Introduction to HRM & Overview of the HR Role

An organization cannot build a good team of working professionals without good Human Resources.

The key functions of the Human Resources Management (HRM) team include recruiting people, training them, performance appraisals, motivating employees as well as workplace communication, workplace safety, and much more.

Modern HR 

1) Talent-centric: Finding, hiring, and developing the best people in line with your business strategy. Leveraging new business best practices that touch on work-life balance and wellness to increase the overall employee experience. Providing the tools that support sourcing, talent review, and succession planning.

2) Social and collaborative: Building a collaborative culture that drives better communication between people, better productivity across teams, and increased knowledge sharing across departments.

3) Insightful: Delivering business insights to every department, from answering complex workforce questions and forecasting performance and risks to empowering leaders to make smart decisions in real-time to meet their goals.

A good HR department is critical to an employee-oriented, productive workplace in which employees are energized and engaged. Here are the reasons why:

• HR monitors the culture.
• HR owns the overall talent management processes.
• HR is responsible for the overall recruiting of a superior workforce.
• HR recommends market-based salaries and develops an overall strategic compensation plan.
• HR recommends and implements employee benefit programs that attract and retain your best employees.

2) Operative Function

This includes the following:
• Employment
• Human Resource Development
• Compensation
• Employee Relations

Employment

It is the first operative function of HRM. Employment is concerned with securing and employing the people possessing the required kind and level of human resources necessary to achieve the organizational objectives.

It covers functions such as job analysis, human resources planning, recruitment, selection, placement, induction and internal mobility.

There are three major subdomains of HR Management:

1) Micro HRM

This covers the subfunctions of HR policy and practice (Mahoney and Deckop 1986). These can be further grouped into two main categories. The largest group of sub-functions is concerned with managing individuals and small groups, including such areas as recruitment, selection, induction, training and development, performance management, and remuneration.

2) Strategic HRM 

Strategic HRM is concerned with systemic questions and issues of serious consequence. SHRM focuses on the overall HR strategies adopted by business units and companies and tries to measure their impacts on performance (e.g. Dyer 1984; Delery and Doty 1996).

3) International HRM 

A third major domain is International HRM (‘IHRM’). Less engaged with the theoretical bridges that are important in strategic HRM, IHRM concerns itself with HRM in companies operating across national boundaries.

International HRM is an amalgam of the micro and the macro with a strong tradition of work on how HR sub-functions, such as selection and remuneration, might be adapted to international assignments.

Goals of Human Resource Management

Human resource management covers a vast array of activities and shows a huge range of variations across occupations, organizational levels, business units, firms, industries, and societies.

This confusing detail and profound diversity naturally begs a fundamental question: what are employers seeking through engaging in HRM and how do their goals for HRM relate to their broader business objectives?

Role / Responsibilities of an HR Executive

Depending on the size of the organization, the HR manager is responsible for all of the functions that deal with the needs and activities of the organization’s people including these areas of responsibility:

• Recruiting
• Hiring
• Training
• Organization Development
• Communication
• Performance Management
• Coaching
• Policy Recommendation
• Salary and Benefits
• Team Building
• Employee Relations
• Leadership

The Changing Focus of HRM

With changing times, the focus of HRM is also changing. HRM is slowly moving away from the traditional administration, personnel, and transactional roles as these are either outsourced or fully automated with exception based business rules.

The function is now expected to perform value added tasks by strategically utilizing employees and ensuring that the various employee programs are recommended and implemented in a positive manner that impacts business in measurable ways.