RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 475.

Review key current developments in personnel management

Personnel management (PM) is the basis of all management

activity, but it is not the basis of all business activity. A business may depend fundamentally on having a unique product, like the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or on obtaining the necessary funding, like the London bid to stage the Olympic Games, or on identifying a previously unnoticed market niche, like Saga Services. The basis of management is always the same: getting the people of the business to make things happen in a productive way, so that the business prospers and the people thrive.

Businesses are diverse. Prisons, restaurants, oil companies, corner shops, fire brigades, churches, hotel chains, hospitals, schools, newspapers, charities, doctors' and dentists' surgeries, professional sports teams, airlines, barristers' chambers and universities are all businesses in the sense that they have overall corporate missions to deliver and these have to be achieved within financial constraints. They all need to have their personnel managed, no matter how much some of the resourceful personnel may resent aspects of the management process which limit their individual freedom of action.

The term ‘personnel management' is not easy to define. This is because it is commonly used in two different ways. On the one hand it is used generically to describe the body of management activities. On the other hand, the term is equally widely used to denote a particular approach to the management of people which is clearly distinct from ‘personnel management'. Used in this way ‘PM' signifies more than an updating of the label; it also suggests a distinctive philosophy towards carrying out people-oriented organizational activities: one which is held to serve the modern business more effectively than ‘traditional' management.

Delivering PM objectives

The larger the organization, the more scope there is to employ people to specialize in particular areas of PM. Increasingly, however, employee relations specialists are required to provide advice about legal developments, to manage consultation arrangements and to preside over employee involvement initiatives. Another common area of specialization is in the field of training and development. Although much of this is now undertaken by external providers, there is still a role for in-house trainers, particularly in management development.

The other major specialist roles are in the fields of recruitment and selection, health, safety and welfare, compensation and benefits and human resource planning.

In addition to the people who have specialist roles there are many other people who are employed as human resources or personnel generalists. In larger businesses generalists either look after all personnel matters in a particular division or are employed at a senior level to develop policy and take responsibility for PM issues across the organization as a whole.