Line and Staff Aspects of HRM

FOR MY EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY

“After studying this you will be able to give at least eight examples of how managers can use HR concepts and techniques.”

NOTE: "This post is meant for my own use"

All managers are, in a sense, HR managers, since they all get involved in activities like recruiting, interviewing, selecting, and training. Yet most firms also have a HR department with its own top manager. How do the duties of this HR manager and his or her staff relate to “line” managers’ human resource duties? Let’s answer this question, starting with a short definition of line versus staff authority.

Authority: The rights to make decisions, direct other’s work, and give orders

Line manager: A manager who’s authorized to direct the work of subordinates and is responsible for accomplishing the organization’s task.

Staff manager: A manager who assists and advises line mangers.

Authority is the right to make decisions, to direct the work of others, and to give orders. In management, we usually distinguish between line authority and staff authority.

Line mangers are authorized to direct the work of subordinates –they’re always someone’s boss. In addition, line managers are directly in charge of accomplishing the organization’s basic goals. (hotel managers and the managers for production and sales are generally line managers, for example.)

Staff managers, on the other hand, are authorized to assist and advise line managers in accomplishing these basic goals. HR managers are staff managers. They are responsible for assisting and advising line managers in areas like recruiting, hiring, and compensation.

Line Manager’s Human Resource Management responsibilities

The direct handling of people has always been an integral part of every line manager’s responsibility, from president down to the lowest-level supervisor. For example, one major company outlines its line supervisors’ responsibilities for effective human resource management under the following general headings:

1. Placing the right person on the right job.

2. Starting new employees in the organization (orientation)

3. Training employees for jobs that are new to them

4. Improving the job performance of each person

5. Gaining creative cooperation and developing smooth working relationships

6. Interpreting the company’s policies and procedures

7. Controlling labor costs

8. Developing the abilities of each person

9. Creating and maintaining department morale

10. Protecting employee’s health and physical condition

KISHOR'S POSTS

Why is HR management and its concepts and techniques important to All Managers?

Perhaps it’s easier to answer this by listing some of the personnel mistakes you DON’T want to make while managing. For example, you don’t want to:

• Hire the wrong person for the job
• Experience high turnover
• Have your people not doing their best
• Waste your time with useless interviews
• Have your company taken to court because of discriminatory actions
• Have your company cited under Federal Occupational Safety laws for unsafe practices
• Have some employees think their salaries are unfair and inequitable relative to others in the organization
• Allow a lack of training to undermine your department’s effectiveness
• Commit any unfair labor practices

Carefully reading this note (in http://www.kishorshrestha.blogspot.com) will help you avoid mistakes like these. And, more important, it can help ensure that you get the right results – through people.

Remember, you can do everything right as a manager – lay brilliant plans, draw clear organization charts, set up modern assembly lines, and use sophisticated accounting controls – but still fail, by hiring the worn people or by not motivating subordinates.

On the other hand, many managers – presidents, generals, governors, and supervisors – have been successful even with inadequate plans, organizations, or controls. They were successful because they had the knack of hiring the right people for the right jobs and motivating, appraising, and developing them. Remember as you read this NOTE that getting RESULTS is the bottom line of managing, and that, as a manager, you will have to get those results through people. As one company president summed up:

For many years it has been said that capital is the bottleneck for a developing industry. I don’t think this any longer holds true.

I think it’s the work force and the company’s inability to recruit and maintain a good work force that does constitute the bottleneck for production.

I don’t know of any major project backed by good ideas, vigor, and enthusiasm that has been stopped by a shortage of cash. I don’t know of industries whose growth has been partly stopped or hampered because they can’t maintain an efficient and enthusiastic labor force, and I think this will hold true even more in the future.

Lessons for my own good (not meant for others)

Master your negotiating skills

Whatever the situation, whether it is with an employer, family member or business, we all negotiate for things each day like higher salary, better service or solving a dispute with a coworker or family member. Here are some negotiation skills, techniques and strategies to help you handle these situations more effectively.

1. Know thyself. When you go into a negotiation, take a personal inventory. How do you feel about negotiation? Do you want to get it over fast? If so, you may give in too quickly, or give away too much. Or, do you want to win, no matter what the cost? If so, you may become adversarial and damage the relationship.

2. Do you home work. Know who you are negotiating with before you begin. What is his or her reputation as a negotiator – win-win model or win-lose model? Does the person want to negotiate with you, dread the negotiation, or is this a neutral situation? A word of advice: think, think, think.

3. Practice double and triple think. It is not enough just to know what you want out of negotiation. You also need to anticipate what the other party wants (in other words double think). The smart negotiator also tries to anticipate what the other party thinks you want (triple think).

4. Build trust. Negotiation is a highly sophisticated and skilled form of communication. Without trust, there won’t be communication. Instead you will have manipulation and suspicion masquerading as communication. Be trustworthy. Honour your commitments. Tell the truth and very importantly always respect confidences.

5. Develop external listening. Learn to listen well. Most people carry on an inner dialogue with themselves. Especially when you are trying to communicate with someone else, this inner dialogue becomes a problem because you can’t listen internally and externally at the same time.

When you negotiate, turn off your inner voice and only listen externally. You won’t miss important non-verbal messages, facial expressions of voice inflections, when you listen externally.

6. Move beyond positions. Remember, it is risky to make yourself vulnerable to someone. That is why in a negotiation you being by stating your position. Later, when the trust has deepened, you and the other party can risk more honesty and identify your true interests.

As a negotiator, it is your responsibility to ask questions that will uncover the needs or interests of the other party. If you have also done your job of creating a supportive climate, you are more likely to get honest answers.

7. Own your power. Do not assume that because the other party has one type of power, that he or she is all-powerful. That’s giving away your power!

Balance this power by assessing the other parties source(s) of power, and then your own. While there are many sources of power, they all break down into two categories; internal power and external power. No one can take the former power away from you and it includes your personal power, level of self-esteem and self-confidence.

External power fluctuates with your situation. For example, if you are laid off or demoted you can lose position power. If new technology is introduced, you can lose your expertise power. Because the dynamics of power are so changeable, a negotiation is never dead.

8. Know your “BATNA”. BATNA stands for Best Alternative to A Negotiated Agreement. The acronym comes out of the research on negotiation conducted by the Harvard Negotiation Project. Before you begin a negotiation, know what your options are.

Can you walk away from the deal? What other choices do you have? What are the pros and cons of each choice? Don’t stop here. Also consider the BATNA of the other party.

9. Know what a win is. What is your best-case scenario? What is your worst-case scenario? The area in between is called your settlement range. If you can reach an agreement within your settlement range, that’s a Win! Never drop below your bottom line. You’ll feel bad about yourself and the deal afterwards, and you many not follow-through on your commitments.

10. Enjoy the process. Negotiation is a process, not an event. There are predictable steps – preparation, creating the climate, identifying interests, and selecting outcomes – that you will go through in any negotiation.

Painting by Hong An.

KISHOR'S POSTS

I took this painting from Vietnamese Artist and my exceptional friend Hong An's 2000 collection. When asked her how she liked this painting, she said "this face reveals a enigmatic beauty, that's why I liked it."

This is one of her 2000's collection and soon you will be able to see few works of her own on recent year too. You don't have to rush to Vietnam for this you can catch it here.

Overcoming emotional tension

Anxiety and nervous tension are two devils that spoil one’s success and calmness. Charting and writing down the various work processes or operational tasks to achieve the targets that could be corporate objectives and business goals can overcome nervous tension and anxiety.

Successful people write down lists of all their ambitions in life. They then discard the unattainable. The attainable or practicable wishes or dreams they keep. They then start their journeys to attain them. These dreams and ambitions become their goals and life’s objectives.

As a business manager, you can decide what you can get on with, and make the very best of what you can attain. Avoid nervous tension. Also remember that if wound up too tightly, people end up being restless and anxious.

When this occurs, little problems will appear huge and insurmountable. Then they start to squander energy and exaggerate their troubles. Within themselves they carry the so-called “germs of frustration”.

Their desire for success would then be greater than their satisfaction with the successes they have achieved. A good business manager helps his frustrated or dissatisfied staff get rid of their frustrations by recognizing the sign of nervous tension and anxiety.

Recognizing the signs of fear, anxiety and frustration.

· Antagonism

· Bullying

· Nagging

· Anti-social attitudes

· Chip on the shoulder

· Laziness

· Gossip

· Giving up

· Rigidity, and

· A closed mind

A person who is calm, mature and well adjusted knows he has to give and take. If he continually only takes, this could lead to frustration.

Emotional tension is of the mind, but it can have profound effects on our body also. For example, anger makes a person’s face flush, and this can cause an ulcer in the long run. High blood pressure is attributed to frequent build-up of tension and hypertension.

We also understand that many vital physical processes are influenced or are affected by emotions. Psychologists advocate that our minds affect our bodies much more than our bodies affect our minds.

In some of the organizations that I have worked in I have come across a few “high-blood pressure personalities”, Not because they have poor health or heredity genes: rather their ailments cropped up over the years when they disagreed furiously or resented their higher authority’s decisions or judgments. Neither is it hard works that kills, but negative attitude.

Remember that any underlying sourness within us, against our society or the world in general, could be the start of an ulcer. If we are successful, the success can bring improvements in our physical and mental condition. But if we fail, the failure can do the reverse.

The other issues are anxiety and fear. Again it has been proven that, apart from ulcers, heart attacks cold also be brought about by anxiety or fear. Striving over mightily for success, and the fear of success not coming one’s way, can lead one to disastrous coronary ailment.

Displaying emotional maturity and physical soundness:

Emotional maturity is essential to business success. It can be said that a person has come of age emotionally, and has acquired new personal habits and emotional attitudes when he can deliver good judgments and provide wise decisions. The antics and clowning of a five-year old, for example, will not suit a 30-year-old. A teenager can afford to giggle at everything and anything. None of this would be right for an adult who is deemed to be mature.

The key to changing personality is insight or gut feeling. To help and lead others the business manger must have this insight, because self-understanding brings emotional release. He has to realize that listening to his people is as important as telling them what to do.

If he listens to and understands his people, he can have the keys to their personalities. The general saying is that good leadership is worth millions. If this is to be believed in an organization, the wrong type of leadership will lead to higher absenteeism and employee’s dissatisfaction.

Even the most generous salary or high wage may not produce good output under a tyrant and egocentric superior. Knowing this philosophy then, it would be better to lead rather than drive command for the best output and results.

KISHOR'S POSTS

What is Human Resource Management?

Kishor's NOTEs: for my educational purposes

The main purpose of this article is to explain what HR managers do, and to describe more fully how today HR function is helping companies meet the challenges of globalized competition. We’ll see that HR management – recruiting, hiring, training, compensating, appraising, and developing employees – is part of every manager’s job. And we’ll see that HR is also a distinct function, with an HR manager assisting the firm’s other managers in many important ways.

The main topics we’ll cover include manager’s HRM jobs, crucial global and competitive trends, and how HR managers use Technology and modern JR measurement systems to create the high-performance work system employers need today.

*The Manager’s Human Resource Management Jobs

We agree that all managers perform certain basic functions, which are planning, organizing, staffing, leading and controlling. In total, they represent Management Process. Some of the specific activities involved in each function include:

Easy to remember: POSLC

1. Planning: Establishing goals and standards, developing rules and procedure and developing plans and forecasts.

Easy to remember: POSLC

2. Organizing: giving each subordinate a specific task, establishing departments, delegating authority to subordinates, establishing channels of authority and communication, coordinating the work of subordinates.

Easy to remember: POSLC

3. Staffing: determining what type of people should be hired, recruiting prospective employees, selecting employees, compensating employees, evaluating performance, counseling employees, training and developing employees.

Easy to remember: POSLC

4. Leading: Getting others to get the job done, maintaining morale, motivating subordinates.

Easy to remember: POSLC

5. Controlling: setting standards such as sales quotas, quality standards, or production levels, checking to see how actual performance compares with these standards, taking corrective action as needed.

We are going to focus on one of these functions in this article – the staffing, personnel management, or human resource management (HRM) function.

Human Resource Management is a process of acquiring, training, appraising, and compensating employees, and attending to their labor relations, health and safety, and fairness concerns. The topics we’ll discuss should therefore provide you with the concepts and techniques you need to carry out the “people” or personnel aspects of your management job.

These include:

® Conducting job analyse (determining the nature of each employee’s job)

® Planning labor needs and recruiting job candidates

® Selecting job candidates

® Orienting and training new employees

® Managing wages and salaries (compensating employees)

® Providing incentives and benefits

® Appraising performance

® Communicating (interviewing, counseling, disciplining)

® Training and developing managers

® Building employee commitment.

And what a manager should know about:

® Equal opportunity and affirmative action

® Employee health and safety

® Handling grievances and labor relations

What are the policies and practices involved in carrying out the Human Resource aspects?

® The policies and practices involved in carrying out the “people” or Human Resource aspects of a Management position, including recruiting, screening, training, rewarding, and appraising.

Have you heard? Intelligent investors are moving the market

PLAN YOUR FINANCES KISHOR'S POSTS Click here to jump to my another blog page Courtesy: StarTwo/ Lifestyle Monday 3 october 2005 For my personl use only Contrary to pouplar blief, financial planning is not only for the rich. In fact, financial planning can be mroe crucial for an average wage earner who has limited income and financial commitments, but wants to achieve his goals in life. Such goals include buying a house in five years' time, sending his children to university in 10 years' time and retiring comfortably in 20 years' time. In order to achieve your goals within a certain time frame, saving money alone may not be enough. You need to invest. Good financial planning helps you balance your income against your needs and commitments. It allows you to obtain a clear idea of how much and to what extent you should invest. Financial planning is the launching pad for successful investing. As an investor, you should ensure that your money is working hard to bring you the maximum possible returns. To achieve this, youwill first need to set clearly defined targets for your investments. Such targets are often more easily identified if they are related to your goals in life. A financial plan keeps you focused and on track in achieving your financial goals. The process of developing a financial plan typically involves the following steps: Identifying your goals Define your personal goals and estimate how much money you will need to achieve them. Evaluating your financial status Analyse your financial needs, commitments and debts against your present income to determine whether you have sufficient money for investment. Choose suitable investment strategies and products Investments with high returns come with high risks. Before making any investment, you must determine a comfortable level of risk that you are prepared to take in case your investment fails. Monitoring your financial plan Review your financial situation (which includes changes in needs, commitments and investments) regularly. This enables you to make necessary adjustments to your spending, savings and investments. You may plan your finances on your won or seek professional advice from qualified financial planners. "Your financial planner can help to articulate and prioritise your goals in life, given your current stage of finance, and draw up a financial plan" Once a financial plan has been drawn up, the financial planner will suggest investment stratgegies to help you achieve your financial goals - for example, reduce spending, and increase savings and investment. " A financail planner is not in a position to advise you what stocks or investment products to buy," "His or her role is to lay all the available investment strategies on the table and advise you on the risk and returns pertaining to each strategy. No responsible financial planner will try to force you to part with your money or make decisions on your behalf. Product selection or choice of investment is upto you" Providing the right information allows your financial planner to do a better job for you. Investors need to be open when sharing ehri financial details with financial planner. "It's very natural for investors not to divulge too much information to a stranger. But themore information you give your financial planner, the better he is able to tailor-make a good financial plan for you. Trust and openness must run both ways." The financial planning process can benefit anyone regardless of age, education or income. Even if you are not ready to invest, consulting a financial planner canhelp you realise how much money you need to achieve your goals in life. Having a financial planner is like having a good adviser to help you make good decisions. Essentially, financial planning ia bout wisely allocating your hard-earned money to achieve your goals in life. no matter how much or little you have. It is something not only for the rich. It is for everyone and it is crucial for any investors who want to invest intelligently.