Impact of Hrm

Before getting to the point of the assignment let me state that I have enormous respect for the members of the Human Resources Department in any specific company, but I also realize that although they are extremely important they are but one of many departments that make up a successful company. The Human Resources department is not all powerful and often finds that they are overridden by orders from those above them. They typically do not set entry pay scales but implement the pay determined by management. They also seldom are qualified to judge whether an applicant meets minimum requirements and must rely on interviews by department heads and other managers to determine if an applicant is truly competent and worthy of employment. This department does not perform performance appraisals but rather just remind the managers that an appraisal is due for an employee, and subsequently file such appraisals for future review. They typically do not set the amount of merit increases but rather implement the policy filtered down from upper management. This is not meant in any way to belittle the efforts of the Human Resources Department, and I have great empathy for the handicap they must endure because many times their hands are tied by upper management and they must operate within stringent boundaries.

It appeared to me that many of my classmates missed the point of the HR assignments and took it upon themselves to discuss any of the five areas that they desired to discuss. Of those that did address the area that they were assigned I found that the material presented by Jason Scott in the area of Labor Relations, and that of Cole Averill in the area of Training and Development, to be the most appropriate for the purposes of this discussion.

Jason Scott had a fairly long laundry list concerning labor relations between a company and its employees and has several ideas on how to improve these relations. It is my opinion, however, that he goes a little far with his ideas and presents many things that would take excessive time to accomplish. While I believe in open communications and easy manager access, having bi-weekly and monthly meetings would consume too much time for all concerned. Setting up e-mails and newsletters is a very good idea but someone must be assigned to these tasks and that means additional manpower required. Bi-weekly seems a bit much as well. His plan would have so many meetings, committees, and publishing concerns that it appears to me that it would negatively impact production. I believe that the novelty of all these meetings would quickly wear off and attendance would drop unless the meetings were made mandatory. I believe that the plans he proposes could be accomplish by greater interaction between managers and their direct reports without the need for numerous meetings. I do think that meetings are necessary and good but they should be limited to as few as practical.

Cole Averill had some