Define HRM. Discuss the importance and scope of HRM citing suitable examples.

Define HRM. Discuss the importance and scope of HRM citing suitable examples. List the functions of HRM in your organisation or an organisation you are familiar with. Briefly describe the organisation you are referring to.


Answer. Human Resource Management is the planning, organizing, directing and controlling the operative functions of procurement, development, compensation and maintenance of human resource of an organization’s goals or objectives.

It is responsible for getting the best people, training them and providing mechanism to ensure that these employees maintain their productive affiliations with the organizations.

Scope/Areas of HRM/Goals of HRM:
HRM is concerned with the ‘people’ dimensions of the organizations. The organizational objectives can be best attained by acquiring human resource, develop their skills, motivate them for high performance and ensure that they continue to maintain their commitment and loyalty towards the organization. The following figure shows the scope of HRM.


The activities that come under the purview of HRM are:
(i) Human Resource Planning: This element involves determining the organizations human resource needs, strategies and philosophies; It involves analysis of the internal and external factors like skills needed, number of vacancies, trends in the labour market etc.
(ii) Recruitment and Selection: Recruitment is concerned with developing a pool of candidates in line with the human resources plan. Selection is the process of matching people and their career needs and capabilities with the jobs and career paths. It ends with the ultimate hiring of a candidate.
(iii) Training and Development: This involves identification of individual potentialities and helping in the development of key competencies through planned learning process. The competencies are to be developed to enable individuals to perform current as well as future jobs.
(iv) Organizational Development: This element assures healthy inter and intra-unit relationships. It helps work groups in initiating and managing change.
(v) Career Development: It is assuring an alignment of the management. It is a process of achieving an optional match of individual and organizational needs.
(vi) Job design: This element defines the tasks, authority and systems of a job. It also ensures integration of individual jobs across the unit.
(vii) Performance Management Systems: The performance management systems ensure linkages between individual and organizational goals. It aims at ensuring that every individual’s efforts and actions support the goals of the organization.
(viii) Compensation and Benefits: This element focuses on a fair, consistent and equitable compensation and benefits to the work force.

(ix) Employee Assistance: The focus of this element is to provide problem solving/ counseling to individual employees. The purpose is to help employees in overcoming personal and job-related problems.
(x) Labour Relations: This variable assures healthy union-organization relationship: It aims at creating am environment of industrial peace and harmony.
(xi) HR Research and Information Systems and Audit: This element ensures a reliable and proof HR information base. It is not only evaluates personnel policies and programmes but also highlights the need and areas of change.

Role/ Functions of HRM: HRM aims at bringing together expertise and skills in a scientific way. It helps in creating attitudes that motivate a group to achieve the organizational goals effectively and economically.

• The Inception Functions: This function deals with recruitment and selection of human resource. It involves identification of skills, knowledge and abilities in an applicant. It facilitates fixation of performance standards, pay rates and invoking fair disciplinary action, if any. The focus is on facilitating adjustment to the work environment, attainment of organizational goals and adherence to the rules and regulations of the department in which the candidate has to work.
• Development Function: This function involves reformulating new employees to make them fully productive. It covers employee training, employee development, organization development and career development. The focus is on assisting employees to acquire better and improved skills for handling current jobs, enriching employees with more productive values, making the organization more adaptive to external influences and designing programmes to assist employees in advancing in their work lives.
• Motivation Function: This function aims at improving performance. This needs proper job designing, adoption of an effective performance appraisal machinery and introduction of a fair and just system of incentives and compensation.
• Maintenance Function: The maintenance function deals with putting in place activities that will help retain productive employees. It involves providing safe working environment, caring for the well-being of the employees and organizing communication programmes. The motive behind organizing communication programmes is to provide information to the employees to vent their frustrations.
• Employment Functions: The main trust of this function is to promote the activities related to the inception function by advertising the job effectively. It is important to note that the function does not deal with hiring decisions. It just co-ordinates the efforts with line management by handling the routine paper work associated with recruitment and selection.
• Training and Development Function: This function is the organization’s ‘internal change agent’. The focus of this function is to enhance the personal qualities of the employees to improve organizational productivity. This function also counsels the employees and helps them in making a better career choice and in finding ways to achieve the desired goals.
• Compensation and Benefits Function: This is the most difficult function for it deals with the most objective areas of a subjective field. It is concerned with paying the employees and in administering their benefits package. The pay is based on consideration like skills, job responsibility, efforts and accountability. While deciding the benefits package, stress is laid on employee needs and expectations and the burden these package create on the financial resources. These considerations often result in a conflict.
• Employee Relations Functions: The task before the human resource manager is to solve employee grievances in a non-unionized setting. The function involves enforcement of policies and procedures and permitting a ‘wronged employee’ a forum to obtain relief. The organization should ensure appropriate disciplinary sanctions.

HRM at McDonalds
I am familiar with McDonald. McDonald's is the largest food service Company in the world. The company has roughly 10,000 locations, which include the standard sit-in restaurants, drive through windows, and satellite sites. McDonald's dominance in the fast-food industry is not likely to disappear anytime soon. McDonald's and its franchises operated over 28,700 restaurants worldwide in 120 countries and territories, serving food and drab to over 45 million people daily. Only fifteen to twenty per cent of the restaurants are actually company-owned. The rest are franchises, run by 2,659 independent owners who pay a fee of between $400,000 and $700,000 for a franchise. McDonald's licensing department handles the fee structure on a case by case basis, and there are a wide variety of license fees determined by property and equipment costs. A skilled franchisee can earn a sex-figure income from a single restaurant; most own 2 or more restaurants.

The Job structure
All employees of McDonald's fall into three groups restaurant workers, corporate staff, and franchise owners. McDonald's restaurant usually employs between 50 and 65 people. Company staff members work either at the corporate headquarters or at one of 40 regional offices. In the restaurants crew members constitute the entry-level position and are by far the most numerous. A large majority are part-time workers, roughly three-quarters. Their wages are low. Swing Managers constitute the first true managerial position in the hierarchy, although their hourly wages are only slightly higher than crew member wages. Assistant Managers and higher are salaried. There is one Restaurant Manager per McDonald's restaurant.

Now we just focus on the ways of management at McDonald's, such as training, education and benefit.

Training
Employee training at McDonald's is highly structured. End-level workers are first taken through the basic Crew Training System. The program consists of on-the job- training and is largely vocational. Each stage of advancement beyond the crew level then entails a new training program, with the skills becoming more complex and generalized.

Training begins immediately with a one-hour orientation on the company. Each restaurant has its own video player and training room. Step--by --step manuals and video tapes cover every detail of the operation, everything from how to make a Big Mao to a shake. Each restaurant has 25 stations from the grill area to the front counter. Trainers use a series of checklists as new crew members move through the restaurant. A level of competency is demonstrated and the activity is checked off on the SOC--Station Observation Checklist. There is a follow-up SOC to get certified on the station.

Once a crew trainers has been promoted to swing manager and performed successfully, he or she is eligible for the Management Development Program. It provides technical and functional management skills for employees at the swing manager level and above. The first step is the Basic Operations Course, which takes several months to complete. It is a course, which covers fundamental restaurant opinions. The nab in the sequence is the Basic Management Course, which teaches leaderships, time planning, and crew recognition. In the intermediate operations course, students are trained on crew recruitment and retention, store leadership and decision-making. The final course in this sequence is the Regional Equipment Course.

Once a front-line crew member has progressed to the position of assistant managed, he or she is eligible to attend Hamburger University, the Company's world wide training center for management personnel. Approximately 2,500 managers and potential franchisees take part in the Advanced Operations Course, or AOC. All managers are required to receive training from hamburger University at least once every 5 years. New emphases include goal setting, diversity management, team building, and employee development.

The company has plans for a certification program, which will govern how employees progress from the crew to the level of restaurant managers. Plans are also in place for a Workplace Skills Certificate. It would be given to crew members who have mastered a set of essential workplace skills, and thus provide a "walkable credential" to enable them to move onto another position within the consumer service industry.

Education
McDonald's is committed to the education of our youth. We all take this leadership role very seriously and work in partnership with parents and educators to ensure that our school-age employees see education and schoolwork as their top priorities. McDonald's Corporation and McDonald's Owner/Operators are similarly committed to ensuring that the McDonald's job experience complements and supports employees' educational goals. Their efforts are defined by the following principles: education always comes first, employment supports education, schoolwork balance and opportunity/careers at McDonald's.

Benefits
• Competitive Wages
• MAC Card
• Haircut Discounts
• Wages increases
• McDonald's Training Programs
• Life insurance
• Education Support
• McDiect Shares
• Uniforms
• Flexible Hours
• Paid Vacation
• Bonus Scheme
• Stock Purchase Plan