These issues motivate a well thought out human resource management strategy, with the precision and detail of say a marketing strategy. Failure in not having a carefully crafted human resources management strategy, can and probably will lead to failures in the business process itself.
These sets of resources are offered to promote thought, stimulate discussion, diagnose the organizational environment and develop a sound human resource management strategy for your organization. We begin by looking at the seven distinguishable functions human resource management provide to secure the achievement of the objective defined above.
Finally, some questions are posed in the form of a HRM systems diagnostic checklist for you to consider, which may prove helpful for you to think about when planning your development programs for the human resources in your organization, if they are truly "your most valuable asset."
Function 1: Manpower planning:
The penalties for not being correctly staffed are costly.
• Understaffing loses the business economies of scale and specialization, orders, customers and profits.
• Overstaffing is wasteful and expensive, if sustained, and it is costly to eliminate because of modern legislation in respect of redundancy payments, consultation, minimum periods of notice, etc. Very importantly, overstaffing reduces the competitive efficiency of the business.
Planning staff levels requires that an assessment of present and future needs of the organization be compared with present resources and future predicted resources. Appropriate steps then be planned to bring demand and supply into balance.
What future demands will be is only influenced in part by the forecast of the personnel manager, whose main task may well be to scrutinize and modify the crude predictions of other managers. Future staffing needs will derive from:
• Sales and production forecasts
• The effects of technological change on task needs
• Variations in the efficiency, productivity, flexibility of labor as a result of training, work study, organizational change, new motivations, etc.
• Changes in employment practices (e.g. use of subcontractors or agency staffs, hiving-off tasks, buying in, substitution, etc.)
• Variations, which respond to new legislation, e.g. payroll taxes or their abolition, new health and safety requirements
• Changes in Government policies (investment incentives, regional or trade grants, etc.
Function 2: Recruitment and selection of employees:
An analysis of the job to be done (i.e. an analytical study of the tasks to be performed to determine their essential factors) written into a job description so that the selectors know what physical and mental characteristics applicants must possess, what qualities and attitudes are desirable and what characteristics are a decided disadvantage;
• In the case of replacement staff a critical questioning of the need to recruit at all (replacement should rarely be an automatic process).
• Effectively, selection is 'buying' an employee (the price being the wage or salary multiplied by probable years of service) hence bad buys can be very expensive. For that reason some firms (and some firms for particular jobs) use external expert consultants for recruitment and selection.
• Equally some small organizations exist to 'head hunt', i.e. to attract staff with high reputations from existing employers to the recruiting employer. However, the 'cost' of poor selection is such that, even for the mundane day-to-day jobs, those who recruit and select should be well trained to judge the suitability of applicants.
The main sources of recruitment are:
• Internal promotion and internal introductions (at times desirable for morale purposes)
• Careers officers (and careers masters at schools)
• University appointment boards
• Agencies for the unemployed
• Advertising (often via agents for specialist posts) or the use of other local media (e.g. commercial radio)
Function 3: Employee motivation:
To retain good staff and to encourage them to give of their best while at work requires attention to the financial and psychological and even physiological rewards offered by the organization as a continuous exercise.
Basic financial rewards and conditions of service (e.g. working hours per week) are determined externally (by national bargaining or government minimum wage legislation) in many occupations but as much as 50 per cent of the gross pay of manual workers is often the result of local negotiations and details (e.g. which particular hours shall be worked) of conditions of service are often more important than the basics. Hence there is scope for financial and other motivations to be used at local levels.
Function 4: Employee evaluation:
An organization needs constantly to take stock of its workforce and to assess its performance in existing jobs for three reasons:
• To improve organizational performance via improving the performance of individual contributors (should be an automatic process in the case of good managers, but (about annually) two key questions should be posed:
• What has been done to improve the performance of a person last year?
• And what can be done to improve his or her performance in the year to come?).
• To identify potential, i.e. to recognize existing talent and to use that to fill vacancies higher in the organization or to transfer individuals into jobs where better use can be made of their abilities or developing skills.
• To provide an equitable method of linking payment to performance where there are no numerical criteria (often this salary performance review takes place about three months later and is kept quite separate from 1. and 2. but is based on the same assessment).
Function 5: Industrial relations:
Good industrial relations, while a recognizable and legitimate objective for an organization, are difficult to define since a good system of industrial relations involves complex relationships between:
• Workers (and their informal and formal groups, i. e. trade union, organizations and their representatives);
• Employers (and their managers and formal organizations like trade and professional associations);
• The government and legislation and government agencies l and 'independent' agencies like the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service
Function 6: Provision of employee services:
The forms this welfare can take are many and varied, from loans to the needy to counseling in respect of personal problems.
Among the activities regarded as normal are:
• Schemes for bereavement or other special leave;
• The rehabilitation of injured/unfit/ disabled employees and temporary or permanent move to lighter work;
• The maintenance of disablement statistics and registers (there are complicated legal requirements in respect of quotas of disabled workers and a need for 'certificates' where quota are not fulfilled and recruitment must take place);
• Provision of financial and other support for sports, social, hobbies, activities of many kinds which are work related;
• Provision of canteens and other catering facilities;
• Possibly assistance with financial and other aid to employees in difficulty (supervision, maybe, of an employee managed benevolent fund or scheme);
• Provision of information handbooks,
• Running of pre-retirement courses and similar fringe activities;
• Care for the welfare aspects of health and safety legislation and provision of first-aid training.
• Schemes for occupational sick pay, extended sick leave and access to the firm's medical adviser;
Function 7: Employee education, training and development:
In general, education is 'mind preparation' and is carried out remote from the actual work area, training is the systematic development of the attitude, knowledge, skill pattern required by a person to perform a given task or job adequately and development is 'the growth of the individual in terms of ability, understanding and awareness'.
Within an organization all three are necessary in order to:
• Develop workers to undertake higher-grade tasks;
• Provide the conventional training of new and young workers (e.g. as apprentices, clerks, etc.);
• Raise efficiency and standards of performance;
• Meet legislative requirements (e.g. health and safety);
• Inform people (induction training, pre-retirement courses, etc.);
So far as group training is concerned in addition to formal courses there are:
• Lectures and talks by senior or specialist managers;
• Discussion group (conference and meeting) activities;
• Briefing by senior staffs;
• Role-playing exercises and simulation of actual conditions;
• Video and computer teaching activities;
• Case studies (and discussion) tests, quizzes, panel 'games', group forums, observation exercises and inspection and reporting techniques
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