Effective Human Resources Management: Strategies & Benefits
Chapter 6: Human Resources Management
Nature of Human Resources Management
Human resources management concerns the human side of enterprises and the factors that determine workers’ relationships with their employing organizations.
Human Resources Management and Personnel Management
Human resources management and personnel management encompasses:
- The aggregate size of the organization’s labor force.
- How much to spend on training the workforce.
- The desirability of establishing relations with trade unions.
- Human asset accounting.
The strategic approach to HRM involves the integration of personnel and other HRM considerations into the firm’s overall corporate planning and strategy formulation procedures.
Practical Manifestations of a Strategic Approach to HRM
Practical manifestations of the adoption of a strategic approach to HRM might include:
- Incorporation of a brief summary of the firm’s basic HRM policy into its mission statement.
- Explicit consideration of the consequences for employees of each of the firm’s strategies and major new projects.
- Designing organization structures to suit the needs of employees rather than conditioning the latter to fit in with the existing form of organization.
- Having the head of HRM on the firm’s board of directors.
Human Resources Management and Competitive Advantage
The more satisfied workers are, the better the company is likely to perform. Organizational culture significantly affects company performance. The practices which seem to be the most important in affecting performance are job design and the acquisition and development of skills. HRM practices are more influential in how successful a company will be than investment in research and development.
Definition of Human Resources Planning
Human resources planning (HRP) is the comparison of an organization’s existing labor resources with forecast labor demand, hence the scheduling of activities for acquiring, training, redeploying, and possibly discarding labor.
Specific Human Resource Planning Duties Include:
- Estimation of labor turnover for each grade of employee and the examination of the effects of high or low turnover rates on the organization’s performance.
- Analysis of the consequences of changes in working practices and hours.
- Predicting future labor shortages.
- Devising schemes for handling the human problems arising from labor deficits or surpluses.
- Introduction of early retirement and other natural wastage procedures.
- Analysis of the skills, educational backgrounds, experience, capacities, and potentials of employees.
Benefits of Human Resources Planning
The benefits of human resources planning are:
- The organization will be ready to adapt future HRM activities to meet changing circumstances.
- Careful consideration of likely future events might lead to the discovery of better means for managing human resources.
- Measures to influence future events can be initiated by the organization itself.
- Decisions concerning future HRM activities can be taken in advance using all the data available and considering all available options; this avoids decision-making in crisis situations with management unable to study all relevant issues.
- Planning forces the organization to assess critically the feasibility of its HRM objectives.
- Labor shortfalls and surpluses may be able to be avoided.
- It helps the firm create and develop employee training and management succession programs.
- Some of the problems of managing change may be foreseen and their consequences mitigated.
- Duplication of effort among employees can be avoided; coordination and integration of workers’ efforts is improved.