Human Resource Management:
Overview, Definition, Scope, Strategy and Ideas

No matter what the size of a business or corporation, it almost will never survive without working on the Human Resource (HR) aspects of the business. The unique talents and abilities of the workforce, as applied to the specific business model are essential to an efficient and effective business that will be a successful venture.

If you are a small-scale entrepreneur, there should be one employee whose job is mainly handling the human resource management of your employees.

Alternately, if the business is small enough and/or resources are limited, the business owner can and should handle these duties. For a smaller venture, this may be the best option and enable the highest degree of owner control of the work-force.

On the other hand, huge corporations are practically unable to survive without the help of a comprehensive human resource management department taking control of employee staffing, training, payroll, benefits, safety practices and other HR-related issues.

Human Resource Management: The Basics

To have a deeper understanding of what human resource management is all about, here is a quick look at the basics.

HRM involves the strategic and coherent management of an organization's personnel. As the name implies, HRM deals with human attributes of a business – these are essentially a business organization's most valuable assets, their employees.

Just imagine how any business would survive if it was not able to keep and maintain a well-trained staff of qualified employees. What kind of performance could you expect from a company where the workers continuously file their resignations due to poor management of the workforce? If you want any type of business venture to succeed, you need to properly manage your Human Resource department.

One of the primary functionalities performed by the Human Resource department is staffing. In order to meet the quantity standards of the company given the product or service the company is offering, the question always remains: “how many personnel do we need to employ?”

Additional questions such as: “what should be each employee’s fair compensation for the quality and size of service they offer while allowing the company to experience an adequate profit potential?”

Once employed, how can the Human Resource department help ensure the employee will be retained and not transfer to a direct competitor carrying the skills learned from your company?

In order to meet your staffing needs, would it be more profitable to hire and train new employees – or is it more practical to use independent contractors to meet the needs of your business?

These and similar questions are the issues HRM personnel deal with on a daily basis when it comes to the hiring and staffing process.

Workforce Planning & Staffing

Workforce planning and staffing is the stage where Human Resource Management personnel specifies jobs and roles, recruits people, screens applicants, hires and outsources as necessary. If you work as a HR personnel manager at a company that hires many employees throughout the year, workforce planning and staffing should be something you have mastered, or not by now – the degree of your success or failure will be evident in the employee retention rate and employee job satisfaction factors.

Paying Employees & Providing Benefits

It’s the Human Resource Management staff that takes care of the benefits packages and salaries of employees – whether they are regular, temporary or outsourced. Close attention must be paid to such issues as payroll and social security taxes, workers compensation, profit sharing, employee stock options, contributions to IRA’s and 501 K’s along with medical insurance premium payment issues. This can be a relatively complex, laborious task that requires outstanding accuracy but computers have helped streamline this process tremendously over the years.

Training Employees

There are many stages of training an employee should be exposed to in order to ensure you have an adequately prepared, qualified and safe workforce for the tasks they must perform.

It’s always good to have your new workers undergo an employee orientation seminar to ensure they are aware of company-wide rules and regulations, as well as their rights, duties, benefits and compensation plans available to them.

In an ongoing manner, the HR department is also responsible for training employees in honing their skills on the job by providing ongoing training in new equipment or service practices or for maintaining up to date new business work procedures.

Maintaining a Safe Working Environment

Finally, it is the responsibility of the HR department to ensure there is a safe working environment, there is no violence in the workplace, and that employees are complying with company regulations and procedures. This helps guarantee that high-performing, reliable and safe-work habit employees are retained by the company.

In most businesses, there should be monthly safety meetings. These meetings should be used to implement general and new company-wide safety procedures and practices along with training in such life-skills as CPR and the Heimlich maneuver. In these meetings, employees should have the freedom to air-out any possible unsafe working conditions, discuss possible injuries of the preceding month and banter-about ways to improve conditions and practices in order to learn from these unfortunate accidents so as not to encourage repeat offences.

Develop Your Own Human Resource Management Strategy

In order to have a successful human resource management strategy, owners need to take into consideration the kind of HR management people they will require to run the specific business model and meet their established goals effectively. A specific program must be designed for attracting, developing, training and retaining a skilled team of people for this purpose. With the help of the right human resource strategy, you can easily meet the specific needs of your business while attaining the highest level of success possible.

Article Custom Written/compiled for Job Service Help by Mabelle Sese of The Filipino Worker Company. Added April 2009