What Does an HR Operations Manager Do?

An HR operations manager oversees the HR operations, ensures smooth procedures, and supervises the HR department’s day-to-day administrative tasks. The tasks include checking the budget, implementing new HR policies, improving employee relations, overseeing recruiting, and more. In short, the HR operations manager maintains the entire internal HR operations.

The role of HR operations managers is quite critical, therefore, it requires particular HR operations skills. A few of these skills include excellent communication skills, administrative skills, active listening, and the ability to provide support to a team. In addition, you must exhibit strong leadership skills that are fundamental for the manager’s post.

The HR operation manager oversees all the administrative workings of a human resources department. They must possess significant HR management experience.

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This article takes you through all you need to know about the HR operations manager’s role and duties.

What are the Five Key Responsibilities of an HR Operations Manager?

The primary role of a human resource operations manager is to set goals for a particular company’s HR operations and track the department’s efforts to target its goals. They also review, approve, and provide any necessary modifications to the HR department’s budget. Moreover, they also supervise database and HR system maintenance for the company.

HR operations managers also oversee specific tasks such as recruiting, employee engagement and retention, employee satisfaction, and performance management.

Moreover, they ensure a healthy environment for employees to work in and that the HR department’s workflow is cost-effective yet efficient. An HR operations manager ensures that the HR department performs its tasks while assisting other departments in an efficient way. 

Understanding the job requirement when applying for a particular position is essential. Once you understand the HR operations manager role, you can start training for it by practicing HR operations skills.

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HR Operations Manager Responsibilities

An HR operations manager is responsible to look after the company’s human resources policies, employees, human resources budget, human resources systems, and administrative work. Therefore, the candidate must exhibit specific skills such as excellent management and communication skills to fulfill these responsibilities. The less communication gap between the departments and employees in a company, the more efficiently they can work.

HR operations manager deals with the employees of a company along with outsiders or third parties, they must exhibit excellent interpersonal abilities.

Leadership skills are another attractive quality that you must exhibit to qualify for an HR operations manager. The ability to lead a team, take HR initiatives, and develop creative ideas for improving the HR department’s workflows is a valuable skill and opens doors to an organization’s growth and success.

Some of the primary responsibilities of an HR operations manager are discussed below.

1. Implement Company Policies

One of the primary responsibilities of an HR operations manager is implementing company policies. After all, it is significant for every organization to have rules and regulations. However, implementing those policies is even more crucial to ensure that the organization enjoys significant productivity while maintaining discipline because of rules, regulations, and guidelines.

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HR operations manager ensures the company runs in a smooth way. They also ensure that the creation of these policies complies with the relevant labor regulations and regulatory legislation of a particular country. Therefore, the HR operations manager assures that the company does not go through any legal troubles.

2. Supervise the Recruitment and Employee Onboarding Programs

The human resources department handles all the HR processes such as recruiting, onboarding, or offboarding an employee. The HR operations manager plays a vital role in the implementation of these operations. They assist in looking for suitable candidates for a role, clarifying a position’s requirements, filtering out unsuitable applications, and arranging interviews.

Once that recruitment process ends, the next task is employee onboarding. The onboarding tasks include:

• Drafting contracts
• Getting them signed by the hired individual
• Negotiating salaries and benefits packages ability
• Handling all the other paperwork that comes with hiring a person

An HR operations manager oversees all these processes and ensures efficiency throughout the workflow.

The onboarding process also includes educating the new employee about the vision, culture, goals, and many more things linked to the company. Organizations demand that all new hires go through training before they step into the job. Hence, an HR operations manager handles and guides all such processes.

3. Oversee Employee Offboarding

When a company lays off an employee, or the employee wishes to resign or is retiring, the HR operations manager performs all formalities. Those formalities often include informing departments like the finance department or the IT department regarding the employee’s exit from the company.

The HR operations manager interviews the employee leaving the company to receive feedback regarding working conditions and what can improve within the HR department’s operations. They also look into the employee’s relations with their colleagues and teams at different levels. 

The offboarding process also includes transferring the responsibilities of the retiring employee to existing employees or a new one and the HR department takes care of the paperwork. Therefore, the HR operations manager supervises all of these procedures and address personnel too.

4. Monitor And Review Departmental Budgets

The finance department of a company drafts the budget, but it goes to the HR operations manager. They then ensure that the budget fulfills the HR department’s operations and administrative needs while keeping in mind all other necessary factors. The budget also includes the availability of capital to the HR department and business plans.

Organizations undergo budget cuts due to unexpected events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic., When such cuts happen, the approved budget must ensure that the company can survive on lower allocations. The HR operations manager is responsible for this task and ensuring that the new funding is adequate for HR operations running.

5. Overlook HR Operations Administrative Tasks

The HR department performs administrative HR tasks, and the HR operations manager supervises them. These tasks include maintaining files on employees’ data, monitoring other departments to ensure that every employee is doing their job, handling compensation details and internal HR systems, and many more.

The HR operations manager looks after all the tasks that the department carries out and ensures that the systems run in a smooth and efficient way. This particular responsibility requires a candidate with excellent leadership, time management skills, and communication skills.

Conclusion

Working as an HR operations manager helps gain professional exposure and pushes you to think outside the box to bring new ideas to the company, resolve problems, and lead an HR team. The job is demanding yet fulfilling since it gives you space to grow and acquire a multitude of HR operations skills at one time.

Qualifications are crucial for this job, and possessing the right skills and adequate experience makes you an appealing candidate when you send out applications. In addition, with smaller organizations, you get to experiment a lot while you are in the HR operations manager role. However, you should also aim to work for a large organization since the experiences you get there are unmatched.

FAQs

Here are some of the most common questions about the HR operations manager role and their answers.

What skills make you a competent HR operations manager?

To become a capable HR operations manager, polish your communication skills and nurture strong time management and human resources management abilities. Such skills help you work in a productive way and ensure that the HR operations team is in the hands of an able HR manager.

Apart from these skills, you must exhibit proactiveness and solid interpersonal skills. Organizations prefer candidates who can take initiative as this shows that they can lead and take charge whenever required.

Another critical skill for an HR operations manager is using the resources available to them in the right way. Once you master such areas, the job becomes more accessible, and the human resources department keeps doing better.

What are some lesser-known details about the HR operations manager role?

An HR operations manager role is stressful at times. Sometimes the number of applications is overwhelming, and other times, it is hard to shortlist a candidate because there is more than one promising individual.

Also, collaborating with a team becomes challenging because there are times when people do not agree with each other. Such scenarios create conflicts to the extent that the team members cannot work with each other and need a mediator. In times like these, it is up to the HR operations manager to remain professional and use their problem-solving skills to resolve the workspace conflicts.

Why do organizations hire an HR operations manager?

Hiring an HR operations manager is the right step if your organization needs a dedicated HR professional to oversee the everyday dealings of the department. Moreover, organizations hire for roles if they don’t wish to divide such responsibilities amongst a few existing employees, which is a usual route for smaller organizations with limited budgets.

A qualified HR operations manager ensures that the HR department runs in a productive way. That is a crucial requirement of large organizations as the world expects professionalism from them.

If you are new to Human Resources and are looking to break into an HR operations manager role, we recommend taking our HR Certification Course, where you will learn how to build your skillset in HR operations, build your people operations network, craft an excellent HR operations manager resume, and create a successful HR operations manager job search strategy.