Perhaps more than any other HR activity, health and safety offer HR manager an opportunity to be more proactive than reactive. Read: The Concept of Occupational Safety and Health There are a number of strategies that can be used by organizations to ensure a healthy and safe workplace and ensure compliance with legal requirements. Some are: Design Safe and healthy systems of work Exhibit Strong management commitment Inspect Workplace for health and safety problems Establish Procedures and controls for dealing with health and safety issues Develop Training programs Set up Health and safety committees Monitor Safety policies Draw up Action plan and checklist 1. Design safer systems of work: The most direct approach to ensuring a safe and healthy workplace is to design systems of work that are safe and without risk to health. This can often only be done satisfactorily at the design, planning or purchasing stage. It may Continue reading
HRM Concepts
Strategic Recruitment
Recruitment is a key HRM activity. Organizations to survive and grow need to attract candidates who are qualified to help them achieve their objectives. Effective recruitment does this by locating and attracting potential candidates to job openings within the organization. Such applicants form a pool from which candidates who most closely meet the job specifications can be offered employment. Recruitment begins with the identification of human resource requirements and ends with the receipt of an application. It immediately precedes the selection process and involves attracting qualified and interested candidates from either inside or outside the organization. It is a two way process. Information is given and received by the applicants and the organization. Recruitment is concerned with both meeting the organizations HR requirements and in helping potential candidates decide whether they meet the job requirements, are interested in the position and want to join the organization. Unfortunately, many Continue reading
Establishing a Grievance Procedure in Workplace
Every employee has certain expectations which he thinks must be fulfilled by the organization he is working for. When the organization fails to do this, he develops a feeling of discontent or dissatisfaction. When an employee feels that something is unfair in the organization, he is said to have a grievance. In the Industrial Relations language, Grievance is defined as anything which irritates or tends to make work conditions unsatisfactory and thereby harbors a discontent or dissatisfaction arising anything connected with the company that an employee thinks, believes or even feels, unfair, unjust. In this sense many of the controversial issues in Industrial Organizations may be said to arise as a result of incept or ill-advised handling or neglect of grievances which individually may appear trivial but collectively may become explosive. The following principles should be observed while laying down a grievance procedure in organizations: A grievance should be dealt Continue reading
Manpower Planning Process – Problems, Barriers and Solutions
The centrality of manpower in production process of corporate entities has long been acknowledged by organization managers and administrators. It is an on-going process (integrated approach), not a once and for all phenomenon. Its process involves interrelated activities and the plan must continue to be modified to meet prevailing circumstances. As a plan, it is embedded with implementation programmes designed to ensure availability of adequate qualified persons. Such implementation programmes include recruitment and selection (employment) of required skilled personnel to perform jobs that will allow the enterprise meet both the corporate and individual goals. The plan implementation programme also entails training and development of personnel and performance appraisal as well as other related personnel administration functions. The term ‘Manpower Planning’ at organizational or corporate level is also known as micro-human resources planning and it has much to do with personnel management or personnel administration. The terms “manpower, ‘human resource”, and Continue reading
Workplace Flexibility and Work-Life Balance
In the modern highly volatile business environment, organizations go through a tough time keeping up with the market forces due to the severity of the competition they face. This makes the customer search for the best quality and value for their money. Therefore organizations formulate strategies and these strategies are then transformed into quantitative objectives and are broken down to each employee in the organization in order that they can carry out their part in it. This creates pressure in the minds of the managers and their employees. The managers persuade the employees and get the tasks done one way or the other. This increasingly demanding workplace complexity is what causes work-life balance issues. In other words, employees find it rather difficult to balance the work with their own personal lives. Is Workplace Flexibility the ‘Solution’ to Work-Life Balance Problems? In the context of human resource management, workplace flexibility refers Continue reading
Reprimands in the Workplace
Reprimanding is a form of punishment which is can be used in decreasing problematic behaviors. It simply means to be scolded, yelled at, and bawled out or to be chastised verbally for exhibiting unwanted target behavior. Reprimands are useful when a person is engaging in mannerisms that call for immediate action because maybe it is harmful to others, self, or to property. Reprimands should be explicitly and selectively used in response to particular mannerisms or behaviors. They should also be inclusive of a statement of the required behavior which of course is the opposite of inappropriate behavior. For the reprimands to be effective the user must be specific. They should also come immediately, use a physical demeanor or a firm voice, back up the reprimand with some loss of privileges, and encourage the person to behave appropriately by stating the correct behaviors explicitly. In this article, we will focus on Continue reading