[MBA] What does it mean to strategically manage employees? Identify and explain ...
What does it mean to strategically manage employees? Identify and explain the three primary HR activities. Which of the three primary HR activities is most challenging and why?
Employees Management is not the core activity of an organization but is not less important than other core functionalities. Without well organized and good staffing achieve of goal is either impossible or inefficient. Strategic HR management assignment of Right Person at Right Place and Right Time. Strategic HRM goes for settlement of weakness and challenges in performance. It includes proper staffing, regular monitoring/reporting, performance appraisal, punishment and reward, remuneration and incentives. Additionally strategic HRM will cope for growth and development opportunities for employees. So as a whole strategic employee management thinks for long term benefits for employee, their social status and for organization itself too.
The major HR Activities are:
Work Design and Workforce Planning
One of the major task in HR activities be Work design and workforce planning, that includes job design describing the individual employee's roles and their term of services. Work design makes the management guided towards a definite path that guides to proper staffing. The job are divided into tasks and tasks are assigned to individuals. Workforce planning is about the arrangement of manpower either by retaining employees or hiring new in case of insufficiency of existing numbers. Workforce planning tells how to supply the manpower demand of work design.
Managing Employee Competencies
Employees on the work are like troops on battle field. Likewise the troops should be well equipped with arms and necessary knowledge of using arms, the map of battle field, in the same way HR manager should make sure that the employees are competent for assigned tasks. The insurance can be done by training currently available employees or going for recruitment process. The employee addition includes recruitment, selection and training before implementing in real jobs.
Managing Employee Attitudes and Behaviors
Managing attitude and behavior means the attainment of mechanism to motivate, reward and punish the employees respective to their performance. If the employee are lagging on organization need and expectations then empowerment, refreshment and development programs should be conducted. Regular monitoring, recommendation, performance appraisal, recognition of their ability and letting them know management is concerning their labor will help employees feel good toward the organization on long run.
Among those three HR activities Managing Employee Attitude and Behavior is most challenging. Other two activities are objective phenomena in which we can distinguish what is right/wrong and they have concrete value but when it comes to subjective phenomena of attitude and behavior it is hard to perform. Because the recognition of problem occurrence, need of correction or need of appraisal is depending upon mentality of manager. When an employee is performing not as expected then it's hard to measure up to what extent he is lagging and how much motivation do he need. Moreover in current world people behave vast different than what they think of. Then a fire will be burning inside without visible smoke. So manager should be able to care and cure the situation wisely.