Human resource management
1. HRM defined
“HRM is that part of organisational management which is
focussed on influencing people’s behaviour in an integrated
and pro-active way. The final purpose is to increase the
added value of the individual or groups of individuals taking
into account the strategy of the organisation.”
We cannot change people in an organisation, all we can do is change their behaviour ‘drill the skill’.
HR tries to take care of the interest of the group, because interests of the group are more important
than the interests of individuals.
People also need to add value: the added value of an individual is related to the strategy of the
company. A problem is that the strategy of the company can change, but the people don’t change…
Talent = commitment x competence x contribution
commitment and competence = input factors
contribution = added value
However, it might be that you are very committed and you have a lot of competences, but
nevertheless your contribution remains low. For example: people in banks are fired because there is
a rise in online banking which makes them unnecessary.
Positioning the HRM field
Organisational behaviour (OB): is about leadership, motivating people, stress management,
negotiating,… You try to understand what happens with an individual once you put them in
an organisation, which organisational behaviour do they show.
The organisational behaviour should be clear and should be shared.
This was not the case in Aldi, owned by two brothers. They didn’t show the same organisational behaviour and
it came to a clash, resulting in a split of Aldi in Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd. Their name is still the same but their way
of working is totally different.
OB is the actual goal of a company. And with ‘goal’ we mean “What is it that we would like to see?”.
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,Examples:
Nike with ‘just do it’: then it would be wrong of the managers to make his employees ask permission
for everything they want to do and constantly correct them. He has to let them ‘just do’ their jobs.
Avis ‘we try harder’: they know that they are the 2 nd largest company so their strategy is to outperform
the number one, simply because they can’t afford it not to be good.
Apple ‘think different’: apple thought in a different way and they’re different because they invented
the new norm. For example the white cables. Cables always used to be black, Apple changed that.
Human resource (HR): more normative, you set up systems to influence the behaviour that
people show when they are in a company. In OB they simply try to describe it, not influence
it.
“Tunebox” where you finetune the behaviour of people.
Organisational design (OD): trying to understand how we structure organisations.
“Structure follows strategy” and not the other way around. If you would like to change the
structure of an organisation then you first need to change the strategy and later the
structure will change. Because changing strategies isn’t that difficult, but changing structures
is!
Structure often changes in the form of a pendulum movement. We don’t like that because we just
want to go forward and a pendulum movement gives the feeling that we are always set back a bit.
FMCG (fast mover consuming goods): they can never work unless you organise them in a matrix!
If you would have only one producer and he would be the big boss, he would only make one soap
and call it ‘soap’. That is efficient. But the customer doesn’t want that, that wouldn’t satisfy his needs
as much so that is why you have to produce all the different marks and organize them in a matrix.
You have a marketeer for Dash, a marketeer for Dreft, a marketeer for Ariel. You have a manager who is
responsible for the brand Dreft, a manager who is responsible for Bonux.
Working in a matrix is almost impossible for an organization because it causes conflicts between the
departments of different brands, but for FMCG it’s the best structure!
Five basic pillars of HRM
We try to integrate structure and strategy of a company, taking into account the environment of a
business. With environment we mostly mean the labour market. When talking about the labour
market there is a difference between the internal and external labour market. The Internal labour
market means that people move inside the company instead of between companies.
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, PLANNING: what kind of people do we need for our company (qualitative), how many people
do we need (quantitative, numbers). What budget do we need? Etc.
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STAFFING: recruitment and selection go hand in hand. The quality of selection = the quality
of recruitment. The purpose of staffing is to get the right man on the right place. You need to
adapt SWFP.
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SWFP Strategic workforce planning
DEVELOPING: How to keep the right person on the right place? It’s two-folded:
o Training and development on the one hand (T&D)
o Everything that has to do with career management (CM) on the other hand
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NEGOTIATING: is all about industrial relationships (IR) = relationships with the unions.
Blue collars have a high unionization, but white collars are more for individual negotiation.
Nowadays, we have more and more white collars, but unions aren’t as effective there. In
Europe the union has a lot of power, in the US not so much.
COMPENSATING: this is a rather technical aspect. The guys who work here are looking for
“How can we set up compensation structures that align with the strategy of the company?”
It’s also about motivating your employees.
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The organisational behaviour means the goal of the company. The organisational culture can be
compared with an onion, it consists of many layers and can be rotten on the inside but still look good
at the outside.
From the outside towards the inside: SAHARAV:
• Symbols: the reflection of the values. Can be the building, the logo, the way people walk or
talk or dress or whatever…
• Age
• Heroes: people who had a huge impact on the success of the company, like the founders of
the company. Heroism is often the easiest way to pass through values.
• Anti-heroes: the people who had a huge negative impact on the company. Anti-hero is
always
something like “that never again”.
• Rituals: rituals and heroes are very difficult to change. This creates problems when there is
an M&A, when doing this we have to kill the heroes of B and kill the heroes of A and invent
new
heroes, the neutral heroes of the new company. But that is not so easy.
• Values: you say what you stand for. You try to link certain values to organizational behaviour.
E.g.: the expensive company cars that weren’t allowed to be dirty because the company wanted to link
their values by using chic expensive cars.
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,There is only one layer where you can make a choice as employee and that is the layer of the values,
the most inner layer. At the layer of the symbols on the outside you don’t have a say.
The human resource cycle MICHIGAN MODEL
Employees are resources, just like other business resources and they need to be managed in a similar
way that equipment and raw materials need to be managed. You select people, employees must be
obtained as cheaply as possible and developed and exploited as much as possible.
SELECTION: matching people to jobs
APPRAISAL: you do an appraisal of their performance
If it’s good you REWARD them
If it’s bad you invest in DEVELOPMENT, but you need
development anyway to make skilled individuals.
If the appraisals remain bad it means that you did a bad selection and you need to go back to the
selection processes to select new people.
Harvard analytical framework BEER MODEL
Beer expands the model with more context.
These people all have certain interests, based on that we have HR policies. Policies are not always
logical, but the situational factors explain them partly. Stakeholders are permanently influenced by
the situational factors.
The HR policies result in HR outcomes and this leads to long-term consequences.
HRM streams
How to hire people How to keep people How to get rid of
INPUT
OUTPUT
THROUGHPUT
people
- planning - appraisal
- recruitment - rewarding - retirement
- selection - training - firing policies
- introduction - developing - outplacement
- job description - rotating - early retirement
- socialization - motivating
- contracting - leadership
HRM trends
Job added value
Function processes
Simple tasks multi-dimensional tasks
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, Individual team
Professionalism co-makership
(pay for) performance (pay for) skills
Individual learning organisational learning: learning in group
Control empowerment
Homogenity heterogeneity
Funtional domains integration
Single-loop learning double-loop learning
Single-loop learning: search for the solution of a problem, the next day you treat a different problem.
Double-loop learning: reflect on how you solved a problem. Those solutions can be re-used later on.
Tacit knowledge, External knowledge
internalized knowledge (books and papers)
Tacit knowledge,
socialization externalization
Internalized knowledge
External knowledge
internalization combine
(books and papers)
HR implications of a changing environment and
dejobbed world
CHARLES HANDY: he tries to look at the world of work and understand what kind of things we are
confronted with today and of which things we should be careful. He says there are paradoxes that
cannot be solved but you can, however, manage them. It is necessary to manage them to keep an
equilibrium, keep it rather stable.
The paradox of intelligence
“Intelligence tends to go where intelligence is”
Geographical. The brain drain in the world is the biggest towards the US because the best universities
are there, though if you only let the 2% smartest people enter it’s not difficult to make very little
mistakes. Belgium (Europe) is different because we allow everyone to enter.
Employer branding: organizations try to brand themselves towards their employees. The biggest
companies have a bigger shot at recruiting the best employees because they can promise them more
money, and if you know that in that company are working very intelligent people you’ll want to work
there as well.
The paradox of work
“Some have work and money but too little time, while others
have all the time but no work and no money”
The rich will buy time with pre-cooked meals, pre-cut vegetables, order in. Or they will give up
bonuses to get some extra vacation. But there are also jobs were people have to work very hard and
still don’t earn enough, so they have to combine multiple jobs and work many hours.
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