UNIT V- Human resource management

Human resource management (HRM, or simply HR) is a function in organizations designed [by whom?] to maximize employee performance in service of an employer's strategic objectives. HR is primarily concerned with the management of people within organizations, focusing on policies and on systems.

BASIC FUNCTIONS OF HR MANAGER:

The major functional areas in human resource management are:

1. Planning, 2. Staffing, 3. Employee development, and 4. Employee maintenance.

These four areas and their related functions share the common objective of an adequate number of competent employees with the skills, abilities, knowledge, and experience needed for further organisational goals. Although each human resource function can be assigned to one of the four areas of personnel responsibility, some functions serve a variety of purposes. For example, performance appraisal measures serve to stimulate and guide employee development as well as salary administration purposes. The compensation function facilitates retention of employees and also serves to attract potential employees to the organisation. A brief description of usual human resource functions are given below:

Human Resource Planning: In the human resource planning function, the number and type of employees needed to accomplish organisational goals are determined. Research is an important part of this function because planning requires the collection and analysis of information in order to forecast human resources supplies and to predict future human resources needs. The basic human resource planning strategy is staffing and employee development.

Job Analysis: Job analysis is the process of describing the nature of a job and specifying the human requirements, such as skills, and experience needed to perform it. The end product of the job analysis process is the job description. A job description spells out work duties and activities of employees. Job descriptions are a vital source of information to employees, managers, and personnel people because job content has a great influence on personnel programmes and practices.

Staffing: Staffing emphasises the recruitment and selection of the human resources for an organisation. Human resources planning and recruiting precede the actual selection of people for positions in an organisation. Recruiting is the personnel function that attracts qualified applicants to fill job vacancies. In the selection function, the most qualified applicants are selected for hiring from among those attracted to the organisation by the recruiting function. On selection, human resource functionaries are involved in developing and administering methods that enable managers to decide which applicants to select and which to reject for the given jobs.

Orientation: Orientation is the first step toward helping a new employee adjust himself to the new job and the employer. It is a method to acquaint new employees with particular aspects of their new job, including pay and benefit programmes, working hours, and company rules and expectations.

Training and Development: The training and development function gives employees the skills and knowledge to perform their jobs effectively. In addition to providing training for new or inexperienced employees, organisations often provide training programmes for experienced employees whose jobs are undergoing change. Large organisations often have development programmes which prepare employees for higher level responsibilities within the organisation. Training and development programmes provide useful means of assuring that employees are capable of performing their jobs at acceptable levels.

Performance Appraisal: Performance appraisal function monitors employee performance to ensure that it is at acceptable levels. Human resource professionals are usually responsible for developing and administering performance appraisal systems, although the actual appraisal of employee performance is the responsibility of supervisors and managers. Besides providing a basis for pay, promotion, and disciplinary action, performance appraisal information is essential for employee development since knowledge of results (feedback) is necessary to motivate and guide performance improvements.

Career Planning: Career planning has developed partly as a result of the desire of many employees to grow in their jobs and to advance in their career. Career planning activities include assessing an individual employee’s potential for growth and advancement in the organisation.

Compensation: Human resource personnel provide a rational method for determining how much employees should be paid for performing certain jobs. Pay is obviously related to the maintenance of human resources. Since compensation is a major cost to many organisations, it is a major consideration in human resource planning. Compensation affects staffing in that people are generally attracted to organisations offering a higher level of pay in exchange for the work performed. It is related to employee development in that it provides an important incentive in

motivating employees to higher levels of job performance and to higher paying jobs in the organisation.

Benefits: Benefits are another form of compensation to employees other than direct pay for work performed. As such, the human resource function of administering employee benefits shares many characteristics of the compensation function. Benefits include both the legally required items and those offered at employer’s discretion. The cost of benefits has risen to such a point that they have become a major consideration in human resources planning. However, benefits are primarily related to the maintenance area, since they provide for many basic employee needs.

Labour Relations: The term “labour relations” refers to interaction with employees who are represented by a trade union. Unions are organisation of employees who join together to obtain more voice in decisions affecting wages, benefits, working conditions, and other aspects of employment. With regard to labour relations, the personnel responsibility primarily involves negotiating with the unions regarding wages, service conditions, and resolving disputes and grievances.

Record-keeping: The oldest and most basic personnel function is employee record-keeping. This function involves recording, maintaining, and retrieving employee related information for a variety of purposes. Records which must be maintained include application forms, health and medical records, employment history (jobs held, promotions, transfers, lay-offs), seniority lists, earnings and hours of work, absences, turnover, tardiness, and other employee data. Complete and up-to-date employee records are essential for most personnel functions. More than ever employees today have a great interest in their personnel records. They want to know what is in them, why certain statements have been made, and why records may or may not have been updated.

MANPOWER PLANNING:

Manpower Planning which is also called as Human Resource Planning consists of putting right number of people, right kind of people at the right place, right time, doing the right things for which they are suited for the achievement of goals of the organization. Human Resource Planning has got an important place in the arena of industrialization. Human Resource Planning has to be a systems approach and is carried out in a set procedure. The procedure is as follows:

1. Analysing the current manpower inventory 2. Making future manpower forecasts 3. Developing employment programmes 4. Design training programmes

Recruitment refers to the overall process of attracting, selecting and appointing suitable candidates for jobs (either permanent or temporary) within an organization. Recruitment can also refer to processes involved in choosing individuals for unpaid positions, such as voluntary roles or unpaid trainee roles. Managers, human resource generalists and recruitment specialists may be tasked with carrying out recruitment, but in some cases public-sector employment agencies, commercial recruitment agencies, or specialist search consultancies are used to undertake parts of the process. Internet-based technologies to support all aspects of recruitment have become widespread.

SELECTION:

TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT:

Employee Training and Development

The quality of employees and their development through training and education are major factors in determining long-term profitability of a small business. If you hire and keep good employees, it is good policy to invest in the development of their skills, so they can increase their productivity.

Training often is considered for new employees only. This is a mistake because ongoing training for current employees helps them adjust to rapidly changing job requirements.

Purpose of Employee Training and Development Process

Reasons for emphasizing the growth and development of personnel include

Creating a pool of readily available and adequate replacements for personnel who may leave or move up in the organization.

Enhancing the company's ability to adopt and use advances in technology because of a sufficiently knowledgeable staff.

Building a more efficient, effective and highly motivated team, which enhances the company's competitive position and improves employee morale.

Ensuring adequate human resources for expansion into new programs.

Research has shown specific benefits that a small business receives from training and developing its workers, including:

Increased productivity. Reduced employee turnover. Increased efficiency resulting in financial gains. Decreased need for supervision.

WAGE AND SALARY ADMINISTRATON

The main objective of wage and salary administration is to establish and maintain an equitable wage and salary system. This is so because only a properly developed compensation system enables an employer to attract, obtain, retain and motivate people of required calibre and qualification in his/her organisation. These objectives can be seen in more orderly manner from the point of view of the organisation, its individual employees and collectively. There are outlined and discussed subsequently:

Organisational Objectives:

The compensation system should be duly aligned with the organisational need and should also be flexible enough to modification in response to change.

Accordingly, the objectives of system should be to:

1. Enable an organisation to have the quantity and quality of staff it requires.

2. Retain the employees in the organisation.

3. Motivate employees for good performance for further improvement in performance.

4. Maintain equity and fairness in compensation for similar jobs.

5. Achieve flexibility in the system to accommodate organisational changes as and when these take place.

6. Make the system cost-effective.

PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL:

A performance appraisal (PA), also referred to as a performance review, performance evaluation,[1] (career) development discussion,[2] or employee appraisal[3] is a method by which the job performance of an employee is documented and evaluated. Performance appraisals are a part of career development and consist of regular reviews of employee performance within organizations

Halo effect

Problem: When a manager rates an employee high on all items because of one characteristic that he or she likes.

Example: If a worker has few absence but the supervisor has a good relationship with that employee, the supervisor might give to the employee a high rating in all other areas of work, in order to balance the rating. Sometimes it happens due to the emotional dependability based on the good relationship they have.

Solution: Training raters to recognize the problem and differentiating the person with the performance they do.

Horns effect

Problem: This is the opposite to the Halo effect and Horns effect occurs when a manager rates an employee low on all items because of one characteristic that he or she dislikes.

Example: If a worker does a good performance and in some resting times he or she loves telling jokes, but his or her supervisor hates jokes, the supervisor might give to the employee a lower rating in all other areas of work, because they do not have that conexion. Sometimes it happens when they do not have a close relationship and manager do not like the person her/him-self.

Solution: Is the same as in the Halo Effect. Training raters to recognize the problem and differentiating the person with the performance they do.

Contrast

Problem: The tendency to rate people relative to other people rather than to the individual performance he or her is doing.

Example: At school, if you are sat down where all the chatty people are and you are silent but you do not pay attention and you do not do your homework, because you are drawing; when teacher gets angry with the group, you might be excluded of the bad behavior they have just because you are silent; but not because you are doing a good performance. Therefore, according to the group, you are not that chatty, but you are either doing the proper performance. However the rater will only get the idea that your behavior is not as bad as other, thus, you will be rate higher.

Solution: The rating should reflect the task requirement performance, not according to other people attitude.

Similar-to-Me / Different-from-Me

Problem: Sometimes, ratters are influenced by some of the characteristics that people show. Depending if those characteristics are similar or different to ratters' one, they would be evaluated differently.

Example: A manager with higher education degree might give subordinates with higher education degree a higher appraisal than those with only bachelor’s degrees.

Solution: Try to focus on the performance the employee is doing regardless the common characteristic that you have

Sampling

Problem: When the rater evaluates the performance of an employee relying only on a small percentage of the amount of work done.

Example: An employee has to do 100 reports. Then, the manager take five of them to check how has the work been made, and the manager finds mistakes in those five reports. Therefore the manager will appraised the work of the employee as a "poor" one, without having into account the other 95 reports that the manager has not seen, that have been made correctly.

Solution: To follow the entire track of the performance, not just a little part of it.

GRIEVANCE HANDLING:

Grievance is all about violation of the contract, practices, rules and regulations. As human beings are different there is bound to be grievances among employees leading to conflicts at the workplace. To avert any kind of conflicts within the organization, there is need for a proper grievance procedure so that the employees feel that their grievances are addressed and redressed.

JOB EVALUATION:

A job evaluation is a systematic way of determining the value/worth of a job in relation to other jobs in an organization. It tries to make a systematic comparison between jobs to assess their relative worth for

the purpose of establishing a rational pay structure.

MERIT RATING.

1. : computation of an insurance premium for a particular risk on the basis of its individual loss-causing characteristics — see experience rating.

2. : the rating of an employee by systematic evaluation of his proficiency in a job.