The Human Resource Assistant and Their Roles (Essay Sample)

Motivation
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Description
The human resource assistant is in charge of the day-to-day human resource responsibilities and acts as a liaison between the employees, the organization, and the vendors. The human resource assistant's role helps ensure that all the employees' needs are met and all the critical HR files are carefully taken care of. The role of HR assistants helps the human resource manager during recruitment, records maintenance, and provision of clerical support for all the organization's employees.
Duties and responsibilities
The HR assistant assists with the entire application process of an employee. They collect the required employment information before the shortlisting process by doing background checks, reference checks, resumes, and any information beneficial for the organization. They are also the point person for asking applicant questions and ensuring proper information flow linking the organization and the candidate.
The HR assistant assists in orienting new employees into the organization and is responsible for answering all the employee's questions. They also ensure that all employees have been assigned their workstations and they understand their job descriptions. Similarly, they are responsible for the employee's payroll. They answer all the employee's questions concerning the payroll and resolve any paycheck errors that may arise. 
Human resource assistants are in charge of maintaining and keeping up-to-date human resource files. The information that needs to be updated includes employee benefits, sick time off, paid time off, and employee nonproductive hours. They also act as an employee advocate for conveying employee issues and concerns to the people responsible for solving them. They plan and organize employee recognition events to assist in creating a fun and engaging employee environment. 
Motivation theories
Motivation theories help discover the things that drive employees to work hard towards a set goal or objective. Organizations are usually interested in motivational theories because motivated employees are usually productive and focus more on achieving organizational goals. Motivational theories differentiate between extrinsic and intrinsic factors. The extrinsic factors are usually focused on the outcome of a particular activity. At the same time, intrinsic is concerned with an individual employee's interest and their willingness to participate in a particular activity.
Motivation is crucial in any organization to enhance productivity and a better working environment for the employee. The organization performs appraisals that have predetermined standards. The appraisal outcome will determine the employees' reaction to show whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with their jobs. Those with good points reflect satisfied employees, while those with bad reviews reflect dissatisfaction. Ali (2016) indicates that job satisfaction depends entirely on the employee's perception and the degree to which the work done delivers the employee's desire. Employers may fail to see job satisfaction because it is an emotional response. Furthermore, it depends on the rewards and incentives that employees get and the motive of being given making them productive in their work. Organizations need to be supporting their employees to improve on retention and loyalty and avoiding anything that may lead to their dissatisfaction.
Employers who can apply the motivation theories successfully ensure that they set a clear and measurable goal easily achievable. Many organizations that perform well have motivated employees who work with the superiors to achieve a certain goal. Companies become more accountable and likely to perform better if they adopt goal setting and ensure that the goals set are achievable and measurable. Employees need to be empowered to enable them to stick around in the organization. The motivation theories applicable for the Human Resource Assistant include Maslow theory, Vroom's expectancy theory, and Herzberg's two-factor theory. Besides, they will assist to improve employee motivation and job satisfaction, leading to a high organizational level.
Maslow theory
Maslow's theory assists an organization meet the needs of the employees while increasing productivity levels. It gives the basis for development in a certain job, ensuring high employee motivation enables the organization to achieve the stipulated goals. Those organizations that apply Maslow's theory enhance high employee satisfaction, employee retention, and successful teamwork. This theory involves satisfaction of human needs, which are usually classified from the lowest to the highest order. Once the needs have been met, employees move to the next need to motivate themselves.
Employees who have strong work and life balances have a high chance of adhering to the theory. An organization with flexible working hours, a friendly working environment, and standard salaries helps meet social, safety, and self-esteem needs. This theory usually forms the basis of job satisfaction in an organization. Employees need recognition and appreciation from their employers besides having basic needs. These are the attributes of self-actualization, which shows that employees are making progress in their lives. A job where an employee can shape his/ her goal and make career development usually creates a sense of self-actualization that may enable them to make progress in their duties.
Vroom's expectancy theory
This theory indicates that employees work with high expectations when seeing a relationship between the effort they put into the desired work. This is based on the performance that they achieve and the rewards that they will receive. It means that an employee decides on what to do based on the expected outcome. This theory's main purpose is to ensure employee satisfaction and reduce what may lead to dissatisfaction in the organization. It also gives insight into the employees' performance, motivation, and effort based on instrumentality, valence, and expectancy. 
An organization needs to set achievable goals and offer rewards to its employees to create employee motivation using this theory. Rewarding an employee doesn't require something so big. Still, little appreciation, praises, career development, and promotions help employees have a realistic expectation level and motivate them to perform better in their assigned duties in the organization. It may take an organization some trial and error to find the appropriate motivation strategy to increase employee job satisfaction (Suciu et al., 2013).
The theory also indicates that the performance of an employee is usually based on different individual factors including knowledge, individual personality, skills, and experience in their area of work. Employers reward them depending on the energy they put into delivering their duties. Organizations can improve the HR assistance roles based on this theory by putting trust in the capabilities of the employees, aligning tasks to the employee who is qualified to do the task, making the performance to be challenging but easily achievable, and the organization make a correlation between performance and the rewards are given. The application of this theory works in correlation with the reward system offered in the organization.
Herzberg's two-factor theory
This theory assists in determining what makes an employee feel good or bad concerning their job. There are usually features that mostly bring out job satisfaction in an organization. These features include recognition, employee achievement, responsibility, and the job done by the employee itself. The theory also noted that some institutional factors such as institutional politics, high supervision, poor pay, work relationships, and poor working conditions might contribute to employee's poor job satisfaction. The majority of the organization are applying this theory because they feel that it effectively increases employee job satisfaction. Furthermore, the Herzberg theory helps to create opportunities for the employee to do personal development, be recognized for performing well in their duties and enrichment. 
Employees in an organization should be promoted once they complete certain stages to avoid a level of stagnation. They need to receive recognition for any special achievement to improve their morale at work. They should also be assigned responsibilities to determine how well they can handle particular tasks related to their job (Dziub et al., 2010). Consequently, the factors that contribute to employee motivation includes the motivator factor, which recognizes achievement, new opportunity, and enjoying your job leading to high satisfaction, and the hygiene factors such as low salary, poor work environment, and conflict among the employees causing job dissatisfaction
Organizational managers need to manage the factors effectively to ensure that all employees experience job satisfaction. Employees also love to feel loved and appreciated by the people leading them. They also need to grow and make progress in their careers through the organization. The managers need to let the employees know that they are valued in the organization. They are on the right path progressing in the role they are participating in. this will give the employees a driving force that will encourage them to work towards completing assigned tasks in the company.
The organization's hygiene factors can be mitigated by the management forming a stronger relationship with their team to make them feel the path and parcel o...