Personnel Management Expands into HR Management
Strategic Human Resource Management (HRM) Leads to Long-Term Success
Feb 1, 2009
Henry Ford's assembly lines and Frederick Taylor's time and method studies saw workers as another tool like machines. They sought to improve worker productivity by designing the way work is carried out. The problem with this approach is that humans are not machines, but individuals with personal goals and needs. Treating them like machines invariably leads to resistance and conflicts.
Main Functions of HRM
HRM is concerned with managing human resources, at all levels, in a way that helps the business gain a strategic competitive advantage. A human resource management article lists the scope of HRM as follows:
- Workforce planning to identify the types and numbers of people that the organization will need during the plan period.
- Recruitment that includes locating, attracting and selecting people with the right skills and attitudes as employees.
- Induction and orientation of selected employees into the culture of the organization and the person's role there.
- Skills management identifying the skills needed by the business and matching employee skills to their roles. This involves preparing specifications for all jobs and job-holder skills requirements.
- Training and development to enhance employee skills, and enable employees to pursue preferred career paths aligned to organizational needs.
- Personnel administration involving such routines as maintenance of employee records, scheduling of vacations and disciplinary matters.
- Compensation of employees through piecework wages or periodical salaries that complies with minimum wage laws and also motivates the employees.
- Time management through planning, goal setting, scheduling, organizing and other means to ensure that employee time is productively utilized to achieve organizational goals.
- Travel management involving scheduling employee travel and keeping track of travel expense claims.
- Payroll for maintaining employee attendance (or output) records and computing the pay due to them.
- Employee benefits administration to administer the different kinds of benefits, such as medical, conveyance, child and others, due to each employee.
- Personnel cost planning to compute employee costs of the organization, and developing strategies to keep it within allowed levels.
- Performance appraisal to monitor the performance of each employee, and discuss it with the person concerned with a view to helping the person improve it.
Human Factors Complicate HRM
The theoretical role of HRM is to maximize the potential of the human resources available to the business. It seeks to play this role, in an ideal situation, by aligning organizational goals with the individual goals of employees. In practice, this might be possible only to a limited extent.
HRM is also impacted by office politics and power plays. In fact, team-building is a major concern for organizations. Team building also is possible only to a certain extent.
Old-style personnel management treated workers somewhat like machines. Modern human resource management sees employees as human persons, and a critical business resource. By forecasting employee and skill requirements into the future, implementing policies and practices that develop and motivate employees, and seeking to integrate all employees into a productive team, HRM seeks to integrate employee and organizational goals.
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