Human Resource Management
October 18, 2024 | R.Lakshajini
Human resource management, involves coordinating, managing, and allocating human capital, or employees, in ways that move an organization’s goals forward. HRM focuses on investing in employees, ensuring their safety, and managing all aspects of staffing from hiring to compensation and development. Human resource management is organizing, coordinating, and managing an organization's current employees to carry out an organization’s mission, vision, and goals. This includes recruiting, hiring, training, compensating, retaining, and motivating employees.
Since World War II, calling it “human relations,” “personnel management,” “labor relations,” and now “management of human resources,” business has spent millions to make employees productive, loyal, and motivated.
First, academics, with minds opened by the Hawthorne experiments, led the movement to effectively manage people. Now, eager consultants and zealous staff experts nurture it. Fortune writes of personnel directors as the “new corporate heroes.” Library shelves overflow with people management books, and a hundred new ones appear every year. Two hundred documented attempts are going on to improve the quality of work life (QWL), and three nationally known institutions have charters to improve productivity and QWL.
Human resources management seems to be mostly good intentions and whistling in the dark or averting unionization. And the results of the 1970s suggest that we may not even be holding our own. The poor management of the work force in this country is damaging the nation and our standard of living. It is making us uncompetitive with the Japanese and some other Asians, the West Germans, the Swiss, and many others.
I do not wish to exaggerate the gloomy aspects of this picture. A handful of large (and certainly many medium-sized and smaller) companies appear to have made their work forces into competitive assets. And surely modest progress has occurred nearly everywhere. For the most part, sweatshops are a thing of the past. Workplaces are better lit and ventilated and are generally safer than in the past. The atmosphere at work is less coldly formal, and decision making more participative. Managers are more aware of feelings and relationships and make fewer overt demands of employees. Fewer “bulls of the woods” charge about offices and factories. Personnel people are more professional, more companies have clearly stated grievance procedures, and house publications regularly explain how and why companies are managing themselves for their employees’ benefit.
Some will argue that we’ve been doing many of the right things and that it is societal factors such as the “declining work ethic,” the “new breed,” and the “new sociology” that are eroding management’s efforts. Regardless, in most companies the results of enlightened people management are simply more comfort, more relaxation, more freedom from pressure, more security, more benefits, and higher pay, not more productivity and loyalty.
What’s gone wrong? Why do so few companies actually make use of the greatest competitive weapon of all—the powerful resources of motivated, energized, cooperative, trusting people?
Few managers need much convincing about the importance of people. All the managers I’ve talked to say, “People are our greatest asset.” But they also report, “We don’t know how to motivate them.” “People are getting harder to manage.” “Personnel departments don’t give us the leadership we need.” “We’re just hanging in there trying to cope.”
Achieving employee commitment
Capturing the loyalty of hundreds or thousands of individuals in one business enterprise so that they direct their energies toward the goals of the company is enormously difficult. The goals of the corporation are long-range and general in nature—profit and growth. But employees usually focus on short time horizons to meet their needs in wages, salaries, working conditions, fair treatment, and promotion. Drawing a connection between these sets of goals is not easy.
Effective relationships between individuals and companies rest on employees’ trust that the goals are connected. But developing trust often requires overcoming years of bad experience and many employees’ belief that companies exploit people. Of every 100 employees, 5 or 10 will have been disappointed or burned by some job-related experience, which may have been beyond the company’s control. Their subsequent alienation can subvert the efforts of managers and personnel officers to build morale.
Given that working in a social, industrial operation requires people to give up many freedoms and that groups acting collectively play on that loss of freedom to better their own short-term interests, that the work force is uncommitted should be no surprise.
Conflicts in theory
Managers use many different organizational techniques to achieve collaboration and productivity. Researchers can take large credit for the multitude of concepts and tools on hand.
1. Human relations.
Theories of group behavior deal with social interaction and interpersonal relationships through such tools as theories X and Y and sensitivity training. The school’s precept is that because group behavior is critical to collaboration and success, groups must bestow authority and control upward.
The individual behavior school of human relations focuses on individual psychology, leadership, power, authority, responsibility, and the subconscious. Its main concern is the individual’s feelings and drives and, how they affect the workplace.
Organizational development goes further and focuses on the need for people to reason together about their common difficulties. Its central belief is that employees can often manage themselves better than managers can.
2. Labor relations.
Labor laws, public policy, the economics of wages and costs, demographics and manpower management, collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievances are under the purview of labor relations. It sees politics at the plant, corporation, union, state, and national levels together with labor laws as keys to any situation. Its stance is usually adversarial and tough—sticking to contract terms, denying exceptions, avoiding precedents, and building a powerful position for bargaining.
3. Personnel management.
Activities involved in managing large numbers of people in the aggregate—namely, recruiting, selecting, training, compensating, and developing them—are the province of personnel. This discipline holds that if companies perform those tasks well, they will acquire a set of employees with appropriate motives, habits, and behavior. Personnel holds that if managers are consistent and apply policies that induce desired behavior, a good climate will result.
4. Industrial engineering.
This school concentrates on designing jobs to fit technology and human capabilities and controlling performance with standards based on industrial engineering studies. It holds that efficiency and productivity are products of economic rewards and hard-nosed, disciplined supervision.
Each of these four schools focuses on acquiring an effective, loyal, and committed group of employees but in very different ways. My concern is not that disagreement arises among these experts or that they have different approaches to the same problem. I do not think that one school is right and the others wrong, that one is better than another, or that any should be ignored. On the contrary, they all offer ideas and tools that are often very effective, though perhaps not when used at the same time.
The problem is a little like having a car that has good wheels, a shiny body, an efficient engine, excellent brakes, and a terrific hydraulic system but that won’t go or that no one in the family wants to drive. Big hat, no cattle.
Each school of thought makes a contribution, a vital contribution, like the wheels and the engine, but the whole system sputters and founders and doesn’t produce enough involved, energetic, and loyal workers. Usually companies do not know how to put these ingredients together in one effective corporate system, for the four schools each offer managers contradictory advice.
Two things appear to be missing from the systems. One is a comprehensive unifying concept. Another is a general manager who can effectively mix and match these necessary ingredients. Unfortunately, such a person is a rare breed.
Problem Solving
The eternally optimistic macho belief is that if reason is applied: When managers put good minds to work on a problem, it will yield quickly. When good managers who will be held accountable are armed with good solutions, substantial improvements will result.
This premise accounts for many “big hats”; managers have adopted programs “to fix” poor morale or low productivity instead of getting at basic underlying causes. Short-term fixes or “programs” do not work in human resources development any better than they do in government. Managers wishing superior human resources must get at fundamental rather than superficial symptoms; they need to accept disappointments and unexpected outcomes of solutions to complex problems, and they need the staying power to work persistently at improving the quality of human resources. These problems are massive and stubborn. When disillusionment and frustration hit, many managers react judgmentally, blaming the union or the government, the “vanishing work ethic” or “the new breed,” instead of their own piecemeal, reactive approach to the management of people.
Toward Improving Human Resource Performance
To develop human resources, corporate management will have to make some fundamental changes in its conventional wisdom.
Let me suggest five processes to include in a new approach:
1. Managers need to tackle the mistaken premises head on and cast them out in favor of a new set like the following: If managers continually fail to listen, communicate, explain, anticipate, and in every way nurture commitment and mutual understanding, employees will inevitably become alienated. In the nature of people and organizations there is a relentless gravitational slide toward alienation.
2. Any company can begin to improve the management of human resources simply by doing the basics better. The most practical way to start is by performing all the routine ongoing personnel activities with extraordinary care. Research suggests that for the many reasons cited earlier, recruiting, selection, compensation, job design, training, and communications procedures are in many companies hastily and inadequately carried out. Worst of all is supervision—the oldest and most written about of management skills. The business schools neglect it, and economics, schedules, costs, and time pressures allow careless and inhumane practices to characterize it.
3. Managers need to set a seven-year time horizon for their human resources planning and operation. I pick seven years simply to make the point that it’s not one, two, three, or even five. Planning in personnel needs at least that amount of time to survive several generations of top executives’ strategy shifts, economic recessions, division and companywide crises, government policy changes, legislative revolutions, and technological advances. It takes at least seven years for managers to install, live with, improve, and reap the benefits of major change in personnel activities; to weed out unproductive skills or attitudes; and to hire a new generation. And it takes that long for employees to live through a period of history in a company that forms a new foundation of trust.
4. Having a seven-year horizon requires that managers develop a philosophy, some objectives, and a strategy. Since human resources strategic planning is as yet a largely unknown art and since it may take researchers years to develop competence, managers would do better to begin on their own rather than wait for the perfect approach.
