HRM:

Is essential for the prosperity and welfare of an Organization, a society and a nation.
Human Resource Management is a process of bringing people and organizations together so that the goals of each are met. It tries to secure the best from people by winning their wholehearted cooperation. In short, it may be defined as the art of procuring, developing and maintaining competent workforce to achieve the goals of an organization in an effective and efficient manner.

In an organization, there are tall people, short people, fat people, thin people, black people, white people, elderly people, and young people and so on. Even within each category there are enormous individual differences. Some will be intelligent, others not so intelligent, some are committed to jobs, others are not, some will be outgoing, others reserved and so on. “The point is that these differences demand attention so that each person can maximize his or her potential, so that organizations can maximize their effectiveness and so that the society as a whole can make the wisest use of its human resources”. The challenge of HR managers today is to recognize talent and nurture the same carefully and achieve significant productivity gains over a period of time. The enterprise is nothing but people. Technological advances globalize competition, demographic changes, the information revolution and trends toward a service society have changed the rules of the game significantly. In such a scenario, organizations with similar set of resources gain competitive advantage only through effective and efficient management of human resources.

The role of a HR manager is shifting from a protector and screener to the planner and change agent.
In present day competitive world, highly trained and committed employees are often a firm’s best bet. HR professionals play a key role in planning and implementing downsizing, restructuring and other cost-cutting activities. They enable a firm to be more responsive to product innovations and technological changes. For example, team based work assignments and productivity linked rewards could replace manufacturing systems. In service enterprises like banking, hotels, insurance firms, etc., discourteous employee responses may ruin the relationships with customers. Employees who lack the temperament, maturity, social skills and tolerance for frequent contact should not be selected at all for service-oriented activities. HR professionals can help an organization select and train employees for such emerging roles. Employees are the primary pillars of corporate success. Machines neither have new ideas nor they can solve problems or grasp opportunities. Only people who are involved and thinking can make a difference. Through open communications, proper feedback and fair treatment of all employees’ grievances and discipline matters, HR professionals promote employee commitment at various levels. In such a case employees perform the assigned tasks willingly and enthusiastically and thus offer a competitive advantage to the organization. As rightly pointed out by Charles Creer, (Strategy and Human Resources, 1995), “in a growing number of organizations human resources are now viewed as a source of competitive advantage.

Increasingly it is being recognized that competitive advantage can be obtained with a high quality workforce that enables organizations to compete on the lines of market responsiveness, product and service quality, differentiated products and technological innovation”. In the new economy, winning will spring form organizational capabilities such as speed, responsiveness, agility, learning capacity and employee competence. Successful organizations will be those that are able to quickly turn strategy into action; to manage processes intelligently and efficiently; to maximize employee contribution and commitment; and to create the conditions of seamless change. The need to develop those capabilities brings us back to the mandate for HR set forth at the beginning of this article. Let’s take a closer look at each HR imperative in turn. Becoming a Partner in Strategy Execution. Strategy is the responsibility of the company’s executive team – of which HR is a member.

To be full-fledged strategic partners with senior management, however, HR executives should impel and guide serious discussion of how the company should be organized to carry out its strategy.
First, HR should be held responsible for defining an organizational architecture. In other words, it should identify the underlying model of the company’s way of doing business. Several well-established frameworks can be used in this process. Jay Galbraith’s star model, for example, identifies five essential organizational components: strategy, structure, rewards, processes and people. The well-known 7-S framework created by McKinsey & Company distinguishes seven components in a company’s architecture: strategy, structure, systems, staff, style, skills and shared values. It’s relatively unimportant which framework the HR staff uses to define the company’s architecture, as along as it’s robust. What matters more is that architecture be articulated explicitly. Without such clarity managers can become myopic about how the company runs – and thus about what drives strategy implementation and what stands in its way. They might think only of structure as the driving force behind actions and decisions, and neglect systems or skills. Or they might understand the company primarily in terms of its values and pay inadequate attention to the influence of systems on how work – that is, strategy execution – actually gets accomplished. In India, the borderless world is shaking the roots of business. HR managers have long realized the importance of conducting their business in a socially relevant and responsible manner. What do you do when the company operates in an area where large army of unemployed people lives? A philosophy of hiring workers who are capable of being trained as against hiring only qualified applicants may help reduce unemployment. It may also improve profitability in the long run. Is it possible for a person to buy a firm’s products or services if he remains unemployed?

The society at large nowadays is more demanding. The actions of business are being monitored and evaluated closely. If a manufacturer claims that his product has one hundred per cent juice content (e.g., Onjus) and the rival (Tropicana) tries to contest this issue openly, the customer is ready to evaluate the issue dispassionately and decide about the future course of action. If the expectations are not met or the tall claims do not stand the test, the fate of the firm/brand is automatically sealed (as it happened in the case of Bajaj’s motor cycle, ‘Cheetah’, technologically-outdated Ambassador car model, etc.). Firms do not operate in isolation.

They are stuck with society. Social impacts have to be carefully evaluated before undertaking any action programme. And society here includes the firms’ own employees and their friends, relations, neighbors as well.
Before cutting jobs in a big way (where, for example, in National Textile Corporation 40,000 jobs have been slashed voluntarily), HR managers have to assess reactions beforehand and come out with certai11 proactive steps (explain facts, train or retrain them, give outplacement help, etc.).

Considerable pressure can be exerted on a firm to alter its practices (for example, in Steel Authority of India, SBI and other State owned Banks, DTC the slashing of jobs did not take place in a big way) if the public believes that it is not operating in the best interests of society.

Culture is our philosophies, faith and beliefs. By organization culture we mean the philosophies, practices and the codes of practices which are prevalent in the organization. A culture with innovative ideas and opportunities for humans to develop and grow will pave way for all round development of humans and organization. The objective of HRM is to develop HR function is according to the organizational needs and see that good culture is established in the organization. Objectives for the welfare of the society:- Our society as you know very well consists of all our systems and their beliefs. Every organization faces the societal impact. HRM seeks to do maximum good to the society and also tries to minimize the effects of the so called social events. These social objectives are planned and needed to satisfy the ethical and social needs of the society. HRM has the societal objective of doing good to society, complying with legal formalities and building good industrial relations. A firm, after all, operates by public consent to satisfy society’s needs.

The role of HRM has undergone a dramatic change over the years. From control and direction of employees, HR department is expected to move toward clarifying goals and paths and creating a supportive and growth oriented environment and concerned about the society and nation as a whole

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Happy Learning **
JAI HIND