What Is Human Resource Management?

An organization consists of people with formally assigned roles who work together to achieve the
organizations goals. A manager is the person responsible for accomplishing the organizations goals, who
does so by managing the efforts of the organizations people.

Most experts agree that managing involves five functions: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and
controlling. In total, these functions represent the management process. Some of the specific activities
involved in each function include:

* Planning. Establishing goals and standards; developing rules and procedures; developing plans
and forecasting.

* Organizing. Giving each subordinate a specific task; establishing departments; delegating

authority to subordinates; establishing channels of authority and communication; coordinating
subordinates work.

* Staffing. Determining what type of people you should hire; recruiting prospective employees;
selecting employees; training and developing employees; setting performance standards; evaluating
performance; counseling employees; compensating employees.

* Leading. Getting others to get the job done; maintaining morale; motivating subordinates.

* Controlling. Setting standards such as sales quotas, quality standards, or production levels;
checking to see how actual performance compares with these standards; taking corrective action, as
needed.

Human resource management is the process of acquiring, training, appraising, and compensating
employees, and of attending to their labor relations, health and safety, and fairness concerns.

These include:

* Conducting job analyses (determining the nature of each employee s job)

* Planning labor needs and recruiting job candidates
* Selecting job candidates
* Orienting and training new employees
* Managing wages and salaries (compensating employees)
* Providing incentives and benefits
* Appraising performance
* Communicating (interviewing, counseling, disciplining)
* Training and developing managers
* Building employee commitment

And what a manager should know about:

* Equal opportunity and affirmative action

* Employee health and safety
* Handling grievances and labor relations

Organization is an entity—such as a company, an institution, or an association—comprising one or more

people and having a particular purpose.

Manager – The person responsible for accomplishing the organization’s goal, and who does so by
managing (planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling) the efforts of the organization’s
people.

Management process – The five basic functions of planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and
controlling.
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Strategic management

The word ‘strategy’, deriving from the Greek noun strategus, meaning ‘commander in chief’, was first
used in the English language in 1656. The development and usage of the word suggests that it is
composed of stratos (army) and agein (to lead). In a management context, the word ‘strategy’ has now
replaced the more traditional term – ‘long-term planning’ – to denote a specific pattern of decisions and
actions undertaken by the upper echelon of the organization in order to accomplish performance goals.

Strategic management is the ongoing planning, monitoring, analysis and assessment of all necessities an
organization needs to meet its goals and objectives. Changes in business environments will require
organizations to constantly assess their strategies for success.

Wheelen and Hunger define strategic management as ‘that set of managerial decisions and actions that
determines the long-run performance of a corporation’.
Hill and Jones take a similar view when they define strategy as ‘an action a company takes to attain
superior performance’. Strategic management is considered to be a continuous activity that requires a
constant adjustment of three major interdependent poles:
1. the values of senior management
2. the environment, and
3. the resources available

Strategic Human Resource Management SHRM – is the process of linking the human resource function
with the strategic objectives of the organization in order to improve performance.

Strategic human resource management (strategic HRM) provides a framework linking people
management and development practices to long-term business goals and outcomes. It focuses on
longer-term resourcing issues within the context of an organization's goals and the evolving nature of
work. It also informs other HR strategies, such as reward or performance, determining how they are
integrated into the overall business strategy.

Strategic HRM, or ‘people strategy’, is about creating a coherent planned framework for employees to
be hired, managed and developed in ways that supports an organization’s long-term goals. It helps
ensure that the various aspects of people management work together to drive the behaviour and
climate needed to create value and meet performance targets. It focuses on longer-term people issues,
matching resources to future needs, and large-scale concerns about structure, quality, culture, values
and commitment. It must also be a response to the evolving nature of work itself, which is explored in
our Megatrends series and our Profession for the Future work.

Strategic HRM can include a number of individual HR strategies, for example:

 To deliver fair and equitable reward.

 To improve employee performance.
 To streamline organizational structure.

In themselves these are not ‘strategic HRM’. Rather, strategic HRM is the overall framework that
determines the shape and delivery of the individual strategies, systematically linking people with
organizations by integrating HRM strategies into organizational strategies to deliver organizational
success.

Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) is a process of managing human resources that links
the workforce with the core strategies, objectives, and goals of an organization. It focuses on the
following aspects of HR operations:

 Ensuring practices that foster flexibility and give a competitive advantage to the organization
 Building a cultural fit for the organization
 Ensuring superior business performance
Strategic HR management can be integrated into various functions including hiring, training, and
rewarding the workforce for their performance. The SHRM approach finds ways for the HR personnel to
make a positive and direct contribution to the company’s growth. There has to be a strategic plan
related to every employee’s development and retention in sync with the long-term business goals.

Strategic Human Resource Management: An Integrated Approach

Unlike a conventional system, companies that apply strategic human resource management principles,
don’t have HR as a department that is separate from other verticals such as IT, operations, or marketing.
Rather, they work in tandem with other departments to create an understanding of their goals. This
helps in building strategies that are well aligned with those goals and overall objectives of the company.
Through such an integrated HR management, the human resource department becomes a key enabler
of the business growth and not just a mandatory service that is limited to hiring and paying the
employees. Further, strategic human resource management also focuses on better utilization of talent
and opportunities available within the department to benefit other departments.

Importance of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM)

Businesses that ensure collaboration amongst all teams, and synchronized working towards common
objectives, succeed faster. By applying strategic HR practices, employees can be analyzed and the
actions that will lead to value addition for the company can be identified. If a company’s HR personnel
don’t know much about strategic human resource management, they can enroll in HR courses online to
understand the concepts thoroughly and implement the same in the organization. There are various
benefits of applying strategic human resource management for any business. These include:

 Increased job satisfaction

 Better work culture
 Improved rates of customer satisfaction
 Efficient resource management
 A proactive approach to managing employees
 Productivity boost

How Does SHRM Work?

Strategic Human Resource Management is essential for retaining the best talent and developing of
human resources. It focuses on making employees feel valued and engaged so that they are motivated
to stay with the company. However, before moving forward, you will need to create a strategic HR
planning process following these steps.

 Cultivate an in-depth understanding of the organization’s objectives

 Assess the capabilities of the HR team
 Analyze the existing HR strength in view of your objectives
 Assess the HR needs of the business as it grows
 Find out what technology or resources employees need to perform well
 Deploy the human resource management strategy devised on basis of the above evaluation
 Check for effectiveness and take corrective actions wherever needed

Irrespective of the field or industry you talk about, strategic human resource management has become
essential for every business. It is not something only for large enterprises or companies with hundreds of
employees. In fact, right from the outset when a business focuses on scaling, SHRM principles can
enhance the speed of growth. Having said that, let’s take a look at what are the objectives of this
modern approach to HR.

Objectives of Strategic Human Resource Management

Strategic HRM primarily focuses on resolving matters such as organizational culture, hierarchy structure,
the effectiveness of operations, resource-role matching, and performance challenges. Ideally, there are
5 primary objectives of SHRM approaches:

1. Resource-based Strategy: Focuses on enhancing the strategic capabilities of the company

2. High Commitment Management: Establishing better commitment between managers and their
employees.
3. Achieving Strategic Fit: Integration of workforce and material resources through a streamlined and
high ROI-oriented operational model
4. High Involvement Management: Empowering and treating employees as stakeholders.
5. High-Performance Management: Enhancing company performance through superior productivity,
growth, and profitability rate of the workforce.