What Is Human Resource Management?

Organization: A group consisting of people with formally assigned roles who work together to achieve the
organization’s goals.
Manager: Someone who is responsible for accomplishing the organization’s goals, and who does so by managing the
efforts of the organization’s people.
Managing: To perform five basic functions: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling.
1. Planning. Establishing goals and standards; developing rules and procedures; developing plans and forecasts
2. Organizing. Giving each subordinate a specific task; establishing departments; delegating authority to
subordinates; establishing channels of authority and communication; coordinating the work of subordinates
3. Staffing. Determining what type of people should be hired; recruiting prospective employees; selecting
employees; setting performance standards; compensating employees; evaluating performance; counseling
employees; training and developing employees.
4. Leading. Getting others to get the job done; maintaining morale; motivating subordinates.
5. Controlling. Setting standards such as sales quotas, quality standards, or production levels; checking to see
how actual performance compares with these standards; taking corrective action as needed.
Human Resource Management (HRM): The process of acquiring, training, appraising, and compensating
employees, and of attending to their labor relations, health and safety, and fairness concerns.

Why Is Human Resource Management Important to All Managers?

1. AVOID PERSONNEL MISTAKES
 To have your employees not doing their best.
 To hire the wrong person for the job.
 To experience high turnover.
 To have your company in court due to your discriminatory actions.
 To have an employee hurt due to unsafe practices.
 To let a lack of training undermine your department’s effectiveness.
 To commit any unfair labor practices.

2. IMPROVING PROFITS AND PERFORMANCE

3. YOU MAY SPEND SOME TIME AS AN HR MANAGER
4. HR FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

Line and Staff Aspects of Human Resource Management:

Authority: Is the right to make decisions, direct others’ work, and give orders.
Line authority: traditionally gives managers the right to issue orders to other managers or employees.
Staff authority: gives a manager the right to advise other managers or employees.
Line managers: A manager who is authorized to direct the work of subordinates and is responsible for accomplishing
the organization’s tasks.
Staff manager: A manager who assists and advises line managers.

The Human Resource Department

1. Recruiters: Use various methods including contacts within the community and print and online media to
search for qualified job applicants.
 2. Equal employment opportunity (EEO) representatives or affirmative action coordinators: Investigate
and resolve EEO grievances, examine organizational practices for potential violations, and compile and
submit EEO reports.
3. Job analysts: Collect and examine detailed information about job duties to prepare job descriptions.
4. Compensation managers: Develop compensation plans and handle the employee benefits program.
5. Training specialists: Plan, organize, and direct training activities.
6. Labor relations specialists: Advise management on all aspects of union–management relations.

New Approaches To organizing HR

Shared HR teams (“Centralized HR units”): These provide administrative and operational HR tasks for multiple
departments or the entire organization from a central hub.
Embedded HR teams (“HR business partners”): These have HR professionals stationed within individual
departments or business units, like the sales department in this case.
Centers of expertise (“consultants” “COEs”): These focus on specific HR functions like recruitment or training,
offering specialized services across the organization.
Corporate HR teams (“Assist top managers”): These are centralized departments handling all HR aspects for the
entire organization.

The Trends Shaping Human Resource Management

1. Workforce Demographics and Diversity Trends:
 The composition of the workforce will continue to become more diverse with more women, minority
group members, and older workers in the workforce.
2. Trends in Jobs People Do
 work has shifted from manufacturing to service.
 ON-DEMAND WORKERS today in companies like Uber and Upwork, most workers aren’t employees
at all: They’re freelancers and independent contractor–gig workers, who work when they can, on what
they want to work on, when they’re needed.
 HUMAN CAPITAL more jobs are becoming “high tech.” even traditional manufacturing jobs like
assembler are increasingly high tech. Similarly bank tellers, retail clerks, bill collectors so acquisition and
development of superior human capital appears essential to firms’ profitability and success.
 Globalization Trends Globalization refers to companies extending their sales, ownership, and/or
manufacturing to new markets abroad.
3. Economic Trends
 Although globalization supported a growing global economy, the period from roughly 2007–2015 was
difficult economically.
 LABOR FORCE TRENDS Complicating all this is the fact that the labor force in America is growing
more slowly (which is not good, because if employers can’t get enough workers, they can’t expand)
 THE UNBALANCED LABOR FORCE Furthermore, demand for workers is unbalanced; for example,
the unemployment rate for, say, recent college graduates in general was higher than that of software
engineering graduates.
4. Technology Trends
 Technology is changing human resource management in two main ways. First (as we saw), technological
change is affecting the nature of jobs.
 At an Alcoa plant in Iowa, a computer at each workstation helps employees control their machines or
communicate data.
 Second, technology is changing how employers get human resource management tasks done.
 In one survey 41% of companies were designing mobile apps to deliver human resource management
services.
 Employers use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (rather than, say, employment
agencies) to recruit new employees. Accenture estimates that social media tools like LinkedIn will soon
produce up to 80% of new recruits—often letting line managers bypass HR and do their own recruiting.
  Employers use mobile applications, for instance, to monitor employee location and to provide digital
photos at the facility clock-in location to identify workers.
 Web sites such as Knack, Gild, and True Office enable employers to inject gaming features into training,
performance appraisal, and recruiting.
 Cloud computing–based tools enable employers to monitor things like a team’s goal attainment and to
provide real-time direct evaluative feedback.
 Data analytics basically means using statistical techniques, algorithms, and problem solving to identify
relationships among data for the purpose of solving particular problems (such as how can I tell in advance
which of my best employees is likely to quit?). When applied to human resource management, data
analytics is called talent analytics.
 Artificial intelligence (AI) basically means using computers to do tasks in human-like ways. For
example, when you call an airline and find yourself answering questions from an automated system.
 Augmented reality (AR) transforms huge amounts of data and superimposes digital summaries and
images on the physical world.

Strategic Human Resource Management

 The company’s top managers choose overall corporate strategies, and then
choose competitive strategies for each of the company’s businesses. Then
departmental managers within each of these businesses formulate functional
strategies for their departments. Their aim should be to have functional
strategies that will support the competitive strategy and the company-wide
strategic aims.
 The human resource management (“HR”) department would have human
resource management strategies.
 strategic human resource management: Formulating and executing human
resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and
behaviors the company needs to achieve its strategic aims.
 The manager should not design any HR activities without understanding very
clearly the business’s strategic needs, and how to align the HR activities with
those strategic needs.
1. First, the manager formulates strategic plans and goals.
2. Next, he or she asks, “What employee skills and behaviors will we need to
achieve these plans and goals?”
3. And finally, he or she asks, “Specifically what recruitment, selection,
training, and other HR policies and practices should we put in place so as to
produce the required employee skills and behaviors?”
 Managers often refer to their specific HR policies and practices as human
resource strategies.

Sustainability and Strategic Human Resource Management

 For example, PepsiCo wants to deliver “Performance with Purpose.” This
means achieving financial performance while also achieving human sustainability, environmental
sustainability, and talent sustainability

Strategic Human Resource Management Tools

Managers use several tools to translate the company’s strategic goals into human resource management policies and
practices. These tools include the strategy map, the HR scorecard, and the digital dashboard.
1. STRATEGY MAP: summarizes how each department’s performance contributes to achieving the company’s
overall strategic goals. It helps the manager and each employee visualize and understand the role his or her
department plays in achieving the company’s strategic plan.
 2. THE HR SCORECARD: Many employers quantify
and computerize the strategy map’s activities. The
HR scorecard helps them to do so. The HR
scorecard is not a scorecard. It’s a process for
assigning financial and nonfinancial goals or
metrics to the human resource management– related
chain of activities required for achieving the
company’s strategic aims and for monitoring
results. Managers use special scorecard software to
facilitate this. The computerized scorecard process
helps the manager quantify the relationships
between (1) the HR activities (amount of testing,
training, and so forth), (2) the resulting employee
behaviors (customer service, for instance), and (3)
the resulting firm-wide strategic outcomes and
performance (such as customer satisfaction and
profitability). The HR scorecard derives from the
“balanced scorecard” planning approach, which
aims to balance hard data such as financial
measures with soft data such as customer
satisfaction in assessing a company’s performance.

3. DIGITAL DASHBOARDS: Presents the manager

with desktop graphs and charts, and shows a
computerized picture of where the company stands
on all those metrics from the HR scorecard process.

HR Metrics, Benchmarking, and Data Analytics

Beyond that, HR audits vary in scope. Typical areas audited include:
1. Roles and headcount (including job descriptions, and employees categorized by exempt/nonexempt and full-
or part-time)
2. Compliance with federal, state, and local employment-related legislation
3. Recruitment and selection (including use of selection tools, background checks, and so on)
4. Compensation (policies, incentives, survey procedures, and so on)
5. Employee relations (union agreements, performance management, disciplinary procedures, employee
recognition)
6. Mandated benefits (Social Security, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and so on)
7. Group benefits (insurance, time off, flexible benefits, and so on)
8. Payroll (such as legal compliance)
9. Documentation and record keeping. For example, do our files include résumés and applications, offer letters,
job descriptions, performance evaluations, benefit enrollment forms, payroll change notices, and
documentation related to personnel actions such as employee handbook acknowledgments?40
10. Training and development (new employee orientation, development, technical and safety, career planning, and
so on)
11. Employee communications (employee handbook, newsletter, recognition programs)
12. Termination and transition policies and practices

Talent Analytics
 Data analytics means using statistical and mathematical analysis to find relationships and make predictions.
 Data analytics tools like these enable employers to analyze together employee data (like employee
demographics, training, and performance ratings) from traditional sources such as employee records, as well
as data from new sources (like company internal social media sites, GPS tracking, and e-mail activity).
 Employers then use talent analytics (data analytics applied to HR issues) to answer questions that in the past
they couldn’t answer, or couldn’t answer as well.
 Employers use talent analytics to answer several types of talent management questions:
1. Human Capital Facts
For example, “What are the key indicators of my organization’s overall health?” JetBlue found that
employee engagement correlated with financial performance.
2. Analytical HR
For example, “Which units, departments, or individuals need attention?” Lockheed Martin collects
performance data in order to identify units needing improvement.
3. Human Capital Investment Analysis
For example, “Which actions have the greatest impact on my business?” By monitoring employee
satisfaction levels, Cisco improved its employee retention rate from 65% to 85%, saving the company
nearly $50 million in recruitment, selection, and training costs. A Google talent analytics team analyzed
data on employee backgrounds, capabilities, and performance.
 Evidence-based human resource management means using data, facts, analytics, scientific rigor, critical
evaluation, and critically evaluated research/case studies to support human resource management proposals,
decisions, practices, and conclusions.
 For managers to think like scientists they first need to be objective and then experimentation.

High-Performance Work Systems

 Is a set of human resource management policies and practices that together produce superior employee
performance.
 Emphasize the use of relevant HR mertrics
 Set out the things that HR systems must do to become an HPWS
 Foster practices that encourage employee self-management.
 Practice benchmarking to set goals and measure the notable performance differences required of an HPWS.

Employee Engagement and Performance

Employee engagement refers to being psychologically involved in, connected to, and committed to getting one’s jobs
done.

The Employee Engagement Problem

Engaged Employees: are the ones who work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company.
Disengaged Employees: are essentially “check out” as they sleep through the work day putting time not energy or
passion into their work.
Actively Disengaged Employees: are not just unhappy about work they are busy acting out their unhappiness on
engaged employees.

What Can Managers Do to Improve Employee Engagement?

1- Provide supportive supervision by coaching on their employee strength.
2- Ensure employees understand how their departments contribute to the company’s success.
3- See how their efforts contribute to achieving the company’s goal.
4- Ensure employees get sense of accomplishment from working at the firm.
5- Ensure employees are highly involved through working in self managed teams.