Human Resources

Human resource management (HRM) is the strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organization's most valued assets and 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 resource" (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.

The Human Resources Management (HRM) function includes a variety of activities, and key among them is deciding the staffing needs of an organization 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 have to carry out these activities themselves because they can't 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.

The HRM function and HRD profession have undergone major changes over the past 20 until 30 years. Before this, 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.

An HRM strategy pertains to the means as to how to implement the specific functions of Human Resource Management. An organization's HR function may possess recruitment and selection policies, disciplinary procedures, reward/recognition policies, a Human Resource 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.

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. There are 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 or 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.