Human Resource Management: Effort to Confront a Workforce - Coursework Example

Human Resource Management: Effort to Confront a Workforce INTRODUCTION The Human Resources Management department has gone through many alterations since its inception in the early 1900’s. Begun as an effort to confront a workforce that required more attention as the industrial revolution was underway, many of the constituents on the Human Resource Management were coming into being. As more scientific resources were brought to bear on the management of business and its workforce, the typical personnel office evolved into Human Resources Management (HRM). While the typical personnel office would handle wages, payroll and disputes, the HRM department opene3d the doors to employee benefits, safety training, employee health and many other resources to keep the workforce healthy and as happy as possible. (Jamrog, and Overholt 2004) Then, during the middle part of the Twentieth century HR’s responsibilities and overall requirements were enhanced by the human relations movement along with the application of knowledge and research from the disciplines of the behavioural sciences and systems theory. However, in spite of the tremendous amount of research showing that happy and well trained employees were more productive and held longer term associations with a company, as late as the 1960’s the HRM professional… …was often viewed as little more than a glorified file clerk who planned the company picnic. This all changed with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent social, demographic, technological, and economic trends in the '70s and '80s. Top management began to take notice, and the modem HRM professional was born. (Jamrog, and Overholt 2004: 52) While there is still some truth to the image of the HRM department as keeping track of birthdays and other events for the betterment of the morale of the staff, HRM is now developing into a much more sophisticated part of the overall business network. In fact there is bound to eventually be a complete split between the duties of the ‘file clerk’ aspect and the duties of the director of the department. There are several aspects of the HRM department that have now defined it as a primary and essential part of the organisation infrastructure. Although this has not been an easy task: …the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Global Forum report on ‘The Maturing Profession of Human Resources Worldwide’ (2004) showed that over half (54.8%) of HRM professionals say the most frequently encountered obstacle to career advancement is HR's not being held in high esteem by the organization. One thing is certain, HRM is evolving and the profession will either be driven reactively by external changes or will more proactively define its own future. (Vosburgh 2007: 13) Much as there is now accepted a split between the accounting and the finance department in any organization (Boudreau 2005: 20; Boudreau and Ramstad 2006: 25), in fact at present even in the smallest of companies there is a difference between the bookkeeper and the finance director that seems to go without saying. One of the first steps in bringing HRM into a more productive and strategic part of the business model is to make the same type of paradigm shift in separation of functions. While many HRM professionals today still struggle to get a seat at the business table, the HRM profession in the future should continue to evolve and take more responsibility for overall organizational effectiveness. To do this the HRM professional will need to become better at utilizing systems thinking and systems measurement. (Jamrog, and Overholt 2004: 54) There are two main components that the HRM department of any organization will cover. The first is comprised of management, leadership and employee motivation and the other is the traditional realm of HRM practices which include performance appraisal, training, recruitment and selection, as well as compensation management (salary and bonuses). In this regard payroll is usually located within the HRM department in some respect and there is a certain amount of crossover between HRM and the Finance area of any company. (Lajara, Lillo, and Sempere 2002: 38) Every day more organizations recognize that their people are a source of competitive advantage. As a result, HRM departments are evolving from playing a merely administrative role to becoming ‘strategic partners’ responsible for contributing to the achievement of business objectives. This evolution requires that new ways of defining and assessing HRM success be developed. Traditional operational measures of internal efficiency are not sufficient. HRM departments must now be able to demonstrate the value of their strategic contributions. (Cabrera, and Cabrera 2003: 31) HRM is often called on to mediate disputes and bring the regulatory labor laws to bear on supervisors and employees alike. In instances of sexual harassment or other forms of intimidation and unfair treatment, HRM is responsible for following company procedures and guidelines when resolving these issues. In fact, HRM needs to assure that the correct policies and procedures are in place so that the staff can adequately assess their position and know where to bring their grievances when in trouble. If the correct protocols are not in place, the company is left open to litigation and lawsuits from staff members, severely impacting the bottom line. In this sense HRM certainly plays quite a strategic role in the safeguarding of the company and its ethical and moral stature, as well as its finances. TRAINING Training is an issue that has many different aspects regarding financial imperatives. It is vital for most companies to keep their staff trained and up to date in order to remain competitive and productive. However, the cost of training can quickly skyrocket and outweigh the profit potential of the task. In a sense it all comes down to an appropriate the return on investment (ROI) and this return regarding the human element is often difficult to measure. In the business world ROI is composed of the following four elements: 1. The inflow of returns produced by that allocation; 2. The offsetting outflows of resources required to make the investment; 3. How the inflows and outflows occur in each future time period; and 4. How much what occurs in future time periods should be ‘discounted’ to reflect greater risk and price inflation. (Boudreau, and Ramstad 2006: 26) Transferring this ideology to the resource of human beings in a company is a little more difficult. If you invest an allocation into a staff member of x amount of pounds’ worth of education, what is the inflow and rate of return on that investment? How is this related to future periods and what indeed is the knowledge based discount to the rate of inflation on the investment? While seemingly ludicrous when applied in this way, many agencies’ budgets cannot make the intellectual crossover to understand and equate the performance outcomes regarding staff training and development. In HRM we do not have decision support frameworks as elegant as ROI, and simply applying ROI logic to HRM investments is not the answer. The ROI components are not available for most HRM decisions, and the ROI framework really does not focus on the right questions for HRM investments, because it was developed for financial investments. (Boudreau, and Ramstad 2006: 27) The principal objective is to be able to finance training that benefits an employee's personal career goal while at the same time benefiting the bottom line of the organization. In other words this training need to create a synergy that is at once reasonable in that it benefits both the employee and the organization. Therefore it is imperative that a ‘training needs’ analysis take place prior to implantation: This approach to training needs analysis uses personnel data already collected by most organizations. Common HR methods currently used for performance appraisals, job evaluation techniques, and compensation practices provide the basic inputs. The underlying relationships between these factors provide strategic guidance for investing in the development of human resources. (Capps & Capps, 2005: 23) Unfortunately employees do not always gain from their training skills that can immediatlley be applied to their jobs without some work. The newly trained employee often experiences a bit of a learning curve. This can at first appear to even stagnate or slow down the worker’s initial productivity, which can be deadly to manager on deadline. Practitioners must either continue to live with potential resource reductions or find the connection between training and performance results. Past studies have considered training and its relationship with such factors as satisfaction, trust, and commitment. However, improving training effectiveness by measuring training's effect on organizational outcomes has not often been the context. (Owens 2006: 167) RECRUITMENT Recruitment has been defined as: The process of locating potential applicants who might join an organization and encouraging them to apply for existing or anticipated job openings. During this process, efforts are made to inform the applicants fully about the qualifications required to perform the job and the career opportunities the organization can offer its employees. (Bohlander and Snell 2007: 34) The first step in most recruitment processes is the collection and review of resumes and employment application forms , at least this is the perspective from the applicant’s point of view. However, in reality the process should have begun very much before that. A review or job analysis of a current or new position would begin the process and that would tailor the job posting as well as the focus on applications and resumes thereafter. This narrows the pool of qualified applicants and begins the recruitment process. (Udechukwu and Manyak 2009: 80) While resumes are the first step a well put together employment application that is specially related to the job is a further instrument to help in recruiting the perfect employee. This application is all too often generalized to the point of uselessness when it comes to recruitment. However, there are some pitfalls here: … employment application forms may also appear rigid in structure. Job applicants complain about the process of completing employment application forms because they find the process onerous and repetitive, particularly since similar information is already readily available in their resume (Udechukwu and Manyak 2009: 82) The benefits of the position are also another important step in recruitment policies. Factors that are attractive to current and future employees and will aid in retention of those employees included some amount of control over their career with the company and their future in general, whether the work was fun, interesting and / or exciting is now of special concern to HRM. Working in an organization that had leading edge technology was also a significant factor. (Arthur 2008: 34) The size of an organization can often determine the scope of the recruitment process. The large the organisation the more complex and formal is this process. Furthermore, with the increase business size the amount of pure institutionalization of HRM practices in general also increases. Smaller companies may not even have an HRM manager while larger ones will have an etire department devoted to it. While smaller companies are not usually less effective in their recruitment of employees, the recruitment behaviour is usually more the outcome of a social process which is mostly supported and undertaken by the culture inherent in the staff. ‘In light of this social-integrative logic of recruitment the quality of employer/employee relations has a high impact on recruitment success in smaller organizations. This applies especially to those businesses that do not have implemented a separate HR-department.’ (Behrends 2007: 57) KNOWLEDGE SHARING The activity of knowledge sharing has also become a prime responsibility of the HRM department. In fact many researchers into the emerging change in dynamics view HRM as becoming less person-centred and more knowledge centred in their approach to their contribution to the overall organization. This is often a substantially different approach to the management of resources, especially when it comes to the career development of staff members. In this respect the emphasis is on the community as a whole and the service aspect is towards sharing and the generation of knowledge among the entire organization as opposed to only the individual. (Des Horts 2002: 54-55) However, there is also the potential for vast development of that same individual in such an arena as well. HRM will need to have better guidelines in place for individuals in this new atmosphere (Kahnweiler 2006: 25-26). As with training and recruitment, Knowledge Sharing is also cornered with social collaboration, with close and frequent social interactions is suggested to be important because it improves openness with shared values, mental models, and perceptions. Additionally, effective professional collaboration even with distant and infrequent social interactions is also suggested to be important because it enhances shared experiences. With shared experiences individuals can capture the embedded nuanced contexts in which the knowledge was created and share complex knowledge. Although individual knowledge is an important organizational resource, it is the collaborative knowledge in an organization that determines its sustainable competitiveness… an organization's core competencies are the collective learning of the organization in terms of production, marketing, and technological knowledge that are hard to imitate by competitors. Developing an organization-wide system of knowledge-base and managing it with effective utilization and creation of new knowledge is important for innovation and performance. Hence, with an effective sharing process an organization can develop its knowledgebase and competitiveness (Chowdhury 2005: 317) Getting knowledge sharing to the optimal level requires a great deal of work, especially in older organisations, in order to develop a culture of trust. ‘Trust is absolutely essential for proactive knowledge sharing: You must be able to trust that the information you receive from others is the best that can be sent to you, and they in turn have to be able to trust that you will use the information in an appropriate manner.’ (Buckman 1999: 28) Therefore, managers, supervisors and executive staff should endeavour to create team work environment that is advantageous to professional as well as social collaboration. An environment of cooperation should be encouraged rather than a competitive and unproductive one. There are many steps required to make this realization such as, an analysis of capabilities within the organization, a review of leadership practices and key leadership competencies and the values of the agency must also be clearly defined. But one key concept that is germane to the entire success of the company is an on-going and open dialog between department, personnel and HRM. In researching the importance of the aforementioned steps to realization, Colbert, and Kurucz discovered the following: In every case dialogue was described as highly important: dialogue with stakeholders to negotiate and appease; dialogue to integrate stakeholder needs and to search for win-win value creation; or dialogue to broaden the company's strategic frame of reference, and to enrol stakeholders in a new organizational direction. (Colbert, and Kurucz 2007: 27) Communication is the key tool for HRM to use in not only distributing information, but in informing management of the achievement of staff so that the positive return on investment in the employee can be readily ascertained. CONSLUSION To summarize, firstly the role that the Human Resource Management plays has been constantly changing to keep up with the times. No longer simply file clerks and anniversary watchers, the part that HRM plays is crucial to companies using best practices to retain and develop employees. So far that and the role of HRM, originally thought of as the police department for the company has begun to change. In 2005 this was still the impression in many companies. An article in 2005 entitled ‘Why We Hate HR,’ explained this concept as a ‘dark bureaucratic force that blindly enforces nonsensical rules, resists creativity, and impedes constructive change.’ (Vosburgh 2007: 15) While HR certainly must maintain and enforce defensible policies for the company, it also must rise to the role of increasing employee retention and searching for as well as creating talent pools for the company. By using training, recruitment and knowledge sharing to develop a talented pool of personnel and the retention of that personnel, HRM is able to create sustainable and achievable growth for an organisation. These processes also have the double-duty of keeping the job itself interesting and exciting for the staff. Programs such as those that rotate employees between different kinds of units within the organization, that encourage directed learning as well as promoting interagency and knowledge communication across the entire company. Therefore, HRM musts be a multidiscipline and cross cultural organisation that can at once seek out talented personnel and continue to train and educate them, as well as foster the growth of a culture of trust that can share knowledge and benefit both the staff and the organization as a whole. List of References Arthur, D. 2008, The Employee Recruitment and Retention Handbook. New York: AMACOM. Bohlander, G. & Snell, S. 2007. Managing Human Resources. 14th ed. Ohio: Thomson South- Western Boudreau, John W., and Peter M. Ramstad. 2006, ‘Talentship and HRM Measurement and Analysis: From ROI to Strategic Organizational Change.’ Human Resource Planning Vol. 29 No.1, pp. 25-34 Boudreau, John W. 2005, ‘Talentship and the New Paradigm for Human Resource Management: From Professional Practices to Strategic Talent Decision Science.’ Human Resource Planning Vol. 28 No.2, pp. 17-26 Buckman, Robert H. 1999. "Collaborative Knowledge." Human Resource Planning 22:22-30 Cabrera, Angel, and Elizabeth F. Cabrera. 2003, ‘Strategic Human Resource Evaluation.’ Human Resource Planning Vol. 26 No.1, pp. 41-52 Capps, Charles J., and Patricia J. Capps. 2005. "The Human Resource Development Matrix: A Strategic Ethical Approach to Determining Training Needs." Human Resource Planning 28:21-29 Colbert, Barry A., and Elizabeth C. Kurucz. 2007, ‘Three Conceptions of Triple Bottom Line Business Sustainability and the Role for HRM.’ Human Resource Planning Vol. 30 No.1, pp. 21-29 Chowdhury, Sanjib. 2005. "The Role of Affect- and Cognition-Based Trust in Complex Knowledge Sharing." Journal of Managerial Issues 17:310-321 Des Horts, Charles-Henri Besseyre. 2002, ‘Governance, Knowledge Creation, and Organizing: An Afterthought.’ Human Resource Planning. Vol. 25 No.4, pp. 48-57 Jamrog, Jay J., and Miles H. Overholt. 2004, ‘Building a Strategic HRM Function: Continuing the Evolution.’ Human Resource Planning Vol. 27 No.1, pp. 51-68 Kahnweiler, William M. 2006, ‘Sustaining Success in Human Resources: Key Career Self-Management Strategies.’ Human Resource Planning Vol. 29 No.4 24-37 Lajara, Bartolome Marco, Francisco Garcia Lillo, and Vicente Sabater Sempere. 2002, ‘The Role of Human Resource Management in the Cooperative Strategy Process.’ Human Resource Planning Vol.25 No.2 pp.34-45 Owens, Patrick L. 2006. "One More Reason Not to Cut Your Training Budget; the Relationship between Training and Organizational Outcomes." Public Personnel Management 35:163-169 Udechukwu, Ikwukananne, and Terrell Manyak. 2009. "Job Applicants' Perceptions of Resumes versus Employment Application Forms in the Recruitment Process in a Public Organization." Public Personnel Management 38:79-88 Vosburgh, Richard M. 2007, ‘The Evolution of HR: Developing HRM as an Internal Consulting Organization.’ Human Resource Planning Vol. 30 No.3, pp. 11- 23. Read More