Human resource management (HRM) 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. The terms "human resource management" and "human resources" (HR) have
largely replaced the term "personnel management" as a description of the processes
involved in managing people in organizations. In simple words, HRM means employing
people, developing their capacities, utilizing, maintaining and compensating their
services in tune with the job and organizational requirement.

HRM strategy

An HRM strategy pertains to the means as to how to implement the specific functions of
HRM. An organization's HR function may possess recruitment and selection policies,
disciplinary procedures, reward/recognition policies, an HR plan, or learning and
development policies; however all of these functional areas of HRM need to be aligned
and correlated, in order to correspond with the overall business strategy. An HRM
strategy thus is an overall plan, concerning the implementation of specific HRM
functional areas.

An HRM strategy typically consists of the following factors:-

• "Best fit" and "best practice" - meaning that there is correlation between the HRM
strategy and the overall corporate strategy. As HRM as a field seeks to manage
human resources in order to achieve properly organizational goals, an
organization's HRM strategy seeks to accomplish such management by applying a
firm's personnel needs with the goals/objectives of the organization. As an
example, a firm selling cars could have a corporate strategy of increasing car sales
by 10% over a five year period. Accordingly, the HRM strategy would seek to
facilitate how exactly to manage personnel in order to achieve the 10% figure.
Specific HRM functions, such as recruitment and selection, reward/recognition,
an HR plan, or learning and development policies, would be tailored to achieve
the corporate objectives.

• Close co-operation (at least in theory) between HR and the top/senior

management, in the development of the corporate strategy. Theoretically, a senior
HR representative should be present when an organization's corporate objectives
are devised. This is so, since it is a firm's personnel who actually construct a
good, or provide a service. The personnel's proper management is vital in the firm
being successful, or even existing as a going concern. Thus, HR can be seen as
one of the critical departments within the functional area of an organization.

• Continual monitoring of the strategy, via employee feedback, surveys, etc.

The implementation of an HR strategy is not always required, and may depend on a
number of factors, namely the size of the firm, the organizational culture within the firm
or the industry that the firm operates in and also the people in the firm.

An HRM strategy can be divided, in general, into two facets - the people strategy and the
HR functional strategy. The people strategy pertains to the point listed in the first
paragraph, namely the careful correlation of HRM policies/actions to attain the goals laid
down in the corporate strategy. The HR functional strategy relates to the policies
employed within the HR functional area itself, regarding the management of persons
internal to it, to ensure its own departmental goals are met.

Features

Its features include:

• Organizational management
• Personnel administration
• Manpower management
• Industrial management

But these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical discipline.
Sometimes even employee and industrial relations are confusingly listed as synonyms,
although these normally refer to the relationship between management and workers and
the behavior of workers in companies.

The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees are
individuals with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as basic
business resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets. The field takes a positive view of
workers, assuming that virtually all wish to contribute to the enterprise productively, and
that the main obstacles to their endeavors are lack of knowledge, insufficient training,
and failures of process.

Human Resource Management (HRM) is seen by practitioners in the field as a more

innovative view of workplace management than the traditional approach. Its techniques
force the managers of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can
be understood and undertaken by the workforce and to provide the resources needed for
them to successfully accomplish their assignments. As such, HRM techniques, when
properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and operating practices of the enterprise
overall. HRM is also seen by many to have a key role in risk reduction within
organizations.

Synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to
describe activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce, providing its
members with payroll and benefits, and administrating their work-life needs. So if we
move to actual definitions, Torrington and Hall (1987) define personnel management as
being:
“a series of activities which: first enable working people and their employing
organizations to agree about the objectives and nature of their working relationship and,
secondly, ensures that the agreement is fulfilled" (p. 49).

While Miller (1987) suggests that HRM relates to:

".......those decisions and actions which concern the management of employees at all
levels in the business and which are related to the implementation of strategies directed
towards creating and sustaining competitive advantage" (p. 352).

Functions

The Human Resources Management (HRM) function includes a variety of activities, and
key among them is deciding what staffing needs to have and whether to use independent
contractors or hire employees to fill these needs, recruiting and training the best
employees, ensuring they are high performers, dealing with performance issues, and
ensuring your personnel and management practices conform to various regulations.
Activities also include managing your approach to employee benefits and compensation,
employee records and personnel policies. Usually small businesses (for-profit or
nonprofit) have to carry out these activities themselves because they can't yet afford part-
or full-time help. However, they should always ensure that employees have—and are
aware of—personnel policies which conform to current regulations. These policies are
often in the form of employee manuals, which all employees have.

Note that some people distinguish a difference between HRM (a major management
activity) and HRD (Human Resource Development, a profession). Those people might
include HRM in HRD, explaining that HRD includes the broader range of activities to
develop personnel inside of organizations, including, e.g., career development, training,
organization development, etc.

There is a long-standing argument about where HR-related functions should be organized

into large organizations, e.g., "should HR be in the Organization Development
department or the other way around?"

The HRM function and HRD profession have undergone major changes over the past 20–
30 years. Many years ago, large organizations looked to the "Personnel Department,"
mostly to manage the paperwork around hiring and paying people. More recently,
organizations consider the "HR Department" as playing an important role in staffing,
training and helping to manage people so that people and the organization are performing
at maximum capability in a highly fulfilling manner.