INTRODUCTION TO HRM

LECTURE 1.
 INTRODUCTION

• Human resources management or HRM as it is commonly

abbreviated, is concerned with the activities, which are
intended to facilitate the effective utilisation of people in the
performance of work organisations.

• The human resources of an organisation are not only its most

important resources; they represent one of its largest
investments.

• Human resources are the most important resource category

in all organisations, because it is people that act on the other
resources to produce the organisation’s outputs.
 DEFINITION OF HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

• Human resources management is a managerial thinking,

policies, procedures, and practices that are related to the
effective management of people for purposes of facilitating
the achievement of results in work organisations.

• It is the set of management activities intended to influence

the effective utilisation of human resources in the
performance of work organisation.

• It is the strategic and coherent approach to the management

of an organization's most valued assets - the people working
there who individually and collectively contribute to the
achievement of the objectives of the business.
 HUMAN RESOURCES OR PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

• Traditionally the functions of managing people in work

organisations used to be known as personnel management and
involved three basic management functions namely: recruitment,
training, and compensation. These functions were performed
basically as clerical functions without much regard for their
functional interrelationships with other managerial functions or
even their contribution towards the achievement of organisational
objectives. For this reason, personnel management was not
regarded a strategic management function.

• In contrast, the functions of managing people in work

organisations are nowadays known as human resources
management.
 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT AND PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT
1. Age
In the literature, HRM is a modern name of the occupation of managing people in
places of work; personnel management is an older and outdated name of the
occupation.

2. Number of functions
• Personnel Management focuses on three major functions i.e. recruitment, training,
and compensation. Human Resources Management encompasses many more
functions of managing people than did personnel management. It encompasses
seven core functions, namely: planning, recruiting, training and development,
performance evaluation, compensation, health and safety, and labour relations.
HRM also includes the functions of job design and analysis, orientation and
placement, career planning and development, motivation, job satisfaction, quality of
work life programmes, employee supervision, communication, disciplining,
management of termination of employment contracts, human resources accounting
and auditing, human resources information systems, as well as human resources
policies and procedures.
 CONT.
3. Strategic function
• Human resources management is a strategic management function, at par
with such functions as procurement, production, marketing, and finance
due to the pivotal place and role of human resources in the performance
processes of the organisation. Human resources management is thus a
proactive function on which all the implementation processes of the
organisation’s strategy depend. Personnel management is an administrative
function and thus it is more reactive than proactive.

4. Complexity
• Human resources management as practised in work organisations today is
complex and in this way, consistent with the systems idea. The systems
approach of looking at the practice of human resources functions recognises
the dynamic interaction among the human resources management
functions on the one hand, and on the other, it recognizes the dynamic
interaction of human resources management functions with the other
management functions in the performance processes of organisations.
 Cont.
• Human resources management is not simple and
straightforward; it is a complex field. It requires a rich
understanding of the field of organisational behaviour
and the skills to utilise it in order to get the
organisation's human resources to work towards
desired levels of organisational performance. It also
requires a good knowledge of organisational and
environmental diagnosis as a basis for understanding
the relationships among people’s roles and for making
correct and consistent decisions about people in a
dynamic work environment.
 OBJECTIVES OF HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

• Human resources management, like all other

programmes achieves its purposes by meeting its
pre-set objectives. In some work organisations,
objectives are carefully thought out and expressed
in writing in an approach known as management
by objectives. There are many organisations,
however, in which the objectives are not formally
documented. In both cases, the objectives do exist
and they guide the human resources management
programmes in practice.
 Cont.
1. Social responsibility
• Human resources management aims to enable the
organisation to fulfil its responsibility to the society in which
it exists. They are formed in order to render to society
specific goods and or services to enable society satisfy its
day-to-day needs. The continued existence of organisations
can only be justified by their continued ability to produce
the goods and or services they were designed to produce,
or simply stated, their continued ability to fulfil their social
responsibility. The fulfilment of the organisations' social
responsibility is a result of human labour.
 Cont.
2. Employee service
• Human resources management aims to help employees to
achieve their personal objectives, insofar as their personal
objectives enhance the employees' contribution towards the
achievement of the objectives of their organisation. Employees
have personal objectives, which they seek to satisfy through
working for the organisation. When the organisation meets
these objectives the employees can be motivated and retained.
• Therefore, another important objective of the human resources
department is to design and implement suitable human
resources programmes, which enable employees to satisfy their
personal objectives through performing their duties well in the
organisation.
 Cont.
3. Organisational effectiveness
• The third objective of human resources
management is to enable the employees contribute
the best and most of their labour input towards the
achievement of their organisation's objectives.
Human resources management is not an end in
itself; it should be a means of assisting the work
organisation to attain results. Simply stated, human
resources management exists in order to serve the
work organisation: to make it succeed.
 DUTIES OF A HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGER

• The following are the specific duties of a human resources manager:

– Advise and counsel line managers on the correct approaches of
implementing human resources policies and procedures and solving
specific human resources problems.
– Maintain a healthy organisation by using various indices such as
absenteeism, production efficiency, accident indices, labour turnover,
complaints and grievances.
– Design human resources procedures and services that ensure
standardised humane treatment for all employees in the whole
organisation. Such procedures and services include schemes of service,
recruitment procedures, interviewing, and testing of new employees,
induction or orientation programmes, designing training programmes,
wage and salary surveys, wages and salaries administration, change
management, health and safety engineering, safety services, and
employee benefit programmes.
 Cont.
– Co-ordination and control of the implementation of personnel
policies. This task involves discussions with managers, inspection,
interviewing, and research both in the organisation and outside.
– Design and analyse jobs for purposes of redesign.
– Plan for the recruitment, transfers, recategorisations, promotions,
demotions, and exit of employees.
– Co-ordinate the management of employee performance.
– Manage the training and development of employees in order to
ensure the right match between job demands and employees’
performance capabilities.
– Manage employee relations in the workplace i.e. industrial
relations, employee participation and communication.
– Manage employee health and safety programmes.
 FUNCTIONS OF HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

1. Job Design and Analysis

• This function involves the systematic arrangement of different tasks in
order to facilitate the effective and efficient performance of work
organisations. The primary objective of this function is to produce jobs
that employees enjoy doing and that are fruitful to the employer.
Occasionally it becomes necessary to collect, analyse, evaluate and
organise job-related information so as to enhance job knowledge for
better human resources decisions.

2 . Human Resources Planning

• Human resources planning will be defined as the process of anticipating
and making provision for the availability of the right numbers and quality
of employees for the performance requirements of the work
organisation.
 Cont.
3. Human Resources Recruitment
• Human resources recruitment or human resources
procurement can be defined as the process of identifying and
encouraging potential applicants to apply for vacant job
positions in the organisation. The function involves the tasks
of job advertising, processing of applications, interviewing,
selection and placement.
4. Orientation and Placement
• Employee orientation will be defined as the process of
familiarizing the new employee with his or her role, the work
organization, its policies and other employees for purposes of
getting the employee off to a good start.
Placement on the other hand will be defined as the
management action of practically assigning or reassigning the
employee to a new job.
 Cont.
5. Human Resources Training and Development
• Human resources training and development is the process of equipping
employees with the right knowledge, skills, experience and attitudes to
match their performance capabilities with the organisation's performance
demands. It also involves designing and implementing management and
organisational development programmes, as well as building effective
work teams within the organisation’s structure.

6. Career Planning & Development

• Career planning is a process of enabling employees to select career goals
and paths to those goals. It is a process of identifying future job positions
that serve as sequential benchmarks in an employee's career. On the
other hand career development refers to a process of activities performed
in order to implement career plans.
 Cont.
7. Performance Appraisal
• Performance appraisal or performance evaluation is the process of
evaluating employee performance against the stipulated
requirements of their jobs during a period of performance. It
involves designing systems of appraising the performance of
individual employees, as well as assisting employees to develop
and realise their career plans.
8. Communication
• The communication function involves the process of managing the
transfer of information and understanding from one person to
another, in order to enable the two share what they feel and know.
This process must be effectively managed in order to ensure
effective job performance and healthy employee-management
relations in the work organisation.
 Cont.
9. Motivation, Job Satisfaction and Quality of Work Life
• Motivation involves the management of the process whereby employees are
enabled to willingly contribute effectively towards their organisation’s
performance processes. It is a process through which management investigates
and discovers the drives or energetic forces within the employees that cause
them to like to work hard. After discovering these forces management
proceeds to discover the goals that the employees are seeking to achieve by
working hard. Finally management proceeds to sustain the forces within the
employee and within the work environment that maintain the intensity of their
drives and goals, which the employees are seeking to achieve.
• On the other hand job satisfaction refers to the management of opinions that
employees have about their jobs or the management of the favourableness
with which employees view their jobs.
• Maintenance of quality of work life refers to the maintenance of an
organisational culture in which employees experience feelings of ownership,
self control, responsibility, and find greater meaning in playing their roles in the
performance of their organisation.
 Cont.
10. Supervision
• Supervision refers to a management function performed by all
managers that ensures that duties are performed correctly.
Our focus is directed at supervisory level managers, or the
lowest ranking members of the management team who have
direct responsibility for supervising non-managerial
employees.
11. Human Resources Compensation
• Human resources compensation will be defined as the
process of determining and administration of the rewards of
employees for their labour inputs in the performance
processes of the organisation. It involves designing and
implementing compensation and benefit systems for all
employees, as well as ensuring that compensation and
benefits are fair and consistent.
 Cont.
12. Health and Safety
• This function seeks to safeguard the safety, and health of
employees. It involves designing and implementing
programmes to ensure employee health and safety, as well
as providing welfare and assistance to employees with
personal problems that may influence their work
performance.

13. Human Resources Information Systems

• This function involves the computerization of human
resources information in order to facilitate decision
making.
 Cont.
14. Human Resources Labour Relations
• Human resources labour relations is the process of managing
appropriate relations between employees and the organisation's
management on the one side, and between the organisation and
the unions, government, and society on the other side. The
desired intra- and inter-organisational labour relations environment
is usually regulated by the employees' trade unions and
government legislation.
15. Disciplining
• Disciplining involves deliberate management actions or behaviour
used to encourage compliance with organizational standards and
rules. It seeks to correct and mould the employee’s knowledge,
behaviour and attitude so that he or she can work willingly for
better co-operation and performance.
 Cont.
16. Termination of Employment Contracts
• This function involves the effective management
of the process of ending the employment
contract so that inconvenience to the departing
employee and losses to the work organization are
minimized.
17. Human Resources Accounting and Audit
• This function involves the accounting and
independent verification of the management of
human resources for control and compliance.
 Cont.
18. Human Resources Policies and Procedures
• The formulation of human resources policies and
procedures refers to a process of putting in place
declared frameworks or actions and sets of guidelines
for decision making for purposes of ensuring
consistency of decision making in the entire work
organisation.
• The laying down of procedures involves establishing
sequential processes of action that detail who does
what, in a certain order, when, who authorises what
action and the causal relationship among the
component activities of implementing a given policy.
CHALLENGES FACING HUMAN RESOURCES
MANAGEMENT
1. Technological Changes
• Technological changes affecting human resources management are widespread,
but probably none are more dramatic than those related to computers. In addition
to using computers in performing the traditional functions of accounting and
payroll calculations, computers today can be used to maintain and facilitate access
to employee data that are valuable in job placement and human resources
deployment. Computers can also be used in employee training, manpower
planning, management of employee exit programmes, as well as compensation
management. Today, it is possible for a human resources manager to conduct
research using electronic databases, recruit personnel, and disseminate
information to various departments and employees, networking, as well as
conducting useful group meetings at minimum cost.
2. Speed and service quality
• Customers in African economies today, are more conscious of time than before.
They want things fast, and work organisations everywhere, will have to be designed
and managed to encourage quick collaboration and instant response, all the time
keeping quality high. The challenge for human resources managers is to cultivate
the “speed culture” in their organisations, so that payment processes take shorter;
bank loan processes take shorter, etc.
 Cont.
3. Structural Changes
• Modern work organisations are undergoing may structural changes that present
another challenge for human resources managers. The most common of these
changes are usually those caused by re-engineering, downsizing of the
workforce, rightsizing, as well as outsourcing.
(a) Re-engineering refers to a fundamental rethinking and radical re-designing
of business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in cost control,
quality re-assurance, service, and speed. In essence, re-engineering processes
usually involve changes in management approaches, as well as changes in
organisational structures.
(b) Downsizing is the process of laying off of large numbers of employees in
order to strike a balance between the desired size of the workforce in relation to
the available quantity of work. Due to poor human resources planning, the
workforce in most organisations being privatised by the Public Service Reform
Programme in post-socialist Tanzania had to be downsized. Downsizing the
workforce is a process that the non-HRM specialists commonly refer to as
“manpower rationalisation”.
 Cont.
(c) Rightsizing is closely related to downsizing. Rightsizing is the
continuous and proactive assessment of mission-critical activities of
the organisation and its staffing requirements with the objective of
ensuring that staffing levels remain meaningfully relevant to current
and foreseen mission-critical activities. The real difference between
rightsizing and downsizing is that the former is an ongoing planning
process to determine the optimal number of employees in every
area of the organisation.

(d) Outsourcing is the decision to subcontract work to an outside

organisation that specialises in a particular type of work. Examples
of work that is normally contracted out to outside organisations
include consultancy services to formulate HR policies and
procedures, review of staffing levels, review of organisational
structures, design of training programmes etc.
 Cont.
4. Managerial Changes
• New changes in management approaches to recruiting, organising and design of
work processes are posing a challenge to human resources managers today.
most organisations are opting for contract rather than permanent terms of
employment, in order to induce their employees to earn their stay in the
organisations rather than merely “remaining around and being careful not to
rock the boat”.
• Many organisations are avoiding the build-up of fleets of pool vehicles, and
opting for hiring transport services when they require them. Similarly many
organisations are opting for the hiring of services for their support functions e.g.
cleaning services and grounds maintenance services.
5. Government Regulations
• Due to the rapid changes in the economies of African countries since the 1980’s
governments have been making a number of regulations and laws such as in the
areas of employee participation in multi-party politics, health and safety, equal
employment opportunities for men and women as well as disadvantaged groups,
pension reforms, labour unions and the environment. Such regulations and laws
introduce a significant increase in paperwork, negotiations, networking
initiatives, handling of cases and implementing court decisions.
 Cont.
6. Empowerment of Employees
• Most of the challenges discussed above have caused changes in
organisational designs, as well as corresponding changes in ways of
motivating employees. In many enlightened work organisations, employees
are considered associates or partners. The challenge here is to make
managers reject the by-the-numbers approach to management, recognising
that an increasingly important part of their role is to show others that they
really care. Human resources managers are redesigning jobs, in order to
make them more human and flexible, designing better career ladders, paying
people better, improving working environments and tools.
7. Organisational Culture
• An organisation’s culture refers to a set of characteristics that describe the
organisation and that distinguish it from other organisations. In each work
organisation a set of values and beliefs are implemented and organisations
should socialise their employees into the culture of their organisation in
order to ensure that they become more effective and productive members.
THE END