Chapter 1: Managing Human Resources

I. Human Resource Management Practices

A. Analysing work and designing jobs
B. Determining how many employees with specific knowledge and skills are
needed (human resource planning)
C. Attracting potential employees (recruiting)
D. Choosing employees (selection)
E. Teaching employees how to perform their jobs and preparing them for the
future (training and development)
F. Evaluating their performance (performance management)
G. Rewarding employees (compensation)
H. Creative a positive work environment (employee relations)

II. Human Resources and Company Performance

A. Human resource management – implies that employees are resources of the
employer.
B. Human capital
1. The organization’s employees, described in terms of their training
experience, judgement, intelligence, relationships, and insight – the
employee characteristics that can add economic value to the organization.
2. Employees – source of the company’s success or failure.

C. Sustainable competitive advantage – better than competitors at something and

can hold that advantage over a sustained period of time.
D. Human resources have these necessary qualities:
1. Valuable – high quality employees provide a needed service as they
perform many critical functions.
2. Rare – a person with high levels of the needed skills and knowledge is not
common.
3. Cannot be imitated – to imitate human resources at a high-performing
competitor, you would have to figure out which employees are providing the
advantage and how. Then you would have to recruit people who can do
precisely the same thing and set up the systems that enable those people
to imitate your competitor.
 4. Have no good substitutes – when people are well trained and highly
motivated, they learn, develop their abilities, and care about customers. It
is difficult to imagine another resource that can match committed and
talented employees.
E. High performance work system – an organization in which technology,
organizational structure, people, and processes all work together to give an
organization an advantage in the competitive environment.

III. Responsibilities of Human Resource Departments

A. One way to define the responsibilities of HR departments is to think of HR as a
business within the company with three product lines:
1. Administrative services and transactions – handling administrative tasks
(e.g. hiring employees and answering questions about benefits) efficiently
and with a commitment to quality. This requires expertise in the particular
tasks.
2. Business partner services – developing effective HR systems that help the
organization meet its goals for attracting, keeping, and developing people
with the skills it needs.
3. Strategic partner – contributing to the company’s strategy through an
understanding of its existing and needed human resources and ways HR
practices can give the company a competitive advantage.

IV. Analyzing and Designing Jobs

A. Job analysis – the process of getting detailed information about jobs.
B. Job design – the process of defining the way work will be performed and the
tasks that a given job requires.

V. Recruiting and Hiring Employees

A. Recruitment – the process through which the organization seeks applicants for
potential employment.
B. Selection – the process by which the organization attempts to identify
applicants with the necessary knowledge, skills, abilities, and other
characteristics that will help the organization achieve its goals.
VI. Training and Developing Employees
A. Training – a planned effort to enable employees to learn job-related knowledge,
skills, and behavior.
B. Development – involves acquiring knowledge, skills, and behavior that
improves employees’ ability to meet the challenges of a variety of new or
existing jobs, including the client and customer demands of those jobs.
C. Top qualities employers look for in employees
1. Interpersonal skills
2. Work ethic
3. Initiative/flexibility
4. Honesty/loyalty
5. Strong communication skills (verbal and written)

VII. Managing Performance

A. Performance management – the process of ensuring that employees’ activities
and outputs match the organization’s goals.
B. Activties include specifying the tasks and outcomes of a job that contribute to
the organization’s success.

VIII. Planning and Administering Pay and Benefits

A. The pay and benefits that employees earn play an important role in motivating
them.
1. This is specially true when rewards such as bonuses are linked to the
individual’s or group’s achievements.
B. Decisions about pay and benefits can also support other aspects of an
organization’s strategy.
1. A company that wants to provide an exceptional level of service or ben
exceptionally innovative might pay significantly more than competitors in
order to attract and keep the best employees.
2. At other companies, a low-cost strategy requires knowledge of industry
norms, so that the company does not spend more than it must.
IX. Maintaining Positive Employee Relations
A. Organizations often depend on HR professionals to help them maintain positive
relations with employees.
B. The HR deparment can also expect to handle certain kinds of communications
from individual employees.
1. Employees turn to the HR department for answers to questions about
benefits and company policy.
2. Employess may turn to the HR department for help with regards to
discrimation, hazards, and other problems.

X. Establishing and Administering Personnel Policies

A. Organizations depends on their HR department to help establish policies
related to hiring, discipline, promotions, and benefits.
B. All aspects of HR management require careful and discreet record keeping,
from processing job applications, to performance appraisals, benefits
enrollment, and government-mandated reports.

XI. Ensuring compliance with labor laws

A. Ensuring compliance with laws requires that human resource personnel keep
watch over a rapidly changing legal landscape.
B. Lawsuits that will continue to influence HRM practices concern job security.
C. Employment at will – the principle that an employer may terminate employment
at any time without notice.

XII. Supporting the organization’s strategy

A. Today’s HR professionals need to understand the organization’s business
operations, project how business trends might affect the business, reinforce
positive aspects of the organization’s culture, develop talent for present and
future needs, craft effective HR strategies, and make a case for them to top
management.
B. Human resource planning
1. An important element of this responsibility
2. Identifying the numbers and types of employees the organization will require
in order to meet its objectives.
C. As part of its strategic role, one of the key contributions HR can make is to
engage in evidence-based.
1. Evidence-based HR – collecting and using date to show that human
resource practices have a positive influence on the company’s bottom line
or key stakeholders.
D. Corporate social responsibility – a company’s commitment to meeting the
needs of its stakeholders.
 E. Stakeholders – the parties with an interest in the company’s success (typically,
shareholders, the community, customers, and employees).

XIII. Skills of HRM professionals

A. Credible activists
1. Means being so well respected in the organization that you can influence
the positions taken by managers.
2. Have the most influence over the organization’s success
3. They have to gain credibility by mastering all the others in order to build this
competency.
B. Cultural steward – involves understanding the organization’s culture and
helping to build and strengthen or change that culture by identifying and
expressing its values through words and actions.
C. Talent manager/organizational designer
1. Knows the ways that people join the organization and move to different
positions within it.
2. Requires knowledge of how the organization is structured and how that
structure might be adjusted to help it meet its goals for developing and using
employees’ talents.
D. Strategy architect
1. Requries awareness of business trends and an understanding of how they
might affect the business, as well as opportunities and threats they might
present.
2. Spots ways effective management of HR can help the company seize
opportunities and confront threats to the business.
E. Business allies – know how the business makes money, who its customers are,
and customers buy what the company sells.
F. Operational executors
1. At the most basic level carry out the particular HR functions such as
handling the selection, training, or compensation of employees.
2. All of the other HR skills require some abiliy as operational executor
because this is the level at which policies and transactions deliver results
by legally, ethically, and efficiently acquiring, developing, motivating, and
deploying human resources.

XIV. HR responsibilities of supervisors

XV. Ethics in HR Management
A. Ethics – refers to fundamental principles of right and wrong
B. Employee rights – US Constitution and Bill of Rights; Immanuel Kant
1. Right of free consent – people have the right to be treated only as they
knowingly and willing consent to be treated.
2. Right of privacy
3. Right of freedom of conscience – have the right to refuse to do what violates
their moral beliefs, as long as these beliefs reflect commonly accepted
norms.
4. Right of freedom of speech
5. Right to due process – if people believe their rights are being violated, they
have the right to a fair and impartial hearing.
C. Standards for Ethical Behavior
1. Ethical successful companies act according to four principles:
a. In their relationships with customers, vendors, and clients, ethical and
successful companies emphasize mutual benefits.
b. Employees assume responsibility for the actions of the company.
c. Such companies have a sense of purpose or vision that employees see
value and use in their day-to-day work.
d. They emphasize fairness; another person’s interests count as much as
their own.

XVI. Careers in Human Resource Management

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a business practice in which a company hires another company or an

individual to perform tasks, handle operations or provide services that are either usually
executed or had previously been done by the company's own employees.

The outside company, which is known as the service provider or a third-party provider,
arranges for its own workers or computer systems to perform the tasks or services either
on site at the hiring company's own facilities or at external locations.

Companies today can outsource a number of tasks or services. They often outsource
information technology services, including programming and application development as
well as technical support. They frequently outsource customer service and call service
functions. They can outsource other types of work as well, including manufacturing
processes, human resources tasks and financial functions such as bookkeeping and
payroll. Companies can outsource entire divisions, such as its entire IT department, or
just parts of a particular department.

Outsourcing business functions is sometimes called contracting out or business process

outsourcing.

Outsourcing can involve using a large third-party provider, such as a company like IBM
to manage IT services or FedEx Supply Chain for third-party logistics services, but it can
also involve hiring individual independent contractors and temporary office workers.

Rouse, M. (2018). What is outsourcing?. Retrieved from

https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/outsourcing

How do companies conduct outsourcing?

What is a BPO? Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the contracting of non-primary

business activities and functions to a third-party provider. BPO services include payroll,
human resources (HR), accounting and customer/call center relations. BPO companies
perform business processes of another company. Most BPOs perform customer or
technical support and offer voice and non-voice services.

But why do companies use a BPO? Companies need business process outsourcing
because of two main reasons: Outsourcing is often far less expensive than doing the work
in-house. The other reason companies outsource to a BPO is because more often than
not the BPO provides a better services. For instance large E-commerce providers might
be superb at creating online platforms and driving traffic, but they aren't good at all at
customer support because they lack people skills. So what do they do? The best way is
to keep core activities in-house and outsource activities they may not be the best at to
BPO’s.

BPOs have a service level agreement or SLA with their customers. This ensures the
quality of work they can provide since this is a clear metrics of their performance. Usually
this is the basis on how they will be paid. They are paid once they meet the set
expectations from their client. This is provided with quality and a quick turn around time.
Furthermore, BPO’s that take on projects because they are often better at providing this
take on customers who are still growing and therefore need BPO’s that can help them
grow. If you will join these BPOs, you could grow fast from a customer service agent to a
team leader because of the fast paced industry.

StaffVirtual. (n.d.). What is a BPO?. Retrieved from

https://www.staffvirtual.com/blog/what-is-a-bpo

Example of eHRM tools being used by companies

HRMS (Human Resource Management System) or HRIS (Human Resource Information

System)

Human resource departments have a lot of information to input, store and track. The most
common method of organizing this information is with a comprehensive human resource
management system (HRMS).

Whether it's a software solution or software as a service, an HRMS can be an HR

representative's best friend. It stores and organizes data, such as employee profiles,
schedules, attendance records and more.

Human resource information systems (HRIS) are typically more data-driven solutions that
allow you to craft in-depth reports for the purposes of audits.

Most HRMS offerings, such as Paychex and Workday, act as HR's central platform and
often have modules or integrations that allow you to access payroll services, benefits
management, and performance evaluations.

Rivera, A. (2018). 6 Essential Tech Tools for your HR Department. Retrieved from
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/9663-hr-tech-tools.html

Business news-related to Human Resource Management