Employability and Entrepreneurship Essay

Human resources management (HRM) is sometimes referred as some subsidiary business function, and some business agents tend to play good enough without the appropriate department. However, the bigger the company, the bigger is the need for human resources management. It goes without saying that employees, each one with his or her own goals and needs, turn out to be much more difficult object of work, and it is not rational to compare them with other business resources like transport or raw materials. To be a good human resources manager, one needs to have good knowledge of a number of disciplines, including psychology (with conflict psychology in particular) and sociology, industrial relations and economics, marketing and management, and always keep a hand on the pulse of time to be able to understand and properly interpret new critical theories and all the innovations in the field. Computer literacy stands to reason.
There are a number of roles an HR manager usually plays. Traditionally, these are employment (attraction, selection and recruitment), then induction into the process, orientation, organizational socialization (onboarding) and further interaction with the employees in order to coordinate their work with the strategic goals of the company (Legge, 2004, 88). A personnel manager is involved in proving the employees with skill management, training and development, compensation (payroll, wage or salary) and performance appraisal like benefits etc. About twenty – thirty years ago the role of personnel manager was usually associated with some paper work around recruiting employees and rewarding system control. “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,” as it is announced in Beardwell’s and Claydon’s research (Beardwell and Claydon, 2010, p. 30). Today HRs are also expected to create and sustain the conditions of sound competition and competitive advantage in comparison with other employers. This interaction continues up to dismissal of an employee, and to a certain extent, the HR department is responsible for all the employees, expressing their will to the top management, and in the meantime, on a large scale act as the representatives of power, speaking on the behalf of supervisors. It means that HR department is both accountable for the work of the staff to the authorities and organizing feedback from the top to the personnel, and vice versa.
At the same time, the responsibilities of the personnel managers today may vary and be rather more expanded. First of all, an HR manager should have excellent psychological knowledge and be able to communicate with different people. It is certainly important to be able to evaluate the professional experience and potential of the applicant searching for a job, but it is also important to foresee how he will act in a team, what operating conditions suit him better, what problems can be blocked and what outcomes can be expected. In short words, the chosen employee must fully fit the position. “An HRM approach seeks to ensure a fit between the management of an organisation’s employees, and the overall strategic direction of the company,” Lepak and Snell (1998, p. 216) point out. Further on, it is significant to keep everyone together to make them feel they are one big organism working for one great goal. It is rather difficult, therefore an HR is required not only delicacy and responsiveness in meeting the needs of the staff, but also firmness and tenacity of purpose and ability to fill other people with energy and courage, in other words to care about their motives and stimuli. In conditions of austerity plan it is rather important to have some extra trump in hands except financial stimulation. All these tasks often fall on the shoulders of human resources department.
Still, such department is not always included into the structure of organizations. Some small businesses cannot afford to have such a cell, and then they are free to apply to special HR associations which assist the companies in recruiting and training. This business is rather profitable today, as more and more people understand the importance of competent approach to human resources management.
However, today the name of HR is widely argued and criticized as obsolete and outdated. It is underlined that manpower is not simply an abstract object of work for these specialists. If to take into consideration the points listed above, it would seem rational that in many companies the relating functions are renamed into organizational management departments, for instance. At the same time there are a lot of shifts in theoretical approach to the function of HR. For the last two decades there has been much research conducted to detect the link between the practice of human resources management and organizational performance. This field of knowledge received the name of strategic human resources management, intended to use empirical data to work out the methods and tactics for improving productivity, efficiency and quality of staff operation. Paauwe (2009, p. 169) demonstrates the division of HRM strategy into such stages as Best Practice (high commitment HRM), Best Fit (contingency approach) and the Resources Based View. “An HRM strategy thus is an overall plan, concerning the implementation of specific HRM functional areas,” Nadler (2006, p. 199) sums up. Traditional approach is gradually pushed to the sidebars, and innovative workplace understanding is coming instead.
On the one hand, the innovations are tightly connected with technological progress, development and upgrade of software and hardware. For example, HR departments are actively applying such network-based structures as Virtual HRM. These structures are build on partnerships and based on information technologies that provide intellectual capital acquisition, development and deployment (Lepak and Snell, 1998, 231). Hence, the role of a former human resources manager is turning into a function of information manager who is responsible for transmission of information from one department to another, from the staff to the top management, i.e. both horizontally and vertically. For this function, special databases are created and thus the manager is to master the computer equipment to operate it properly. The danger is that here the HR department may be reduced, and the tasks connected with database processing are often distributed to the information technologies department. This function is now known as the Chief Information Officer, and information management is becoming a core competency of business.
It is reasonable to underline that information management includes not only the transmission of information inside the organization, but also communicating externally. Information becomes one of the most called-for resources, and the agents of information market are those at the hub of activity. Virtually, new knowledge and skills are required here, as information strategies are also not easy to work out. Information can either promote the company or sink the ship, and the outcome depends on how data are operated.
Unfortunately, in business personnel managers face the same problem as many other specialists throughout different spheres and throughout the world, they are substituted by machines. Consequently, to stay competitive personnel manages have to unite their conventional responsibilities with some new the modern market of workforce is able to offer.
If to be more specific, there is, for instance, an effective tool known as E-HRM used to support and network HR activities between those who share that responsibility. Local networks (intranet) and other web-technology channels are used to execute the typical functions of HRs without specialists, but by managers and employees themselves. It is considered that E-HRM helps the HR department to reduce their involvement in operational functions, thus increasing time for strategic elements. It means that when used rationally, the software does not really threaten the HRs with the loss of work, but it helps them to light the administrative burden and to pay more attention to other tasks. Like in any other system, there are several elements in E-HRM. First, operational E-HRM is used in administrative tasks such as payroll statistics and gathering personal data about employees. Second, relational E-HRM is applied for recruitment, trainings, performance management and other supporting business processes. Third, transformational E-HRM is meant for strategic activities like knowledge management, time management and strategic re-orientation (Strohmeier, 2007, 21). HR goals may be achieved by different combinations of services provided by the software. The choice depends on the reckoning of the company. On the whole, specialists see a lot of benefits in skillful application of E-HRM. Potentially, this is a strong tool to improve the effectiveness of HR department both for the employees and managers. It enables the HR specialists to be useful strategic partners in heating the goals of their organization.
On the other hand, after world financial crisis many companies had to revise their structures and responsibilities distribution. In particular, the human resources managers achieved a crucial role in calculating and reducing the risks within organizations. Modern scheme required the human resources specialist to be a) strategic business partner, b) change agent, c) employee champion and d) administration expert (Beardwell and Claydon, 2010, p. 199). Time management and travel management are among relationally young functions. For effective use of time much monitoring and analysis is needed. “A time management system is a designed combination of processes, tools, techniques, and methods. Usually time management is a necessity in any project development as it determines the project completion time and scope,” Nadler (2006, p. 301) determines. Travelling is traditionally managed by accounting department, but today it is more and more often seen as the competence of HR.
All in all, today human resources management, like any other business functions, experiences a lot of changes and shifts in its crucial roles, employment and execution. These changes are resulting from a number of economical, social, technological and educational reasons. Some of them are threatening the human resources specialists with loosing jobs and reduction in their functionality, others are quiet reasonable to advance the effectiveness of their activities in a good course of employees and managers.