HRM SUMMARY
WEEK 1
The current trends in HRM:
- Work from home and individualization: the challenge is keeping the workforce
engaged while being detached from a physical work location.
- Upskilling and reskilling:
o In recruitment: if you are looking or people with skills that are rare, you can
widen your search by including adjacent (nabije) skills in your search.
o Career development: you can give people suggestions which skills they can
develop with the greatest chance of success.
o Redeploying people: some skills might obsolete (verouderen), but maybe
adjacent skills that can easily be developed are still in demand.
- Focus on well-being: the pandemic highlighted the paradox of work-life balance.
Working from home blurs boundaries even further.
- The great resignation: describes a mass, voluntary exodus (uittocht) from the
workforce.
o Because stress and burnout at the end of the pandemic causes people to rethink
their priorities and how they want their life to look.
o Dissatisfaction, and even fear, caused by cost-cutting actions (firing, lower
salary) by their current employer due to covid, makes employees reconsider
who they want to work for.
Evidence based practices: taking a scientific approach to come as close as possible to an
unbiased decision regarding HRM decisions.
- Consider different scientific sources to base a decision on.
- Ask yourself:
o Has there been research on this topic?
o Have I seen this work somewhere else?
o Has it worked well at a company that is similar to mine?
With objective data we can make the best-informed decisions possible and find out what the
best practices really are.
How do we base our decisions on evidence?
- Ask (formulate question).
- Acquire (search evidence).
- Appraise (critical evaluation).
- Aggregate (integrate and weigh sources).
- Apply (incorporate into decision-making process).
- Assess (monitor outcome).
o Is the decision the right one? Is there a better way I could have done this?
All elements of HRM are aimed at gaining the best talents and keeping those talents within
the company.
- All the functions work together to improve the company and to keep a steady level of
satisfaction, motivation, and engagement in the employee so they can perform and do
their jobs well.
,In order to do this, organizations need to have a good understanding of what employees today
are looking in order to apply (to be interested at working at the company), and what it takes to
keep these employees.
- Mistakes could be very costly. Therefore, a lot of time is invested in this process.
HR functions:
- Attracting and retaining employees.
- Adapt quickly to changing environment.
- Identify and promote talent from within.
o Make sure they get the training and the mentoring that they need or want.
- Motivate employees.
- Continuous learning and development.
HR responsibilities:
- Labor law compliance.
- Keeping records of employees and their careers.
- Testing employee’s knowledge, skills and abilities.
- Compensation and benefits
- Analysis and design of work.
- Recruitment and selection.
- Training and development.
- Performance management
- Employee relations/labor relations.
- Personal policies.
- Support for business strategy.
HR digital transformation: the process of changing operational HR processes to become
automated and data driven.
- HR teams making up the dual challenge of transforming HR operations on the one
hand and transforming the work force and the way work is done on the other hand.
o It is a morphoses that evolves organizations as a whole.
There are 6 stages of digital transformation.
1. Business as usual
2. Present and actives: various experiments throughout the organization to drive digital
literacy and creativity.
3. Formalized: this is where the business relevance comes in. if an experiment is not
relevant for the business, leadership should not support it.
4. Strategic: individuals begin to realize the power of collaboration. Their shared efforts
and new strategic roadmaps.
5. Converged: a dedicated digital transformation team is formed to guide the company
strategy and operations
6. Innovative and adaptive; digital transformation has become the new ‘business as
usual’ and a new ecosystem is established.
A successful digital transformation:
- Has to take place with a clear objective in mind (it has to make business sense).
- You have to make sure that all stakeholders are on board.
- Don’t overcomplicate things: start simple (gain ideas from your surrounding).
, - Prioritize ideas: start with the ideas that are high impact and low effort.
- Critically assess what works and what doesn’t.
- (Company) culture is important: essential for a successful transformation.
Shared services model: centralization of HR functions and major routines that includes
centers of expertise or excellence, service centers and business partners.
- Centers of expertise/excellence: HR specialists are all offering services company wide
to executives in business units (andere afdelingen) on request.
- Service centers: central unit for HR-related administrative and transactional tasks, that
employees, retirees, and business-unit managers can access online.
- Business partners: HR staff members who work directly with business unit managers
on strategic issues (create succession plans and compensation programs).
This way HR comes a COE (center of excellence) within the organization.
How can HR tailor services and solutions to individual employees?
- Through a database that HR has built, HR employees can learn about certain
problematic cases occurring in e.g. different business units and enact through
providing services to eliminate this problem.
How is the system of centralized service lines changing the role of HR?
- Normally there would be HR employees available at all different locations. Through
the centralized approach, all the problems/issues/questions come to the strategic center
and from there the center can send a SWAT team out to locations in need.
o So, the way in which HR operates and in terms of delivery service changed.
- The role of HR has become the COE to inform business strategies (information,
analytics, strategic partner).
What new competencies do you see in HR that you are hiring for right now?
- The ability to move away from the transactional/operational part of HR, which makes
the strategic form of HR much clearer.
- The enhanced ability and emphasis regarding training and teaching.
Organizational culture: complex set of values, beliefs, assumptions, and symbols that define
the way in which a firm conducts its business.
- Helps define relevant stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, and competitors)
and how to interact with them.
Organizational culture could be the key success factor in implementing any strategy:
- ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ – if you don’t have the right culture, mission, and
people, it doesn’t matter how great your strategies are, you are not going to be able to
implement them effectively.
Behaviors and actions of organizations, often reflect the organizational culture and the values
and belief systems that support it.
Culture:
- Culture is made up of values (What guides us when making decisions).
- Culture is made up of beliefs about how we interact with each other.
- Culture helps identify the people who are important to us.
, If you are wondering what a company values, look at their mission statement, social media,
behavior.
Two parts of values;
- Espoused values: the values that are communicated explicitly.
- Enacted values: What are people actually doing.
If there is a line-up regarding what the company says it values and what they actually do then
it is a lot easier to actually implement the strategy, because both components are moving in
the same direction.
WEEK 2
HR management is all about the people, motivating, training, and keeping the right people in
the right place.
This often requires careful planning and execution. Especially when it comes to getting the
right talented people to the organizations in the first place. In order to do this, there are three
steps:
- Workforce / HR planning: helps HR professionals to identify current work issues,
forecasting future needs and implement a plan in order to ensure that those needs are
met.
o Process of making sure that individuals with the rights skills are where they
need to be at the right time to meet an organizations current and future staffing
needs.
- Recruitment: when the workforce is identified recruitment starts. Refers to the
activity’s companies engage in, in order to identify potential employees and also
communicate the characteristics and requirements of the job.
o Convince potential hires to apply and bring them into the applicant pool.
- Selection: when the applicants pool is recruited, you need to decide which applicants
you want to keep there for further consideration and ultimately want to hire.
o More challenging, because selecting the wrong people can be a costly mistake
(resources, time, cohesion in teams is affected).
o Most importantly is that selected workers are performing the job effectively
and efficiently
o Best case scenario: organizations have a systematic process in place that helps
to guard individual biases and ultimately leads to a more systematic unbiased
decision.
KSA: knowledge skills and abilities.
Recap last week:
- HRM practices help companies to gain a competitive advantage.
- The HR function is going through a transformation process to create a function that
can play this new strategic role while fulfilling its other roles.
- Competitive challenges have implications for HR function.
Societal trends affect employers through:
- Consumer markets: which affect the demands for goods and services.
