Professional Behaviours and Valuing People in HR

In modern workplaces, CIPD assignment help in Bahrain are expected to do more than just administer policies, process payrolls, or hire staff. Their role increasingly demands ethical leadership, inclusive practice, and a strong orientation toward valuing people. Two interlinked concepts professional behaviours and valuing people are central to contemporary HR practice. Together, they help drive better employee engagement, wellbeing, fairness, trust, and ultimately stronger organisational performance.

What Do We Mean by “Professional Behaviours” in HR?

Professional behaviours are the standards of conduct, values, and patterns of behaviour expected of HR (and people‑profession) practitioners. These include:

• Ethical practice: acting with honesty, integrity, confidentiality. Upholding professional codes of conduct. Ensuring fairness.

• Professional courage & influence: speaking up when needed, challenging decisions or practices that conflict with ethics or fairness, influencing leaders or stakeholders.

• Accountability and reliability: following through on commitments, taking ownership of choices/outcomes, being consistent.

• Continuous learning and improvement: keeping skills up to date, reflecting on one’s own behaviour, seeking feedback, adapting to change.

• Working inclusively: respecting diversity, being open to different perspectives, ensuring all voices are heard. Collaborating across boundaries.

These behaviours are often codified in professional standards. For example, the CIPD Profession Map (UK) lists Valuing People as one of its core behaviours. HR practitioners are expected to bring compassion, fairness, and a people perspective into business decisions.

What Does “Valuing People” Mean?

“Valuing people” means recognising that people are central to an organisation’s success—not just as resources, but as individuals with dignity, rights, potential, and unique needs. Key elements include:

1. Compassion, empathy, fairness: Treating people with respect, understanding their circumstances, being sensitive to differences (culture, ability, family responsibilities).

2. Employee voice: Giving employees opportunities to express their views, contribute to decisions that affect them, feedback channels, participative culture.

3. Wellbeing: Prioritising physical, mental, emotional wellbeing—not pushing people to burnout. Supporting work‑life balance. Including wellbeing considerations in policy design.

4. Development and growth: Offering learning, career progression, mentoring, coaching. Investing in people’s skills. Recognising and rewarding contributions.

5. Fair treatment: Ensuring policies are equitable, free from discrimination or bias. Ensuring fair processes in recruitment, performance appraisal, reward.

Why These Matter in HR

Why does HR need to embody professional behaviours and value people? Several reasons:

• Trust and credibility: If HR does not behave ethically or treat people fairly, trust erodes. People won’t feel safe raising concerns or giving feedback.

• Engagement and retention: Employees who feel valued, respected, included tend to have higher job satisfaction, are more engaged, and stay longer.

• Better organisational outcomes: Organisations with high employee wellbeing and strong ethical culture often perform better, are more agile, and have better reputations.

• Risk mitigation: Ethical lapses, injustice, discrimination these bring legal, reputational, and operational risks. HR’s role includes ensuring compliance, fairness, and safeguarding.

• Change leadership: HR often leads organisational change. Professional behaviours and valuing people help ensure change is implemented sensitively, inclusively, and effectively.

How HR Can Embed Professional Behaviours & Valuing People

Embedding these in the real world takes deliberate effort. Here are ways HR can do this:

1. Leadership buy in and role modelling
   Senior leaders need to demonstrate these behaviours. Ethical decision making, transparent communication, acknowledging mistakes leading by example is powerful.

2. Clear frameworks, policies, and standards
   Use professional standards (e.g. CIPD Profession Map) or internal HR competency frameworks. Explicitly include values such as fairness, inclusion, integrity. Ensure these are communicated.

3. Training, reflection & continuous development
   Provide training on ethical decision making, inclusive leadership, diversity and bias. Encourage reflection (e.g. after events or projects) on what went well / what could be done better.

4. Feedback and voice mechanisms
   Establish safe channels for employees to bring up concerns, ideas, or feedback. Use surveys, focus groups, suggestion boxes. Ensure action is taken on feedback and communicated.

5. Inclusive practices
   In recruiting, appraising, promotions ensure diversity, fairness, and representation. Remove structural biases. For example, use blind recruitment, inclusive job descriptions, fair performance criteria.

6. Wellbeing as part of strategy
   Make wellbeing more than a checkbox. Consider psychological safety, workload, flexible working, mental health support. Ensure wellbeing is part of HR KPIs.

7. Ethics and compliance alignment
   Ensure that HR professionals know relevant legal and regulatory frameworks (e.g., equality law, data protection, employment law), act with integrity, and call out when practices conflict with ethical values.

8. Continuous measurement and insight
   Use people data, metrics, benchmarks, internal surveys to assess how people feel, how inclusive the culture is, and whether HR practices are delivering. Use insights to improve.

9. Personal accountability
   HR professionals should self‑assess, seek feedback, own development areas. Engage in CPD. Be willing to challenge colleagues including senior ones when behaviour or practice deviates from values.

Challenges in Practising These Behaviours

Embedding professional behaviours and truly valuing people is easier said than done. Some key challenges:

• Competing pressures: Business demands (cost-cutting, performance, deadlines) can conflict with people centric behaviours. Sometimes HR is asked to implement changes that compromise fairness or wellbeing.

• Organisational culture: If the wider culture doesn’t support inclusion, fairness, transparency, then HR efforts may be stymied. For example, leaders who undervalue employee voice or discourage criticism.

• Bias and systemic inequality: Unconscious bias, structural barriers, lack of diversity can make fairness and inclusion difficult.

• Limited resources: Small HR teams, limited budget, lack of expertise can reduce HR’s ability to deliver training or wellbeing programmes.

• Fear of conflict: Speaking up when something is wrong can lead to tension with other parts of the organisation. Many avoid because of fear of repercussions or being marginalised.

• Measuring the intangible: Some aspects like fairness, compassion, inclusion, psychological safety are hard to quantify, making it difficult to set targets or measure progress.

Best Practices and Examples

Here are some good practices and illustrative examples of HR professionals embedding these behaviours:

• Transparent decision‑making: In promotion or redundancy decisions, publishing criteria, involving employee panels, having clear appeals.

• Employee voice forums: Regular town halls, listening sessions, feedback surveys, suggestion schemes, and actually following up from feedback.

• Inclusive leadership training programmes: Educating managers on unconscious bias, inclusive communication, cultural competence.

• Wellbeing policies: Flexible working (hybrid, remote), mental health days, access to counselling, workload monitoring.

• Ethical codes and reporting: HR setting up ethical guidelines / code of conduct, whistleblowing policies, ensuring safe channels to report unethical behaviour.

Connecting to Learning Outcomes (CIPD / HR Qualifications)

If you’re studying HR or people practice (e.g. CIPD’s Level 5 “Professional Behaviours & Valuing People” Module 5CO03), these are some expected learning outcomes:

• Be able to demonstrate professional and ethical behaviours in people practice.

• Champion inclusive and collaborative strategies to build positive working relationships.

• Demonstrate personal commitment to learning, professional development and performance improvement.

• Understand what “being a people professional” means: personal values, ethical values, evidence‑based decision making.

These outcomes emphasise both the behavioural/attitudinal side (ethics, inclusion, fairness, voice) and the practical capacity to apply these in real HR work.

Practical Advice: How You (as HR or Aspiring HR) Can Strengthen These Behaviours

If you’re an HR professional or someone looking to grow in people practice, here are tips for developing professional behaviours & valuing people:

1. Self‑Reflection: Regularly reflect on your actions. Ask: Did I treat everyone fairly? Did I listen? Did I consider different perspectives?

2. Seek Feedback: Get feedback from peers, team members, and leaders about how you are doing in fairness, inclusion, and ethical conduct.

3. Learning & CPD: Take courses on ethics, inclusion, unconscious bias, emotional intelligence, inclusive leadership.

4. Mentoring & Coaching: Both being a mentor and having one can help. Seeing how someone else handles difficult ethical choices, inclusive decisions, or challenging conversations is useful.

5. Set Clear Values: Work with your team or organisation to define values. Make them visible. Use them as guides in decision‑making.

6. Use Evidence: When making decisions (e.g. policy design, recruitment, performance reviews), refer to data and research. Use people analytics, employee survey data, benchmarking.

7. Lead Inclusively: In meetings, let everyone speak. Be conscious of voice: who speaks, who doesn’t, whose opinions are overlooked. Include diverse perspectives.

8. Challenge Unethical Practices: Have the courage to raise concerns. Where policies conflict with values or law, speak up responsibly.

9. Embed Wellbeing: Monitor stress, workload, and provide supportive measures. Make “safe spaces” for emotional support or concerns.

Conclusion

Professional behaviours and valuing people are not optional luxuries they are essential foundations for modern HR practice. When HR professionals behave ethically, champion inclusion and fairness, give people a voice, support wellbeing, and invest in continuous learning, they not only meet the moral imperative, they also drive better performance, engagement, innovation, and trust in their organisations.

For HR professionals, embedding these behaviours begins with self awareness, values, and purpose and is enacted through policies, leadership, culture, and everyday interactions. It’s a journey, not a destination, but one that is increasingly central to what it means to be a true “people professional.”