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Managing Human Resources

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What is Human Resource Management?

• Human resource management refers to the practices and policies you need to carry out the personnel aspects of you management job.

• The practices and policies include, for instance: conducting job analysis, planning labor needs and recruiting job candidates, selecting job candidates, orienting and training new employees, managing wages and salaries, providing incentives and benefits, appraising performance, communicating, training and developing, building employee commitment.

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What a Manager Should Know about?

• Equal opportunity, ethics, and affirmative action.

• Employee health and safety and ethical treatment.

• Grievances and labor relations.

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Why is HR Management is important to All Managers?

HR Management is important to all managers because no manager wants to:

. Hire the wrong person for the job

. Experience high turnover

. Find employees not doing their best

. Have his/her company taken to court

. Have his/her company cited under federal occupational safety laws for unsafe practices

. Allow a lack of training to undermine his/her department’s effectiveness

. Commit any unfair labor practices

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Line and Staff Aspects of HRM

• All managers are, in a sense, HR managers, because they all get involved in activities such as recruiting, interviewing, selecting, and training.

• However, most firms also have a separate human resource department with its own human resource manager.

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Line vs. Staff Authority

• Line managers are authorized to give orders and are in charge of accomplishing the organization’s basic goals.

• Staff managers, on the other hand , assist and advise line managers in accomplishing these goals.

• HR managers are generally staff managers. They have the authority and responsibility for advising line managers in areas such as recruiting, hiring, and compensation.

• HR and line managers generally share responsibility for most HR activities.

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Line Managers’ HRM Responsibilities

• As one expert says, “The direct handling of people is and always has been, an integral part of every line manager’s responsibility, from president down to lowest-level supervisor.”

• In small organizations, line managers carry out all the personnel duties unassisted. But as the organization grows, line managers need the assistance, specialized knowledge, and advice of a separate human resource staff.

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HR Management HRM Responsibilities

• Recruiters.

• Equal employment opportunity (EEO) representatives or affirmative action coordinators.

• Job analyst.

• Compensation managers.

• Training specialists.

• Labor relations specialists.

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The Changing Environment and Duties of HR Management

• The metamorphosis of personnel into human resource management.

• Highly trained and committed employees, not machines, are often firm’s main real sustainable competitive advantage.

• Successful organisazations do use many HR practices like leadership training, technical training, mentoring programs, and career workshops to help employees become more productive.

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A Changing Environment

• Globalization: more globalization means more competition, and more competition means more pressure to be “world class”—to lower costs, to make employees more productive, to do things better and less expensively.

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• Technological Advances: many of these “world-class” improvements involve technology.

• Carrier Corporation—the time required to get an order entered and confirmed has gone from six days to six minutes.

• HR faces challenge to quickly applying technology to the task of improving its own operations.

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• The Nature of Work: Technology is also changing the nature of work.

• Even factory works are more technologically demanding.

• Knowledge-intensive high tech manufacturing in such industries as aerospace, computers, telecommunications, home electronics, pharmaceuticals, and medical instruments are replacing factory jobs in steel, auto, rubber, and textiles.

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• As Bill Gates puts it: “In the new organization the worker is no longer a cog in a machine but is an intelligent part of the overall process.

• Welders at some steel plant now have to know algebra and geometry to figure weld angles from computer-generated designs.

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• Technology is not the only trend driving this change from “brawn to brains”

• Today over two-thirds of U.S. workforce is employed in producing and delivering services, not products.

• This all means a growing emphasis on “knowledge workers” and human capital.

• Human capital refers to the knowledge, education, training, skills, and expertise of a firm’s workers.

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• Today, “the center of gravity in employment is moving fast from manual and clerical workers to knowledge workers, who resist the command and control model that business took from the military 100 years age.”

• In this environment, managers need new world-class HR management systems and skills, to select, train, and motivate these employees and to get them to work more like committed partners.

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• The Workforce: At the same time, workforce demographics are changing.

• More notably, workforce is becoming more diverse.

• Creating unanimity and “human capital” from a diverse workforce is not easy.

• Most managers say they encourage diversity, but most management systems will not allow diversity, only similarity.

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• Establishing HR management programs that turn a diverse workforce into highly skilled knowledge workers can thus be a challenge.

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Exercise

• Working individually or in groups, develop several lists showing how trends like work force diversity, technological trends, globalization, and changes in the nature of work have affected the college or university you are now attending. Present in class. The list might include items such as the growth of adult (non-traditional aged) students, the use of computer and communications technology, diversity issues, and others.

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The Changing Role of HRM

• Human resource manager’s job has grown broader and more strategic.

• Today, globalization, technological, and nature of work trends mean that human resource managers have taken on several new responsibilities.

• The first is that employees expect their human resource functions to be more strategic.

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Strategic Human Resource Management

• Strategic human resource management is part of strategic planning.

• A strategic plan is the company’s plan for how it will match its internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

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• Strategic human resource management means formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors the company needs to achieve its strategic aims.

• Top management wants to see, precisely, how the human resource manager’s plans will make the company more viable, for instance by boosting factory skill levels, and, thereby, improving performance.

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Creating High-Performance Work Systems

• The emphasis on strategic human resource management is one change in what human resource managers do.

• A focus on productivity and performance is another.

• Most human resource professionals recognize the need to focus on performance.

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High-Performance Work System

• A growing body of evidence shows that the best-performing companies in a wide range of industries perform of well in part because of their high-performance work systems.

• A high-performance work system is an integrated set of human resource management policies and practices that together produce superior performance.

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A high-performance work system includes…..

• Employment security• Selective hiring• Extensive training• Self-managed teams and decentralized decision making• Reduced status distinctions between managers and

workers• Information sharing• Contingent rewards• Transformational leadership• Measurement of management practices• Emphasis on high-quality work

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Measuring the Human Resource Management Team’s Performance

• In today’s performance-based environment employers naturally expect their human resource management teams to provide measurable evidence of their efficiency and effectiveness, and for that of their proposed programs.

• The fundamental requirement for such measurability is that the human resource manager needs numbers.

• Specifically, he or she needs quantitative performance measures (metrics) to assess their operations.

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Managing with the HR Scorecard Process

• Managers can link such metrics or measurements together to provide a more meaningful picture.

• For example, (for Signicast): testing 100% applicants using new selection test>>>improved average employee performance on automated machines>>>higher plant productivity>>>Signicast achieving its strategic goals.

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• For most human resource management activities, one can similarly map out the cause –and-effect links, from the human resource activity, to the employee behavior, to the company performance.