REVIEW OF HRM

By Paul Nartey
 KEY ISSUES IN HRM

 HRM practitioners agree that there are five basic

functions that all managers perform in their daily
work. These are :
 Planning: establishing goals and standards; developing rules
and procedures; developing plans and forecasting.
 Organizing: giving each subordinate a specific task;
establishing departments; delegating authority to subordinates;
establishing channels of authority and communication;
coordinating the work of subordinates;
 Staffing: determining what type of people should be hired;
recruiting prospective employees; selecting employees; setting
performance standards; training and developing employees; 2
evaluating performance; counseling employees.
 KEY ISSUES IN HRM (CONT’D)

 Leading: getting others to get the job done;

maintaining morale; motivating subordinates;
and
 Controlling: setting standards such as quality
standards; sales quotas; production levels;
checking to see how actual performance
compares with these standards; taking
corrective action as required. These functions
represent the managerial cycle or
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management process.
 KEY ISSUES IN HRM (CONT’D)

 HRM is the process of acquiring, training,

appraising, and compensating employees
and of attending to their labor relations,
health and safety, and fairness concerns.
 Staffing, in human resource management
includes activities such as recruitment,
selection, training, compensation,
appraisals, and development of employees.
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 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 Human Resource management is a part of

every manager’s responsibilities namely:
 the placement of the right person in the right
job;

induction, training and compensation to
improve employees’ job performance.

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 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 Changes are occurring today that are requiring human

resource managers to play an increasing central roles in
managing companies. These changes or trends include:
 Technological Advances
 One truth is that technology has had a huge impact on how people work,
and on the skills, competencies they possess and training that they
undergo.
 High-tech jobs i.e. use of automation or high-tech to produce more using
fewer workers; squeezing waste out of the system as manufacturers
integrate Internet-based customer ordering with just-in-time
manufacturing systems; change from “brawn to brains” where blue–color
workers no longer do hard physical labor with dangerous machinery. 6
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)
 Globalization- the opening of world markets (the
tendency of firms to extend their sales, ownership,
and /or manufacturing to new markets abroad);
products can be sold anywhere in the world; people
can seek employment anywhere in the world.
 Companies expand abroad for several reasons: Sales
expansion; manufacturers seek new foreign products
and services to sell, and to cut Labour costs;
sometimes, it is the prospects of forming partnerships
that drive firms to do business with firms abroad. 7
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 Globalization’s has implications:

 For business, globalization means more competition, and more
competition means lower costs, to make employees more productive;
 To consumers it means lower prices and higher quality on practically
everything from computers to cars to air travel, but also demand from
employers for hard work from employees.
 There is also the issues of job insecurity (job outsourcing) for
employees (having employees abroad to do jobs that , for example
foreigners did --- is one such threat.
 For business owners globalization means benefits like reaching
millions of new consumers but also the considerable threat facing
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new and powerful global competitors at home.
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 Cultural integration: foreign ways of doing business

 Mix of foreign and domestic workforce.
 Language: is a great challenge to industry.
 Recruitment: it is difficult to find people locally exposed to
international standards. The awareness and skills may be well
below expectations.
 Training: challenge to bring local skills to international standards.
 Local standards of living may not be suitable for expatriates from
developed nations. Food, potable water, housing, security etc may
be difficult, if not traumatic to foreign employees.
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 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 Deregulation means organizations or companies must be

more competitive today.
 Other important trends include:
 Growing workforce diversity (making, finding and hiring
good employees more of a challenge; labor force growth is
not expected to keep pace with job growth;) and
 Changes in the nature of work, such as the movement
toward a service society (most workforce is employed in
producing and delivering services, not products) . In service,
the server is face-to-face with the customer when he demands
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the product. In service, the product is consumed immediately.
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 A growing emphasis on human capital (refers to the knowledge,

education, training, expertise of a firm’s workers and their
motivation). As Drucker puts it “the center of gravity in employment
is moving fast from manual and clerical to knowledge workers…”
 Best jobs require more education and more skills. For managers this
means a growing emphasis on knowledge workers (skilled
personnel).
 The organisation’s workforce is the stock of human capital it
acquires, deploys, and retains in pursuit of organisational outcomes
such as profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction.
 There is now an intense shift from viewing employees as cost of
doing business to valuing employees as human capital that creates
competitive advantage for the organisation. 11
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 Organisations that can deliver superior customer service, for

example, much of which is driven by highly knowledgeable
employees with fine-tuned customer service skills, have a
definite and long-term “leg up” on their competitors.
 Nature of Work: implications for HR: As it has been the
function of HR in organisations to recruit, select, train and
compensate employees, changes in the nature of work make
employers highly reliant on effective human resource
management. For example the key to effectively utilize new
technology is usually not the technology but the people. 12
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)
 From Financial perspective, human capital is an intangible asset for
an organisation that is difficult to directly measure and place a value
on.
 The value of human capital may be estimated by comparing the
value of the organisation’s tangible assets with the value of its
stock.
 Staffing is the process of acquiring, deploying, and retaining a
workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive
impacts on the organisation’s effectiveness.
 Staffing is the organisational function used to build the
organisation’s workforce through such systems as staffing strategy,
human resource planning, recruitment and selection, employment,
and retention.
 Automation and just-in-time systems mean jobs require more13
reading, mathematics, and communication skills than before.
 KEY ISSUES HRM (CONT’D)

For the HR Managers, the focus on competition

and productivity requires measurability. Most
firms are installing Internet and computer-
based systems for improving HR productivity.
A growing evidence shows that best-performing
companies are doing so well because of their
high-performance work system.
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 KEY ISSUES HRM (CONT’D)

A high-performance work system is an integrated set of human

resource management policies and practices that together produce
superior employee performance. These practices include:
 Extensive training
 Employment security
 Selective hiring
 Measurement on high-quality work
 Information sharing
 Self-managed teams and decentralized decision making
 Reduced status distinctions between managers and workers
 Contingent (pay-for-performance) rewards
 Transformational leadership (relating to inspirational motivation)
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 Measurement of management practices.
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 The HR Manager today has a challenging role and requires several

proficiencies:
 HR Managers require four categories of proficiencies namely HR
proficiencies, Business proficiencies, leadership proficiencies and learning
proficiencies:
 HR Proficiencies represent traditional knowledge and skills in areas such
as employee selection, training and compensation.
 Business Proficiencies reflect human resource professionals’ new strategic
role.
 For example the HR manager needs to be familiar with strategic planning,
marketing, production and finance to assist top management team in
formulating strategies.
 HR manager must speak the CFO’s language by explaining HR activities 16in
financially measurable terms such as ROI, cost per unit of service etc.
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 HR Managers require leadership

proficiencies, e.g. ability to work with and
lead management groups and to drive the
changes required.
 HR Managers need learning proficiencies
because of the quickly changing competitive
landscape where new technologies are being
continually introduced. There is the need to
stay abreast. 17
 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 HR managers (and in fact anyone managing people day-

to-day) must be proficient in applying employment law
to employment decisions.
 For e.g. equal employment laws set guidelines regarding
how the company writes its recruitment adverts; what
questions its job interviewers ask; and how it selects
candidates for training programs; Occupational safety
and health laws; labor laws lay out areas that can give
comfort or cause discomfort for the firm.
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 KEY ISSUES HRM(CONT’D)

 Ethics: the standards someone uses to decide

what his or her conduct should be.
 Ethical decisions always involve morality,
matters of serious consequence to society’s
well-being, such as murder, lying and stealing.

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 BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS

Internal Environments External Environments

Union Relations Labor Legislation

Business Strategies Labor Market

Employee Capabilities Competition

HRM

Organization Culture Suppliers

Leadership Standard of Living

Social Changes
Employee Costs 20
 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT

• As we have discussed in the earlier slides, by 2019, the world at

large, and the corporate world in particular, faced global challenges
relating
 to rapid technological changes and artificial intelligence;
 environmental degradation;
 the uneven pace of globalization;
 Inequality;
 demographic shifts, and migration.
• COVID-19 pandemic has amplified these challenges and also
presented further challenges in itself. 21
 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Our discussion provides examples of how

organizations have tackled the crisis by adopting
Human Resource Management approaches, policies
and practices in the areas of organizing work,
recruitment, selection and retention, staff
development, performance management, etc.
• We present also examples of how cooperation
between managers and employee representatives has
helped to find good solutions. 22
 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT(cont’d)

• It is important to note that with the rapid spread of the Covid-19,

countries implemented several non-pharmaceutical measures to
reduce the spread such as:
 Social distancing;
 Lockdown measures were/have been imposed;
 People were/have been quarantined;
 Schools, universities, non-essential businesses and non-governmental
organizations were/have been temporarily closed;
 Travels were restricted;
 Flights were canceled and
 Mass public gathering as well as Social events were/have23
been
prohibited.
 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

 HRM is about how people are employed, managed and developed.

HRM has been grandly impacted by COVID-19, generating significant
challenges for managers and HRM practitioners.
• Some of the ways that Covid-19 has impacted and continues to impact
on Organizations:
• Organizing Work
HRM response to office workers, relates to the new ways in which work
has been organized during the COVID19 crisis.
 Teleworking, had to be adopted quickly and widely to rapidly to
individual workers, while keeping them together as virtual teams.
 Managing a virtual team is and always has been a difficult task 24
that
requires not only careful planning, but also an ability to learn and
adjust constantly..
 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Organizing work (cont’d)

 What can be done to improve the performance of virtual teams?
 continuous communication about business and office developments is needed;
 Managers must monitor team dynamics through group conversations and
perform frequent checks if an employee starts to show signs of self-isolation;
 The closure of schools and childcare centres further blurred the lines between the
private and business domains. This challenged workers with children and
impacted negatively on single and childless workers who were at greatest risk of
feeling lonely.
 Flexibility in working hours. Employees with children had difficulty while
working from home in that family responsibilities required them to work early in
the morning or late at night.
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 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Organizing work (cont’d)

 Remote employees had to be provided with the proper
corporate technical equipment and skills to ensure that they
were/are using tools compatible with IT requirements, that
poor connectivity will not force them to drop out of important
online meetings, and security is not compromised.
 Though there is a partial return to the workplace, working from
home continues.
 There is a “hybrid” working culture: some staff stay at
home, others return to the office, and many combine the two.
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 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Organizing work (cont’d)

 Managing this arrangement involves many
considerations, from ordering proper equipment to
developing appropriate rotation schedules.
 These tasks were/are performed by the same managers
as before Covid-19 crisis, in addition to their
traditional responsibilities,
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 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Organizing work (cont’d)

 This situation has created new managerial challenges that
required:
o managers to acquire new skills;
o choose the right technologies;
o order the most appropriate ergonomic office furniture, and
o learn new ways of establishing a collaborative culture that help
workers/employees who struggle emotionally with being alone at
home. 28
 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Organizing work (cont’d)

• Covid-19 crisis has created an
opportunity to revisit corporate HRM
policies such as health and safety
policies specifically for workers taking
public transportation. 29
 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Recruitment, selection and retention

 Enterprises are adjusting their procedures towards heavy use of
virtual tools.
 This requires great care in using tools such as virtual interviews and
assessment centres, which aim not only to evaluate candidates’
technical skills, but also to understand how they might fit in with the
organization’s values.
 An increased number of “hiring mistakes’ could lead both to lower
productivity and, in the longer term to the erosion of organizational
culture,
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 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT (cont’d)

• Recruitment, selection and retention

• Online recruitment risks introducing bias by excluding candidates
who lack sufficient access to technological equipment or are not
skilled in its use (unless, of course, these skills are a critical
requirement for the job).
• When a crisis hits, many enterprises believe that they cannot avoid
layoffs. This time, however, most employers seem to have done
their best to protect jobs.
• The pandemic is shifting individual priorities towards health and
well-being, building pressure on the State to ensure security and
stability in society.
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