CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION TO HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Men, materials, machines and money are considered as the main factors of production. Out of
all these factors, men are considered as an important factor. It is very difficult to handle the other
factors of production without the efficient use of human resources. Several terms have been used by
various management thinkers to represent human resources. These include personnel, people at work,
manpower, staff and employees.

People are the key to business success. A successful business does not just rely on a person’s
power instead it involves continuous effective teamwork and communication. Human Resource
Management has a big role towards the success of every business. It seeks to achieve competitive
advantage through the strategic deployment of a highly committed and capable workforce, using an
integrated array of cultural, structural and personnel techniques. Some functions of Human Resource
Management are recruitment/resourcing, administration, selection of employees and provides direction
for the people who work in the organization. HRM practices include training and development,
compensation policy selective hiring, job security, etc. All managers should understand the importance of
human resource management.

A changing environment today is influencing what human resource managers do and how they
do it. Globalization means more competition, and more competition means more pressure to lower
costs and to make employees more productive and quality conscious. Technology is requiring more
employees to be technologically well informed and pressuring employers to improve their human
resource processes by applying new technological tools. There is more emphasis on knowledge work
and therefore on building human capital, the knowledge, education, training, skills, and expertise of a
firm employees. Workforce and demographic changes mean that the workforce is becoming older and
more diverse. Changes like these are manifesting themselves in important trends in human resource
management.

Today, with employers competing in a challenging new environment. As part of this, employers
expect their human resource managers to be able to create high performance work systems that
produce superior employee performance. To do so, HR managers should be able to apply evidence-
based human resource management, which means the use of data, facts, analytics, scientific rigor,
critical evaluation, and critically evaluated research/case studies to support human resource
management proposals, decisions, practices, and conclusions.