INTRODUCTION TO

HRM
Tanisha Bukth
Assistant Professor, IBA

Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka

What is HRM?

■ Human resource management (HRM) is the process of

acquiring, training, appraising and compensating employees
and of attending to their employee relations, health and safety,
and fairness concerns.

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Key HR Functions

Health & Safety

HR Planning
& Compliance

Employee
Talent Acquisition
Relations

Compensation Training &

& Benefits Development

Performance
Appraisal

Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka

Key HR Functions

■ HR Planning involves deciding how many and what type of employees are needed to
fill key positions within the organization.
■ Talent Acquisition all about finding the right employees for the business. So this unit
would cover all aspects of business staffing, including internal selection and external
recruitment. The main function of the unit would be advertising jobs, sourcing potential
employees and screening them, and then facilitating selection decisions.
■ Training and Development: After finding employees for vacant positions, there is
typically a need for further training and development. The HR unit wouldn’t normally
provide the training, but would play an active role in facilitating it.

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Key HR Functions (contd.)

■ Performance Appraisal involves determining whether employees are performing according to

expectation and providing necessary feedback. It is the basis for employee evaluation and development
and also serves a critical legal function.
■ Compensation and Benefits: Compensation, specifically, would include the setting up of structures
that would ensure salaries and other payments are competitive and equitable. Benefits would include
insurance, group health benefits, retirement funds and so on.
■ Health and Safety/Compliance: This unit keeps the workplace safe and ensures compliance with
regulations. This would include ensuring that logs of workplace accidents and injuries are kept,
providing safety equipment, keeping track of dismissals, monitoring diversity concerns, among others.
■ Employee Relations: Employee relations will help to strengthen relationships between employers and
employees, by focusing on job satisfaction. Functions would normally include negotiation and
bargaining as well as attending to grievances, resolving conflict, etc.

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Why HRM is Critical

■ Ensures the organization is staffed with the right individuals i.e. those who are willing
and able to contribute to the attainment of the organization’s objectives
■ Ensures that the skills and expertise of employees is developed in line with
organizational requirements
■ Helps keep employees motivated and committed towards organizational goals
■ Helps ensure equitable and competitive compensation for employees
■ Safeguards the organization from legal complexities in the area of HRM
■ Helps ensure a return on HR investment

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Some Basic Concepts of HRM

■ The HR Manager typically carries out three distinct functions:

 A Line Function – Exercise of direct authority over individuals in the HR
department
 A Staff Function – Providing advisory support to all departments
 A Coordinative Function – Ensuring adherence to organizational policies &
procedures

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 8

Some Basic Concepts of HRM (contd.)

■ Talent Management vs Human Resource Management
The terms talent management and human resource management are often
used interchangeably. However, the former has been coined to emphasize
the more strategic role that HRM plays in today’s organizations.
■ Talent Management vs Performance Management
Performance management is a subset of the entire talent management
process which involves measuring employee’s performance and
providing feedback to improve the same.
Structure of the HR Department

■ Traditionally, a medium to large sized business will have a separate HR department with
its own chief
■ Within the department, there are likely to be units dealing with each key function such
as Talent Acquisition, Training and Development, Compensation and Benefits,
Employee Relations, etc.
■ However, many organizations today are redesigning HR departments to create more
strategic focus.

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Most Time-Consuming vs. Most
Important HR Activities

Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka

Structure of the HR Department (contd.)

■ HR business partnering is a process whereby HR professionals work closely with

business leaders and/or line managers to achieve shared organisational objectives.
■ The concept of HR business partnering, or strategic partnering, emerged during the mid-
late 1990s, around the time that US business academic Dave Ulrich set out his initial
theories for the optimum delivery of HR.
■ Subsequently, certain aspects of the Ulrich model have come to be depicted as a ‘three-
legged stool’ or ‘three-box’ model for HR, although there is an ongoing debate over
how his theories should be interpreted and put into practice

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Structure of the HR Department (contd.)

■ The ‘three-legged model’ of HR is based on three key elements - HR business partners, shared
HR services and HR centres of excellence.
■ HR business partners (or strategic partners) – HR professionals working closely with
business leaders or line managers, usually embedded in the business unit, influencing and
steering strategy and strategy implementation.
■ Centres of excellence – usually small teams of HR experts with specialist knowledge of leading-
edge HR solutions. The role of centres of excellence is to deliver competitive business
advantages in areas such as reward, learning, engagement and talent management.
■ Shared services – a single, often relatively large, unit that handles all the routine ‘transactional’
services across the business such as recruitment administration, payroll, absence monitoring and
advice on simpler employee relations issues. The aim of shared services is to provide low-cost,
effective HR administration.

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Structure of the HR Department (contd.)

Key drivers of such change include:

■ Rising expectations of HR. Organisations expect more from HR in terms of
contributing to strategy, enabling the execution of business plans, and delivering
tangible commercial benefits.
■ Accelerating competition. Organisations need HR functions that can deliver skilled,
creative, motivated, flexible and committed employees; hence the growth of centres of
excellence (for example, specialising in reward or learning and talent development).
■ Cost efficiency. The introduction of shared services is seen as particularly important to
achieving savings, although these cannot be realised without other roles operating
effectively.

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Trends Shaping HRM

■ The need to upskill, reskill and upskill – Jobs of the future are likely to be more
information-driven, more digital and more cross-functional.
■ Many careers today take lattice forms as opposed to ladder forms.
■ Hence, HR will need to create effective skilling and re-skilling strategies for workers.
■ HR should be assertive and take a leadership role when it comes to staffing
organizations with the right talent, training the existing talent pool and creating a
workplace culture that values responsiveness.

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Trends Shaping HRM

■ The need to create an Employee Value Proposition– Just like products have a unique
value proposition, companies need to have an employee value proposition to set
themselves apart from other employers.
■ The EVP should highlight to prospective employees what is unique about what the
organization offers its employees – it could be higher pay, more benefits, more growth
opportunities, or even, more flexible work arrangements.
■ HR has a critical role to play in crafting and communicating the EVP.

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Trends Shaping HRM (contd.)

■ Employee Experience - Employees are no longer only people whose data or

transactional requirements are to be managed by HR.
■ They are the most powerful advantage any organization has over its competitors. HR’s
must work towards improving an employee's overall experience, starting with
recruitment and through to an employee’s exit.
■ Today organizations are making growing use of exit interviews, organization climate
surveys, to make sure gaps in employee satisfaction are detected and closed.

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Trends Shaping HRM (contd.)

■ Technology and Data Analytics – Companies are increasingly using technology and
data analytics for talent acquisition purposes. Examples include applicant tracking
systems, AI based screening, use of chatbots.
■ Employee engagement is becoming key to retention and many employers are using data
analytics to better understand and respond to employee needs.
■ The challenge is to treat humans and technology as co-workers instead of replacements
for one another.

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Trends Shaping HRM (contd.)

■ Data has also made more evidence-based HR possible.

■ Some parameters for measuring HR effectiveness are:
– Time to fill vacancies, response rate in terms of providing advice and information, etc.
– Employee opinion surveys
– Attrition levels
– Absence rates
– Grievance handling
– Numerical measures such as ratio of HR costs to total costs, ratio of HR staff to total
number of employees, cost per HR employee (these can be benchmarked with other
organizations)

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Trends Shaping HRM (contd.)

■ Flexible work arrangements - Today’s workforce has a considerable number of new

mothers, older workers, younger employees who want work hours that give them time
for life outside work. There is a growing requirement to have flexible work
arrangements and many organizations are accepting this fact, because this can be a
game-changer from a retention perspective. With the onset of COVID-19, more and
more organizations are also having to consider hybrid arrangements.
■ The “alternative workforce”– The “alternative workforce” (also called the “contingent
workforce” or the “gig” economy) is composed of part-time, temporary and contractual
workers. Management of these contingent workers creates both opportunities and
challenges for HR.

Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka

 Thank you

Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka