In this assignment, we would study about one of the most interesting and important approaches in the business world i.e. human resource management. The assignment provides a brief introduction to the approach and discussed its importance in the modern day world. The assignment further discusses the concept of strategic human resource development in details and the benefits that it can have for an organisation. In the end, the assignment discusses some of the most important activities that the human resource managers of every business organisation have to perform.

Human resource management is an approach that aims at assisting business organisations in managing their human resources and optimising their performance by improving the work conditions for them. Human resource management uses concepts, such as performance management, training and development, career development, etc.

In the past few decades, business organisations have come to realize that it is not possible for them to achieve market competencies using operations or technology as they can be easily replicated by the competitors within no time. The only source that the business organisations have, which can help them in achieving market competencies and can contribute towards the achievement of organisational goals and objectives, is the human resource. Thus, human resource is now considered to be the most important resource for any business organisation and companies are spending millions of dollars every year to properly manage their workforces and become leaders in the market by optimising their performance.

A strategic approach that aims at attracting, developing, rewarding and retaining employees for the well-being of the organisation as well as of the employees is known as strategic human resource management (Study.com, 2016). The department that is concerned with strategic human resource management never operates alone. Such departments always work in co-ordination with all the other departments of an organisation so that they can understand the goals and objectives of each department and help them in achieving them through strategic management of human resource. Therefore, the goals and objectives of the strategic human resource department reflect the goals and objectives of the organisation on the whole. On the whole, the main objective of the strategic human resource management department is to assist the human resource department in making all the departments of an organisation more strong and effective. Let us now discuss some benefits of strategic human resource management:

• Strategic human resource management allows the organisation in the identification, prioritization and exploitation of opportunities related to the human resource
• It helps in providing an objective view of the problems related to the human resources of a company
• It helps in establishing a better co-ordination amongst the various departments of an organisation
• It helps in minimising the effects of unwanted or adverse conditions and changes
• It helps in proper and timely allocation of resources to the opportunities that can help the organisation and its human resources in becoming more effective
• Helps in bringing the individual efforts together and using them to achieve something bigger
• It helps in fostering a workplace environment where changes are easily accepted
• It helps in improving the discipline in the organisation and allocated fewer resources and lesser time towards correcting the wrong decisions that the organisation has taken.

Human resource managers are those people in an organisation who are given the responsibility of managing the human resources in the best possible manner, keep them motivated, deal with their problems and optimise their performance by improving the work conditions for them. Human resource managers have a number of roles & duties to perform in an organisation and an effective human resource manager can always help an organisation in achieving a competitive pool of talent and achieving organisational goals and objectives by optimising their performances. Let us now discuss three important activities that a human resource manager must perform in an organisation:

Staffing and recruiting à each and every human resource manager in an organisation has to perform the activity of staffing and recruiting new employees. It is the duty of a human resource manager to carefully forecast the human resource needs of an organisation, considering various factors that can have an impact on the staffing requirements, and then designing ways and techniques that would be used to fulfil the human resource demands of the company. Staffing and recruiting also means that the human resource manager will have to prepare job descriptions, job specifications and will have to analyse whether the demand can be fulfilled internally i.e. by promotions, transfers, job rotations, etc. (Wright, 1998). or by external methods, such as campus recruitments, job portals, calling in new invites, etc. An example of staffing and recruitment activity is when a human resource manager identifies a vacancy in the organisation that would likely occur in the coming few months. The manager would then prepare a job description and specification for the vacancy and would plan to fulfil the vacancy either internally or externally. If the manager decides to fulfil the vacancy internally he can desing a performance appraisal program where the start performer would be promoted to the higher job. On the other hand, if the manager decides to fulfil the vacancy externally, he can invite applications through job portals and can design various interviews and tests to choose the best candidate out of all.  (Smallbusiness.chron.com, 2016).

One of the most important activities that every human resource manager has to perform is to design training and development programs for the employees. The various tasks that are covered under this activity is the identification of training & development needs of the employees, conducting a training need assessment, designing a training and development program, higher experts to conduct the training and development sessions, ensure transfer of training at the workplace, gather feedback from the employees and the trainers and then finally introducing the desired changes in the programs for the future (Harvey, Speier, & Novicevic, 2000). Training and development of employees is a continuous requirement and should be performed very carefully because no company would want to waste its important resources in training and developing the employees for acquiring skills that are not required or are already present in the workplace. Therefore, designing and conducting training and development program is another important activity that every human resource manager has to perform. An example of training and development activity is when a human resource manager identifies that the employees need a training session that would improve their knowledge about Microsoft Excel. The manager would then identify the employees who lack the knowledge or skills required to operate Microsoft excel efficiently. Once the employees are identified, the manager would then design either an Off-the-job training session or an on-the-job training session for them and would also formulate training goals and objectives that the employees would be required to achieve during their training period (Study.com, 2016).

Compensation and benefits à the activities performed by human resource managers are all very important as they all are related to the workforce, which is the most important resource and these activities are the ones which can help in optimising the performances of the employees. One such important activity that the human resource managers have to perform is the design of compensation and benefits for the workforce. We are living in an era where the business organisations are competing on a global scale and the market competition is so fierce that it has become very difficult to retain employees. Companies are always on a hunt for new employees and can easily lure them by offering them handsome and better salaries than their previous companies (Kirk, 1991). As a result, it is important that the compensation and benefits of the employees are so adjusted that they would neither make them feel that they are being paid lesser than the market trends nor make them feel that they are being paid too much for doing too little. An example of compensation and benefit activity is when a human resource manager decides the compensation and benefits for a particular post, let us say a production engineer. The manager would then conduct a market analysis of the compensation trends for that post and would fix a basic pay scale that would be competitive in the market. The manager would then decide additional benefits that would be offered to the employees working on that specific post. The benefits that a manager has to decide can be in the form of medical leaves, medical allowance, telephone allowance, travel allowance, etc.

Human resource management, at present, is one of the key concepts that is helping business organisations in achieving market success. In such a scenario, it is important that the human resource managers of companies are efficient and effective in forming human resource management strategies so that they can optimise the performance of the employees and achieve the desired results.

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