Unit 1
Can you list and describe the main uses of an HRIS?
A carefully designed HRIS that is current and reliable can assist managers in many ways. The major uses of an HRIS include the following: • Human resource planning: to anticipate replacements and promotions • Diversity reports: to know how many employees of each sex and ethnic group are employed in each job category • Compensation reports: to obtain information regarding how much each employee is paid, the overall compensation costs, and the financial costs of pay increases and other compensation changes • Personnel research: to conduct research into such problems as turnover and absenteeism, or to discover the most productive places to look for new recruits • Training-needs assessment: to analyze the performances of individuals and to determine which employees need further training
Can you describe the purpose of an HRIS? (Human Resource Information System)
A carefully designed HRIS that is current and reliable can assist managers in many ways. The major uses of an HRIS include the following: • Human resource planning: to anticipate replacements and promotions. • Diversity reports: to know how many employees of each sex and ethnic group are employed in each job category. • Compensation reports: to obtain information regarding how much each employee is paid, the overall compensation costs, and the financial costs of pay increases and other compensation changes. • Personnel research: to conduct research into such problems as turnover and absenteeism, or to discover the most productive places to look for new recruits. • Training-needs assessment: to analyze the performances of individuals and to determine which employees need further training.
Grand Strategy: Differentiation
A differentiation strategy involves providing unique products and services in ways that are widely valued by buyers. This can be achieved by providing exceptionally high quality, extraordinary service, innovative designs, technological capability, or an unusually positive brand image. Whatever attribute the company chooses to establish its uniqueness must be significantly different from what is offered by rivals to justify its price premium.
Grand Strategy: Focus Strategy
A focus strategy aims at either a cost advantage or a differentiation advantage in a narrow market segment. Companies that use this strategy select a defined segment of an industry—such as a particular product, a specific kind of end-use buyer, a defined distribution channel, or a limited geographical location—and target its strategy to serve them to the exclusion of others. This strategy is also known as a niche strategy, since the firm seeks to compete primarily in a niche of the larger market. The goal is to exploit a narrow segment of a market by appealing specifically to it. The success of a focus strategy may depend on how narrow the segment is. If the segment is too large, the strategy may suffer because of a lack of focus and uniqueness. But an extremely small segment may limit a company's success until it expands to other segments.
Can you describe the purpose and process of an HR Audit?
A human resource audit evaluates the effectiveness of the human resource department. How do the policies and programs sponsored by the human resource department meet the needs of the employees and company? Most HR audits rely on the subjective judgments and candid feedback of line managers or the professional opinions of experts. Step 1: Define the responsibilities of the human resource department. Step 2: Develop the audit questionnaire and collect the data. Step 3: Analyze the data (statistical analysis) and benchmark the results. Step 4: Provide feedback and evaluation (review and interpretation of the results by the human resource department). Step 5: Develop an action plan.
Can you explain the role of a mission statement in an organization and describe how mission statements might be developed?
A mission statement explains the company's reason for existence. It describes what the company does and what its overall goal is. The mission statement's primary function is to communicate the organization's purpose and direction to its employees, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders. Internally, a mission statement also creates a sense of identity for employees. Written mission statements help to focus the energies of their members by answering questions: Why does our organization exist? What business are we in? What values will guide us? Organizational goals and objectives are usually derived from the mission statement, but they are more specific. While mission statements are not measurable, goals and objectives ought to be.
Can you explain competitive advantage and value chain?
Competitive advantage: Competitive advantage refers to the ability to transform inputs into goods and services at a maximum profit on a sustained basis, better than competitors. Value Chain: a strategic concept showing the relationships between companies. Each firm represents a link in a chain of value that receives inputs from suppliers, adds value to them, and passes them on buyers.
Can you list and explain the three grand strategies?
Cost leadership Differentiation Focus Strategy
Can you describe environmental scanning and the factors that are typically analyzed?
Environmental scanning: involves examining the economic and social forces influencing the organization, especially the long-term composition of the labor force and the future availability of employees. To meet their staffing requirements, organizations depend on the availability of talent. For HR managers, environmental scanning requires a careful examination of all relevant external factors. These factors can be summarized in what is known as a PEST analysis, which stands for political, economic, social, and technological. • Political factors: refer to the involvement of the government in the organization's environment. The government's influence on employment law, education, tax policy, trade restrictions, public health, infrastructure, and political stability all impact the organization's human resource functions. • Economic factors: include the unemployment rate, competition, economic growth, interest rates, and inflation. These factors affect the availability of labor and how businesses operate. • Social factors: include the size and composition of the population, immigration, attitudes about careers, work-life balance, and health and safety. Organizations may need to change HR strategies to adapt to various social factors. • Technological factors: include advances in technology, innovation, and automation. These factors influence the type of employees needed and the training that may be required.
Grand Strategy: Cost Leadership
Gaining a competitive advantage through cost leadership involves selling your products and services at a lower cost. This is usually achieved by technological innovations that improve the efficiency of operations or using low-cost labor that reduces the costs of production. Success with this strategy requires that the organization be the cost leader, not merely one of the contenders for that position. Furthermore, the products and services being offered must be perceived as comparable to or better than those offered by rivals.
Can you list and explain the methods of human resource accounting?
Human resource accounting refers to the process of identifying and measuring HR data and communicating this information along with financial data to interested parties, especially investors and managers. • Outlay cost: is also referred to as the historical acquisition of cost. This measure represents the value of "human capital" and includes all of the costs associated with recruiting, selecting, training and developing employees for a firm. It has been suggested that these costs should be capitalized and treated the same way as costs for capital equipment, which are depreciated over the expected useful life of the assets. • Replacement cost: Is an estimate of how much it would cost to replace a firm's existing human resources. Included in this estimate is the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, and developing capable replacements. The total replacement value includes not only the current replacement costs but also the opportunity costs of lost income that would be incurred while the replacements were developing the same level of proficiency as existing employees. • Human resource value: Represents the expected contribution to the firm's net income for individuals at each level in the firm. This value is estimated by calculating the net present value of each person based on the person's expected future services and probability of staying with the firm.
Can you explain the primary purposes of having established HR policies?
Human resource policies serve three major purposes: 1. to reassure employees that they will be treated fairly and objectively 2. to help managers make rapid and consistent decisions 3. to give managers the confidence to resolve problems and defend their decisions Human resource policies guide the actions of an organization toward the achievement of its objectives. Whereas an objective tends to specify what is to be done, a policy explains how it is to be done.
Can you explain the primary HR metrics?
Revenue Factor Revenue per Labor Costs Human Capital ROI Human Capital Value Added HR Expense Factor Absence Rate Turnover Rate Cost per Hire Turnover Costs per employee Time to fill Training Investment factor Time Fill Training Investment Factor Health Care Costs per Employee Employee Benefits as a percent of payroll HR to Employee Ratio
Can you list and describe the main roles of an HR manager?
Role 1: Management of the firm infrastructure Role 2: Management of employee contributions Role 3: Management of strategic HR Role 4: Management of Transformational Change
Can you define the term strategy and describe its role in an organization?
Strategy refers to the goals and set of policies designed to achieve competitive advantage in a particular marketplace. Organizations create generic strategies to help them succeed in a dynamic and competitive environment. These generic strategies share several important characteristics: • They promote the mission and goals the organization is striving to achieve. • They have a long-term focus that extends beyond the immediate time horizon. • They define the action plans the organization intends to follow to achieve its mission and goals. • They recognize explicitly the impact of the external environment, especially the reactions of competitors.
Can you define and explain the balance scorecard?
The balanced scorecard involves analyzing the performance of an organization from multiple perspectives. It recognizes that there are three important stakeholders for every company—the stockholders, the customers, and the employees. Therefore, the balanced scorecard involves analyzing the traditional human resource measures concurrently with performance metrics from other perspectives—financial results, customer satisfaction, and internal business processes.
Can you explain the process for selecting an HRIS?
The human resource department generally plays a key role in the selection and implementation of an HRIS. Selecting an HRIS may include the following steps: 1. Assemble a Committee: A project team or committee may be formed with stakeholders representing various areas of the organization. The team may include the following 2. Conduct a needs assessment: As with any project, the first step in implementing or replacing an HRIS is to assess the organization's needs. A careful analysis should identify • the problems the system would be expected to solve • the information people need to successfully perform their roles • the individuals who need access to the information • how the information will be collected 3. Define selection parameters: . At the conclusion of the needs assessment, the constraints upon which a decision will be made should be established. These parameters should include: • detailed functionality requirements based on the needs assessment • the budget for program implementation and maintenance • the technological resources required • the project timeline • guidelines for evaluating the options (criteria weighting) 4. Create a list of available HRIS products: . A wide variety of HRIS products are available. The selection team should compile a list of all viable options. The list may include the possibility of continuing to use the current system. 5. Evaluate options against criteria: One approach for doing this is to create a spreadsheet table that lists the program needs and desires in the left column, with additional columns for the HRIS options. Each HRIS is evaluated on each criterion and the result is recorded in the appropriate cell on the table. 6. Narrow down the options: Using the selection parameters previously defined, the committee compiles a list of the most promising systems. If an HRIS doesn't meet the organization's basic functionality needs or if it exceeds the budget, it should be eliminated from further consideration. 7. Request bids from vendors: After narrowing down the list, the vendors with the top systems are contacted and asked to make a bid for the project. This may be accomplished by developing and submitting a request for proposal (RFP) to each of the vendors. Sending an RFP is a formal, standardized method of requesting bids. I 8. Ask for a demonstration from the top vendors: After bids have been collected, the committee can identify the top several candidates and ask for a demonstration of their HRIS. The committee should provide the vendors with a prepared list of the required features it would like to see demonstrated. The committee members should have a standardized method, such as a checklist or scorecard, to evaluate what they like or dislike about each HRIS 9. Check references: Vendors should be asked to provide a list of current clients who are using the HRIS the organization is considering. Committee members contact these references to verify the functionality of the HRIS and the vendor's service claims. Where possible, committee members should visit the references on-site to see the HRIS in action and to ask questions. 10. Select a system: After observing demonstrations and checking references, the committee should be prepared to make a final decision. The systems are compared objectively using the previously-established selection parameters, with the focus on the most highly-weighted criteria.
Can you explain the use for virtual teams?
The primary advantage of global virtual teams is the company's ability to leverage competencies and skills from all parts of the world. These teams are seen as having the ability to solve very complex problems and create innovative solutions.
Can you describe the uses of employee portals?
These programs provide the following kinds of services for employees: • Personal information, such as skills and work history, can be stored in the company's human resource information systems (HRIS), and employees can access relevant information and update it periodically. • During the open enrollment period for employee benefits, employees can examine the information regarding their benefits options and make their own decisions. Effective portals provide personalized information to help employees evaluate the options and make informed decisions. • Employees can access their retirement and savings accounts and manage their investments. • Employees can participate in wellness and engagement surveys and receive targeted information regarding events and programs of interest to them. • Training courses can be provided through eLearning modules that track each employee's training history and mastery scores. • Employees can record their work hours on electronic timesheets. Employees can search for applicable HR policies and review the company's employee handbook.
Role 2: Management of employee contributions
This HR role requires HR leaders to represent and defend employees and respond to their needs. The purpose of this role is to increase employee commitment and competence. In performing this role, HR managers serve as employee champions. HR managers help employees by providing emotional support, encouraging employee participation, surveying employee attitudes, promoting a work/life balance, encouraging employee communication, resolving employee complaints, and providing employee feedback.
Role 1: Management of the firm infrastructure
This HR role requires HR managers to design and deliver efficient HR processes for staffing, training, appraising, rewarding, promoting, and managing the flow of employees through the organization. This traditional HR role requires HR managers to be administrative experts and has received the greatest attention in HR texts. In helping to manage the firm's day-to-day operations, human resource managers typically perform three roles: (1) the advisory or counseling role, (2) the service role, and (3) the control role.
Role 4: Management of Transformational Change
This HR role requires HR managers to help the organization respond to an ever-changing environment, which may involve smaller transitional changes, such as revising a company's evaluation and reward systems, or more substantial transformational changes, such as creating a customer-oriented culture. When human resource managers are called upon to supervise or guide an organizational development intervention, they are filling the role of change agent; because they are members of the organization, they are referred to as internal change agents. In performing this role, they can be highly effective because they have the advantage of being familiar with the organization and its members, and they can develop long-term relationships and feelings of trust needed for successful change.
Role 3: Management of strategic HR
This HR role requires HR managers to interact with other leaders in their organization in aligning HR functions with business strategies. HR managers serve as strategic partners with other corporate executives in executing strategy. The responsibilities of HR managers in strategy formulation and the management of strategic HR are explained later.
Can you explain how strategies are formulated?
This popular approach to strategy development is often called the SWOT method, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Decision makers should examine the organization's competitive advantages relative to its internal strengths and weaknesses, its external opportunities and threats, and potential competitor actions, then formulate and implement a strategy, and evaluate and monitor the results as shown in. The SWOT approach to strategy formulation assumes that decision makers carefully analyze an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as they decide its future. This approach is a very proactive way to develop a strategy, and it appears very clean and logical. there are 6 steps
Can you define and explain the benefits of outsourcing HR functions?
This strategy, called human resource outsourcing (HRO), can be a cost-effective method for companies to operate because (a) outside experts can use economies of scale to perform the HR functions more efficiently, (b) outside experts can use their expertise and a broader perspective to do the functions better, and (c) outside experts are better prepared to keep abreast of technological advances and new legal requirements. The HR functions that are the most likely candidates for outsourcing include: • payroll administration • benefits administration • record keeping and information systems • retirement counseling • outplacement and relocation • health and wellness programs • testing, including drug testing and psychological testing • training and development, called learning system outsourcing (LSO) • recruitment, called recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) Although outsourcing can relieve HR managers from routine administrative activities, it places a greater responsibility on them to manage what is outsourced and assess its effectiveness.
Can you list the 9 HR competencies from the HRCS Model and describe the skills and abilities associated with each?
Three core competencies: • Strategic positioners: HR professionals need to have knowledge of business context and strategy; they need to be able to apply that knowledge, and they must be able to point people in the right direction. • Credible activists: HR professionals must have relationships of trust and influence with key people within the organization, and they must be able to get people moving in the right direction. • Paradox navigator: HR professionals must be able to navigate the many paradoxical tensions in an organization, such as the tension between long-term and short-term focus, or between centralized and decentralized operations. Six enabling competencies: Three of these enablers focus on building a strategic organization: • Culture and change champion: HR professionals must be an agent for change and must tie change initiatives to culture change. • Human capital curator: HR professionals must be able to care for the talent of the organization by helping individuals and leaders grow, developing individual performance, and increasing technical talent. • Total reward steward: HR professionals must be able to manage financial and non-financial rewards. The other three enablers focus on tactical delivery: • Technology and media integrator: HR professionals must be able to use technology and social media to create and drive high-performing organizations. • Analytics designer and interpreter: HR professionals must be able to analyze and interpret data to improve decision-making. • Compliance manager: HR professionals must be able to ensure compliance by following laws and regulations.
Can you describe why an organizations structure, systems, culture, and processes must support its strategy?
To make organizations more effective, the mission and strategy must be aligned with four organizational characteristics: structure, systems, culture, and processes. Many strategies have failed because the organization's structure, control systems, and reward systems were not adequately designed to implement the strategies. Structure: Structure refers to the fixed relationships of the organization, such as how jobs are assigned to departments, who reports to whom, and how the jobs and the departments are arranged in an organizational chart. Systems: Systems refer to the patterned activities that keep an organization operating. These essential subsystem activities include procurement activities, production activities, disposal activities, human resource activities, adaptive activities, and managerial activities. Culture: Organizational culture refers to the system of shared values and beliefs that influence worker behavior. Each organization creates its own distinctive culture, much as individual people have distinctive personalities Processes: Organizational processes refer to the interactions among members of the organization. Some of the major organizational processes are the human resource functions of recruiting and staffing that place the right people in the right jobs at the right time.
Can you list and describe 8 important environmental sectors?
human resources sector: The primary advantage of global virtual teams is the company's ability to leverage competencies and skills from all parts of the world. These teams are seen as having the ability to solve very complex problems and create innovative solutions. raw material sector: Raw materials must be obtained from the external environment. These materials include everything from paper and students for a university, patients for a hospital, iron ore for a steel mill, and insecticide for a farm. The raw materials sector for the auto industry includes a large number of suppliers and parts and manufacturers. financial resources sector: Money is an essential input for most organizations and an especially crucial input for a new company. The financial resources sector includes places where needed money can be obtained, such as banks, savings and loan institutions, stock markets, and venture capitalists. consumer markets: The outputs produced by the organization must be consumed by customers who purchase the goods and services. This market sector includes the customers, clients, and potential users of the organization's products and services. For example, hospitals serve patients, schools serve students, supermarkets supply homemakers, airlines move travelers, and government agencies serve the public. technology sector: Technology is the use of available knowledge and techniques to produce goods and services. The technology sector includes scientific research centers, universities, and the research and development efforts of other organizations that contribute to new production techniques and the creation of new knowledge industry sector: An industry encompasses all the organizations in the same type of business, most of whom act as competitors to an organization. The size of the industry and the number of other competing firms create a unique industry sector for each organization. An industry dominated by one or two major corporations, such as heavy-equipment-manufacturing, is much different from an industry characterized by hundreds of small companies, such as the fast-food industry. economics sector: Organizations are not isolated from economic conditions. The success and effectiveness of an organization is influenced by the health of the overall economy and by such factors as whether the economy is expanding or contracting. Some of the most important aspects of this sector include economic growth, unemployment rates, recessions, inflation rates, and rate of investment. government sector: The government sector includes all the federal, state, and local laws, as well as the regulatory agencies that administer these laws and the judicial system that resolves disputes. This sector also includes the political system and political action committees and lobbyists who try to change the laws and obtain favorable legislative treatment. An important HR role is influencing proposed legislation that will impact the organization.
Can you explain what organizations can do to reduce uncertainty?
• Changing the organizational structure: As the environment becomes more complex, the organization needs more buffering departments and boundary spanners. • Planning and forecasting: Organizations can increase their capacity to respond to an unstable environment by forecasting environment changes and creating contingency plans. • Mergers and acquisitions: An effective method of controlling environmental resources is to buy a controlling interest in an upstream or downstream company that serves as supplier or consumer. • Cooptation: Cooptation is any strategy of bringing outside people into the organization and making them feel obligated to contribute because of their organizational involvement. • Public relations and advertising: Organizations spend enormous amounts of money to influence consumer tastes and public opinion. Advertising and public relations activities are designed to reduce uncertainty by providing a stable demand for the company's outputs or a constant level of inputs.
Can you describe what HR managers can do to influence legislation?
• The first step in influencing legislation is understanding the legislative process and the interactions of the three branches of government. Human resource activities are extensively restricted by legal considerations and HR managers need to understand the relationship between laws, agency regulations, and court decisions. • The second step in influencing legislation is to know what is happening in the legislative process. Answers to many of the questions relating to what is happening in the legislative process can be obtained from many sources, including newspapers, television news programs, and a variety of political action groups and legislative watch groups. • When protesting a law or agency regulation, two avenues HR managers can use to protest a law or overturn an agency regulation are to publicize their case before the public or to seek redress in the courts.
Can you list the topics that would typically be covered in an employee handbook?
• a statement of welcome and an explanation of the handbook's purpose • a brief history of the company and information about its products and services • a mission or vision statement • policy statements on such issues as equal employment opportunity, harassment, affirmative action, business ethics, a drug-free workplace, and the use of e-mail and the Internet • information about recruitment, promotion, termination, and rehire policies • compensation information, including employment classifications, work hours, overtime, and pay procedures • workplace conduct rules including procedures for addressing complaints and resolving disciplinary problems • information on paid time off, leaves of absence, holidays, and vacations • summary plan descriptions of benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans • a description of opportunities for training and professional development • emergency procedures and contact information • a brief explanation of procedures for arranging travel and receiving expense reimbursements • a disclaimer that the handbook is for information purposes only and is not a legal binding document, and a disclaimer that nothing in the handbook changes the at-will nature of the employment relationship
