۱۷-۱- Terminology

۱۷-۲- HR Strategy

۱۷-۳- The Bottom Line

References

TERMINOLOGY

A well-run organisation will recognise people practices as the heart of its operation. People practices, or human resources, can be divided into these categories: Recruiting: attracting candidates whose qualifications match what you need, and, perhaps more importantly, have a ‘culture add’; Retention and engagement: having the correct programs in place to keep employees happy, engaged and productive; Training and development: ensuring your employees are trained to do their current job safely and well, and are developed to be able to move into future roles and/or to meet the challenges of their current job as it changes over time; Total rewards/compensation: having a sustainable and defensible total rewards mix in place that meets your company’s and employees’ needs; Wellness: a system whereby employees are safe and well at work, and miss minimal amounts of work due to conflicts between work and home; Employee relations: this refers to a company’s efforts to manage relationships between employers and employees. An organisation with a good employee relations programme provides fair and consistent treatment to all employees so they will be committed to their jobs and loyal to the company; Culture: corporate culture refers to the beliefs and behaviours that determine how a company’s employees and management interact and handle outside business transactions. Often, corporate culture is implied, not expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the cumulative traits of the people the company hires; Information technology (IT): the growing importance of using IT in leveraging human resource (HR) functions is now realised. The e-HRM revolution relies on cutting-edge IT, ranging from Internet-enabled human resources information systems (HRIS) to corporate intranets and portals.

HR STRATEGY

Before getting into the various elements of HR management, strategy and planning must be discussed. Just as any enterprise should have a financial strategy, corporate strategy, business strategy and operational strategy, it should have an HR strategy as well. The success of an enterprise without an appropriately formulated and skilfully implemented HR management strategy is at risk (Belcourt and McBey, 2010). The HR strategy should complement and reinforce the overall corporate strategy: enable it, in other words. Human resources management (HRM) includes the following elements: specific HR practices (e.g., compensation, recruiting), HR policies, which direct the practices, and at the highest level, overall HR philosophies, which inform the policies and practices (Belcourt and McBey, 2010). HR programs must ‘fit’ the organisation both internally (in relation to other HR programs) and externally (to organisational strategy) (Belcourt and McBey, 2010). The following enablers (see Fig. 17.1) all inform and enable a company in its HR programs.