Human resource managers cannot be responsible for every possible negative scenario involving employees. They can, however, work to create systems which support employee satisfaction, foster growth, nurture the individual, and reflect a team atmosphere which includes support and guidance through coaching and mentoring. This means HR managers could be responsible for ensuring tools are in place to identify both positive and negative trends experienced by the work force, the implementation of policies that lead to greater employee satisfaction, and establishing programs which promote ethics, teamwork, and mutual support among employees.
At times, organizations create cultures which make people responsible for specific things within the organization but do not give those people the means or authority to manage it. For HR managers, it would be unfair that they be required to be responsible for general employee performance or employee turnover. However, it would be reasonable to require that HR managers are responsible for reviewing comprehensive annual evaluations and exit interviews. When information is systematically gathered about an organization’s human resource pool, trends and patterns can be identified. While the HR manager cannot control all of the factors which determine (dis)satisfaction or employee turnover, by collecting and analyzing available data not only can they identify patterns in employee behavior, they can begin developing programs to address those issues. Employees who consistently perform poorly in a particular department must have something in common; once an HR director can recognize the commonalities, effort can be made to address the problem.
As shifts in expectations for human resource management continue to occur, Herington, McPhail, and Guilding (2013) noted increasingly high levels of involvement by human resource staff and management in higher level corporate decision-making. Some of the human resource functions are becoming the responsibility of non-HRM department heads. Human resource departments, and their leaders in particular, are then tasked with securing buy-in from other departments on the importance of giving these functions the attention they deserve and establishing a means for training non-HRM department heads in how to perform these historically human resource department duties (Herington et al.).
Evaluating the effectiveness of HRM functioning in a measured and quantitative way creates a new set of challenges for organizations. However, as organizations move towards the Balanced Scoreboard, it becomes imperative that a viable and practical means for quantitative measures be in place. For example, if an organization is going to be able to benefit from the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard, it is easy to get a quantitative financial measure. The others factors, however, require new tools which many organizations have not previously had.
The HR Scorecard, another tool with growing popularity in organizations today, measures “HR deliverables and HR system alignment, compares HR alignment with strategy, and measures organizational gains created by HR practices” (Lussier & Hendon, 2013, p. 67). Using the HR scorecard will also require designing tools which will allow for the quantification of tasks. Deliverables may be measured by scores of successful recruiting and retention, employee satisfaction surveys, and comparisons between one’s own organization and comparable organizations in terms of HR factors (salary, benefits, training and promotion opportunities, etc.). Finally, HR efficiency must be measurable. The use of such tools as EVA and ROI make it possible to measure organizational returns on human resource management policies.
References
Herington, C., McPhail, R. & Guilding, C. (2013). The evolving nature of hotel HR performance measurement systems and challenges arising: An exploratory study. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 20, pp. 68-75.
Lussier, R. & Hendon, J. (2013). Human Resource Management: Functions, Applications, Skill Development. Los Angeles: Sage.
