Approaches and Practices in Strategic Human Resources Management

Introduction

This chapter is planned and designed to explore human resources (HR), key terms, activities and requirements in organisations. Using various activities and case studies to support the lines of discussion throughout the chapter. For over a century now, human resource, as a discipline and practice, has progressed into various areas of studies. This, for a time, had been through a process of trial and error – hitherto; using a model that largely relied on the development and testing of various ideas by academics and practice managers. The fundamental forces driving this advancement and growth in the field are profitability, efficiency, sustainability and the quest for the acquisition of new knowledge which supports the utilization of and development of staff as part of a number of resources organisations have at their disposal. It is crucial to note that the concept of human resource transcends an exploration of a set of behaviour in the workplace and the efficiency staff demonstrate. Indeed, a key principle is about how they are treated in line with set values and etiquette.

The context of human resources worldwide is rapidly changing, and the merging of social, technical, and intellectual factors have driven this sector to the tipping point of a momentous transformation to align the industry with the 21st century modern realities of staff selection, hiring, training/development and retention. The ever-changing and increasingly complex business environment has contributed directly to managers’ pursuit of improvement in their production and service delivery procedures, using best practices as a common standard for resources management.

What Are Human Resources?

The term Human Resources is often used in many organisations today and will find the semantics of it, in some instances, to be different from one organisation to another. While Human Resources, in a simplistic sense, may imply the ‘people resources or employees’ in organisations. Unpacking the meaning may be somewhat controversial than it may ordinarily appear. For instance, authors like Armstrong (2012) argued that labelling people as resources have been frowned upon in some quarters of society given the connotation this presents – i.e.; the idea staff are simply a factor and part of the ‘production’ or ‘service machine’ in organisations reduces them to mere materials whose value could be exploited to benefit firms.

Despite the aforesaid, there is no doubting that good human resources are really important in organisations. Nevertheless, to understand how this can be planned, we need to have a clear and common understanding of what they are.