Functions And Importance Of Human Resource Department In An Organization

What is Human Resource Management?

Question:

What is Human Resource Development ? How can Human Resource Manager ensure that Employee Development is beneficial to the Organisation.

The research essay is presented with the aim of bringing about general aware ness of functions and importance of Human Resource Department in an organization. Out of all important functions in the organization, human resources department is crucial to efficient functioning of the business. While HRD is mostly attributed to employee recruitments, selection and handling employee exits. It is in fact involvement at all levels to various other functions. The essay shall portray different functions of human resources department, its importance as well as describe its influence on employee development function in the organization. It shall cover ways in which human resource managers impact the employee development in the business environment with examples

Human Resource Department is the body of human resource professionals who follow human resource management in the organization. Human resource management is a tactical and intelligible approach to managing the organization’s most valued resource – its employees. The organization cannot accomplish its business objectives without combined support from HRD. HRD has long been attributed to just the function of ‘personnel management’ i.e. managing people in the company. As of today, with increasing complexity of business environment, policies, market paradigms etc., this image has rapidly evolved into a much larger field. Human resource department is an active professional activity involved with attending the theoretical and practical practices of dealing with organizational workforce.

A human resource management includes various functions of any organization. One of the most vital one is to understand the staffing requirement, choose to hire or choose to work with contractors, recruitments, provide proper training, ensuring employee satisfaction, employee efficiency, set performance parameters and responsibility metrics, ensuring that the practices abide by law, manage the employee benefits and compensation, handle employee records, create and apply employee policies.

So, in short, human resource development is the set of activities carried out in an organizational setup, designed by the organization itself. It provides its members or employees opportunities to learn key skills and perform efficiently for their current and future assignments. HRD process involves developmental activities to bring about expertise in an employee through organizational development, training and development etc. It extends across human resource management , quality improvement as well as occupational progress (.

Training and Development – these are set of activities conducted by the human resource professional to improve the skill level, knowledge and attitude of employees in organization. Training entails providing employees with necessary knowledge and skill development opportunities, focusing simultaneously on making the employee ready for future job responsibilities that could come on him by improving his capabilities. Example – when an employee joins the organization, an orientation programme is held which familiarizes the new entrant to the organizational environment and warms him up in terms of setting their expectations right on what is required of them. Once they become proficient in their job roles, with further development programmes prepare them by advancing their skills and make them ready for next level (Lahap et al., 2015)

Functions of Human Resource Department

Organizational Development – It is an important procedure of increasing the efficacy of the company alongside the welfare of its employees. This is done with assistance of planned interventions combined with science of behavioural science. Member participation packages needing necessary alterations in work anticipation, reportage, techniques and incentive methods are directed at cultivating an effective organization. The HRD professionals act as catalysts in this process. They advise the line manager through consultations, various strategies that could be employed to bring about the change, when necessary they also involve themselves directly. Example – when a new incentive policy is introduced in the organization, HRD team works closely with managers to smooth out teething issues

Occupational progress – An employee joining an organization carries ambitions to progress in his career and the HRD professionals are supposed to help them achieve this goal. Example – Leadership workshops carried out by HR team to prepare the next level managers in the organization

It is important for human resource managers to ensure that the employee development activities are beneficial for the organization. Some of the reasons of employee development could be:

• Performance appraisals point out that there is a gap between required and achieved level of performance
• As part of the total professional development program
• To benchmark the development position at every level of a performance improvement program (Almeida, 2014)
• Succession planning which would prepare the employee for the next level
• To test a new system
• Specific requirements of training

Employee development programmes could be around:

1. Communication improvement skills
2. Customer service skills
3. Quality initiatives
4. Safety training
5. Ethics awareness program
6. Respecting diversity
7. Policies and regulations
8. Improvement of human relations at workplace

Ensuring that these are beneficial are vital as they help achieve:

1. Increased job satisfaction
2. Improvement in employee morale
3. Enhance motivation in employees (Gagne and Howard, 2016)
4. Improvement in efficiency standards eventually leading to financial gains for the business (Nda and Fard, 2013)
5. Improved capacity in adapting to changing technologies or processes (Jehanzeb and Bashir, 2013)
6. Influence innovation in building products, tactical plans etc.
7. Reduced employee attritions (Reio Jr., 2013)
8. Positive brand image
9. Enhanced capability in risk management such as sexual harassment, diversity disputes etc.

In absence of efforts to ensure that the employee development has achieved the goals mapped out could be quite harmful for the organization. Employees could feel demotivated, feel stagnated in their current job role, look out for jobs, may exhibit deteriorated morale and attitude to their tasks, enter conflicts frequently and create a negative atmosphere. It would also be difficult to plan for future as there would not be people with right skills to take new challenges (Cummings and Worley, 2014). Bringing in new talent all the time involves revenue and is time consuming as they would need time to settle down in their profile and start giving results (Lewis and Donaldson-Feilder, 2014).

A popular model that is followed by human resource development team is the Kirkpatrick’s staff development model. Developed in 1950s, it still finds its way to today’s modern organizational culture when it comes to employee development initiatives.

                                                     source - https://www.slideshare.net/BizLib/measuring-effectiveness-and-impact-092514h

The model is rampantly used to measure effectiveness of employee training, objectively. As per the figure, there are four levels namely, reaction, learning, behavior and results (Mellor et al., 2017). In the first level, it is important to observe and record the reaction to the development program by trainees. Then it is important to measure the learning by the trainees. This could be done by matching the learning objectives to the achievements. By observing and recording how the trainees applied the knowledge practically are pointers to the behavioral learning. It is important to note that, in absence of seeing application of knowledge necessarily does not point out that the trainee didn’t learn the concept, it could also be owing to other reasons that the trainee is not able to apply the knowledge practically, reasons need to be sought for this. The final level is the result – if the outcomes sought for setting up the development programme were finally achieved and how it helped the organization (Moldovan, 2016).

Conclusion

The essay was presented to find out what human resource development is and how the human resource managers ensure that the employee development measures undertaken are beneficial to the organization. The essay has briefly outlines what human resource management is and what are the functions of human resource development – what are its chief functions. In order to find out if the employee development program is beneficial it has presented the expected outcomes of a good program set up by the professionals in HRD. The essay also sheds light on one of the popular models – the Kirkpatrick’s model of staff development which is an effective way to find out the efficacy of the employee development programme of any nature.

References

Books

Cummings, T.G. and Worley, C.G., 2014. Organization development and change. Cengage learning.

Journals

Mellor, P., Gregoric, C., Atkinson, L.M. and Greenhill, J.A., 2017. A Critical Review of Transition-to-Professional-Practice Programs: Applying a Standard Model of Evaluation. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 8(2), pp.23-30.

Moldovan, L., 2016. Training outcome evaluation model. Procedia Technology, 22, pp.1184-1190.

Jehanzeb, K. and Bashir, N.A., 2013. Training and development program and its benefits to employee and organization: A conceptual study. European Journal of business and management, 5(2).

Reio Jr, T.G., 2013. Human Resource Development and Employee Engagement: Examining the Connection between Employee Turnover Intentions Brad Shuck and Devon Twyford University of Louisville Angie Shuck, MS.

Lewis, R. and Donaldson-Feilder, E., 2014. Managing for Sustainable Employee Development. WINNING IDEAS., p.25.

Nda, M.M. and Fard, R.Y., 2013. The impact of employee training and development on employee productivity. Global Journal of Commerce and Management Perspective, 2(6), pp.91-93.

Lahap, J., Ibrahim, S.Z., Said, N.M., Azmi, A. and Syuhirdy, M.N., 2015. Training and Development Program as a Source of Improving Employee Job Performance.

Gagné, M. and Howard, J., 2016. 5. A motivational model of employee attachment to an organization. Handbook of Employee Commitment, p.59.

Almeida, R.L.D., 2014. How training evaluation can be used to potentiate employee development in an organization (Doctoral dissertation, NSBE-UNL).