You get to be the interface for that. And I'll use that word quite a bit of interface because that's you. You get to be the bridge between where people want to be and where people currently are. And through that, you're going to develop a superior workforce. It's your job. Every day you come in, how can we make our organization so much better? What is it that we can do to make our organization successful? Part of that is managing HR so much better. We have to manage our human resources because that's the trick to being a successful organization. See, we could have really, really strong products or really, really strong services. Now, even if we had those, if we didn't have people to sell them who are wonderful at doing that, if we didn't have good customer service, if we didn't have good administration, none of that would work long term. So you get to be a part of developing that superior workforce. The other part is you get to develop the HR department itself. Not only are you developing this larger organization, you're also developing the people around you. You're finding trainings for the people say who are in benefits administration, sending them to new trainings and getting them prepared so that they can answer the questions that employees might have. So you're going to be a part of improving your human resource department by providing all the tools necessary for them to do their work well. You'll also be developing an employee-oriented company culture. And there's three emphasis that I want us to talk about. Number one is quality. See, quantity is a big deal and a lot of people talk about wanting more. The problem is instead of us having more, we need to have less and actually have less that is quality. So it's important for us to have quality people. Imagine having a workforce of 20,000 people and only 5,000 were effective people. What a waste. We're paying people to be there and they're not producing in a way that we need them to develop or to produce. So you get to do that. You get to develop this workplace that emphasizes quality but it also emphasizes continuous improvement. That means just because people are wonderful at certain things, it doesn't mean that they are perfect at them. We're always seeking opportunities for people to improve. How can we take our manufacturing to become better? Well, not only do we have the right systems in place, we also have the right people. So you are constantly keeping an eye out and your ear down for a lot of people who might come in and provide added value to the organization. The third point is high performance. We want high performing people. That's the hallmark of a good HR department, bringing in high performance. This is people who are in the manufacturing section, people who say who are in customer service, people who are on the sales side, people who are on the service side if we have tools that need to be serviced, you are bringing in the very best people and developing them. Now sometimes you're going to bring people who aren't exactly the greatest but because of your time and attention they start to become better because they start to see themselves through the lens of their strengths and that's what you get to do because now you're developing this culture that says it is all about you and we want you to become strong. Now with all this said, it's important for you personally to develop. If you are not developing you provide no example for the people that you're trying to encourage to become so much more of what they could potentially be. So it's important that in the process of you constantly developing other people and sending them to trainings and providing benefits for them and giving them the information that they need that you personally develop as well because when you develop as part of the HR department you increase the value of the HR department and by doing that you also increase the value of the organization itself.