Updated May 30, 2023
Introduction to HR Management Strategy
Fundamentals of HR Management Strategy, Are human resource (HR) managers like Mila Kunis, the hottie headhunter in “Friends with Benefits”? Or are they more like Toby Flenderson, the depressing middle-aged executive in “The Office”?
In HR management, you are in charge of everything that makes human resources (the people employed in an organization) as productive as possible. It means ensuring that everything runs smoothly and that employees and employers are motivated and satisfied.
But what does that involve?
Fundamentals of HR Management Strategy
Below are some of the hr management skills given.
1. The non-negotiables
HR management strategy calls for assertiveness, emotional intelligence, and business savvy. The HR management strategy has to balance company goals and its bottom line with the well-being of the employees. It means that in HR management strategy, you have to deal with different types of people in an organization besides having a solid working knowledge of the business.
Whatever the organization’s size, the basics of HR management strategy remain common. Here are the roles in HR management strategy that has to be typically discharged.
2. Recruiting/hiring
For this role, the HR management personnel should have a solid understanding of the company. What are the goals? How are they evolving/changing? You also have to identify the contractor or employee who will guide the company where it needs to go.
This position requires explaining the working conditions and business policies to prospective employees. Thus, HR management personnel dealing with recruiting and staffing must know relevant labor and employment laws properly.
Possible tasks: Common tasks in this role is likely to include attending job fairs, creating hiring plans, reviewing resumes, conducting interviews, carrying out background checks, making job offers, contacting references, negotiating salaries, and similar things.
3. Instilling a talent mindset
The HR manager must believe that recruiting the right talent is essential. Even if no tools are available, you can still head the game. Before Microsoft Excel arrived, people still had successful business models. The only difference is that it can be done much faster nowadays. Go-getters, who are result-driven people, can reach the summit even with essential tools. Only passion needs to be in place.
Instill a mindset among your staff that everybody is a recruiter. Remember that hiring great talent is a strategic business objective and a core competency. Align the company in achieving its hiring strategy.
4. Training and employee development
This is a significant part of creating a successful business enterprise. Hiring an employee is just the beginning. You must ensure that they become an asset to the company. Training and employee development ensure that staff performance is always optimal.
Possible tasks: These include conducting surveys, interviewing the staff and HR management strategy, assessing the productivity of current employees and recruits, developing training programs, organizing extended education programs, and initiating mentorships. As usual, the tasks may vary between companies.
5. Organizational development
Organizational development means ensuring that the company, as a whole, is working together towards its goals. It entails working through the changes that take place in the company, identifying issues in various departments and scouring ways to resolve them, and assessing business methods to check whether they can be improved further.
Possible tasks: The typical work includes identifying and fixing organizational problems, holding team-building workshops, initiating projects and plans for measuring performance, aligning productivity with the organizational goals, assessing business processes, and improving them if necessary.
6. Salary and Benefits
An accounting background won’t hurt here. A department’s HR management professional must have a working knowledge of state and local laws to be familiar with what the staff is entitled to. Heather Clark, HR director of The Huntzinger Management Group Inc, says: “Payroll goes wrong? Take that right to the top of your list. Nothing will upset your employees more than an inconsistent and incorrect paycheck.”
HR managers must consider employee benefits, health and safety, and worker-management relations. Employee benefits are non-incentive compensations like free parking, health insurance, and similar things. They are often used for transferring non-tax compensation to the staff.
The three major benefit categories taken care of by HR managers include:
- Employee services like purchasing plans, legal services, and recreational activities.
- Holidays, vacations, and other allowed leaves.
- Retirement, insurance, and health benefits.
To successfully run a benefits program, HR managers must understand tax incentives, retirement plans, and the purchasing power of the more extensive base of employees.
Possible tasks: These involve creating benefits packages, maintaining a relationship with the insurance company, staying updated with company policies, explaining tax benefits to the staff, and taking care of allied benefit schemes like health insurance, provided funds, and similar things.
7. Resolving Disputes
It requires a thorough knowledge of both employer and employee laws. The goal is always to negotiate a compromise with minimal cost, i.e., expenses emerging from disruptions like strikes. It’s essential that the HR management personnel involved in this role can look into the future and suggest pre-emptive measures.
Resolving disputes requires a good amount of emotional intelligence. The best outcome, of course, is to give the warring sides what they want. But that’s only sometimes possible. You have to put yourself in the shoes of both sides, assess the situation, and offer a solution that will appease all quarters.
Katie Kerr, HR manager at Grid Alternatives, says: “Managing personalities is one of the hardest things about the job. I’ve found that the only way to be successful here is to be someone people feel they can trust.”
Possible tasks: Advising and counseling employees and the management to avoid conflicts and working with the quarreling sides to reach an agreement.
8. Knowing a company needs
As already said, the target of each company is different from one another. While Microsoft may be hunting for problem solvers, Home Depot will likely scour for customer-oriented entrepreneurial leaders. The point is that a company can never recruit the right staff until it decides what people it needs.
As an HR manager, don’t box yourself by diving deep into a candidate’s experience. Instead, try looking for predictive factors. How you respond to questions shows how you may treat your staff on the job. For instance, inside the Home Depot store, the idea will be to predict customer service traits and teach them. Retired executives could be ideal for the job because they will leave behind the belts, ladders, and tools and come to teach.
Defining clearly to your recruits the type of employee you are looking for will lead you to the correct staff. There are at least three fits that you can describe.
- Company fit: What kind of staff are you looking for? Problem solvers? Entrepreneurs? Customer service executives?
- Team fit: Does your recruit have the correct personality and quality?
- Role fit: Does the employee have the proper technical and leadership qualities?
9. The situation now
The role in HR management strategy and the practice’s fundamentals have significantly shifted ever since globalization became the buzzword. No wonder many multinational companies today prefer to call their HR management personnel “people managers” or “people enablers” and the practice “people management.” The HR manager in 21st-century organizations is no longer seen as a professional described in the traditional management books. Most companies have separate departments dealing with payroll, staffing, retention, and other broad HR management strategy matters. The HR manager, instead, is responsible for managing staff expectations vis-à-vis company objectives. Reconciling both is the challenge that an HR manager has to take up to ensure both employee fulfillment and attaining company objectives.
Globalization has also served to increase competition for both jobs and customers. It has led to several businesses demanding higher performance from their employees and, simultaneously, holding the line on compensation. Other things that have changed the nature of HR management in recent years include new operational theories like total quality management (TQM), fast-changing demographics, health insurance, and state and federal employment legislation changes.
Conclusion
In Fundamentals of HR Management Strategy you must know that while the fundamentals of HR management strategy have remained the same, there have been some cosmetic changes that one has to adapt. HR management strategy roles vary according to the industry and the demands of the company policy. HR managers usually have to work under tremendous pressure because they deal with one of the most delicate issues in the daily running of an organization: employer-worker relations.
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