Human Resources Flow
The management of human resources flow is about meeting current and future work force requirement while at the same time employees’ career objectives. Note that trying to also meet employees career needs is always forgotten. There are 6 steps in an organization’s human recourses flow:
- Recruit (marketing of your company)
- Select (find the fit of candidates to position and organization)
- Performance evaluation
- Training
- Retention (motivation)
- Redundancies
The first two steps in managing human resources flow is recruiting and selecting employees. This is the process by which organizations solicit, contact and interest potential candidates and then establishes whether or not to appoint any of them. The organization must clearly define what are the requirements for the role in terms of skills and behavior needed. Selecting is about finding a ‘fit’ with the position requirements and with the company’s culture.
But how can organizations find if someone does ‘fit’ or not? There a various different methods to assist the selection process. However, most companies use traditional interviewing. Interviewing has been an abused method in the past, and many companies selected employees only based on interviews. But interviews are in general a subjective judgment selection method. Although interviews are good in order to asses potential match between the candidate and the company’s culture, it does not cover all the areas needed to be assessed. In this sense, a multi-method approach could be better.
The next three step in managing employees flow are: performance evaluation, training and employee retention or motivation. How companies measure employees’ performance? On the one hand, the objective of the company is to influence employees’ behavior towards reaching corporate goals. And on the other hand, the objective of the employee regarding their performance evaluation is to get feedback in order to improve their professional development. Therefore, evaluating employees’ performance should not only include corporate goals, but also employees goals of professional development such as skills gained and peers feedback.
Regarding training what should managers do when new skills are required? One option thay have is to hire those new skills from employees outside the organization; thus not having to internalize the training costs. But what will happen to the remaining staff? If the company decides to fire them, it will be losing a lot of ‘social capital’ or ‘team-work’ developed among the existing work force. The relationships that are built among employees in an organization are a valuable asset for any organization. Trust among employees takes time to develop and mutual obligations that foster better work is created after they have worked together for some time. Therefore, a better option for managers is to internalize training costs in order to capitalize on the company’s social networks.
Regarding employee retention, it is interesting to raise the question: why do people leave? Again, it is not always just about money. People may leave an organization because of job specifications, fit with the company’s culture, personal reasons, external conditions (i.e. economic situation in the country), etc. Because of these factors, it can be argued that it is not really possible to try to retain all employees. So how to retain the employees? Maybe by trying to identify those key employees that the company must retain. So manager should understand what are the company needs and determine which employees to keep. Then, managers must tailor or customize programs to retain those employees for the period of time required.
This is called ‘ job-sculpting’, where managers should understand key employees deeply embedded interests. This is almost a psychological task in which manager should regularly (monthly) talk with employees about their job related interests and professional situation, and then try to adjust their positions as much as possible.
Tags: human recourses flow, motivation, recruitment, selection