A line HR is responsible for the various execution and administrative tasks. They are the ones who would be keeping tab of the day to day employee facilitation activities for example about leave, perks/ benefits processing, exit interviews, getting your joining letter, employee engagement activities (engagement activities means how to keep the employee motivated and committed to one's job), employees training activities etc. Now For the Strategic HR, they are the people who mostly work behind the scenes who would be the architect of the company policies on employee retention , development of employees through training and development, performance management of employees how to quantify performance and ensure the best systems for employee promotion, the compensation and benefit package of the employee as well as creating systems and process that enables and empowers employees to unleash their creative potential to the maximum. It is actually about what it would take to make something engaging enough that employees themselves would love to work at a company how to make an organisation some of the best places to work.
Apart from the above mentioned fields comes also the domain of recruitment as well employer branding which is how do you increase the brand value of your employer to potential employees whether the potential employees are laterally hired or whether they are fresh engineering/ management graduates straight from their technical/business schools . A big chunk of strategic HR contains another parallel branch called Industrial relation HR, which is about managing labour relations in manufacturing setups ensuring compliance to laws on labour. It is about how the HR department becomes a part of labour- management collective bargaining procedures. In fact this is so huge that trying to write it in few lines would be a crime (would certainly dedicate another article outlining details and explaining elaborately about industrial relations)
Thus these are some of the mentioned functions of the Strategic HR namely performance management, Compensation & benefits, learning & development, Industrial relations, Recruitment. Although there isn't any strict role definition between a line HR and strategic HR but broadly this is what HR comprises of . Normally in many companies the Line HR is also known as administration and may not technically be part of the Human resource function. Moving further in the strategic HR functions each of the above mentioned functions have a vast and intricate side to it something like a recruitment has a plethora of psychometric sciences tools and techniques of matching candidate profile with job and role analysis etc.
Each of the functions mentioned when explained elaborately could be topics of entire articles altogether which I shall share in my further articles. The aim of this article was to give a small gist about what HR is. Being a senior year student in the Tata institute Of Social Sciences ( HRM&LR) course formerly known as the (PMIR) which is arguably India’s oldest college offering the course of human resource management education and having been through two fieldwork and summer internships this is my understanding of HR (more about fieldwork of TISS in subsequent articles ). I will certainly follow up this article with many more about my college , Life at TISS as well as many heavy and lighter moments of studying in TISS for the experience in itself is worth the efforts of getting into it. Adios for now and would be writing soon enough.
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