Human Resource Management as a part of the management function

Human resource management is considered as the most vital element for every organization irrelevant to the nature, size and industry type of the organization. Human Resource Management performs various functionalities in order to accomplish organizational goals. With the help of HR functions, an organization could easily move towards sustainable growth and overall development. Human resource management is also considered as the crucial part of management function as the primary objective of this department is to appoint the employees along with providing the appropriate training so that their efforts could be moulded as per the organizational requirements. Apart from this, human resource management is also responsible for retention of employees for a longer period of time by fulfilling their needs and wants along with giving them regular opportunities to grow along with the organization as well as to build reliable image amongst the employees towards the organization.

In this report, the significance of HRM and its functions in TRAX will be discussed. It is a small company based in Ireland with its stores located in Port Laoise, Carlow and Tullamore. The company operates in music CDs, consumer electronics goods, mobile phones, etc. The company also provides repairing facilities but their major focus is on mobile phones. TRAX does not a separate human resource department as the total number of employees across its all stores is just 15 but as the organization has created separate websites for selling smartphones and for providing repairing services to its target audience, the requirement of human resource department could be observed.

The functionalities of human resource department and management are quite different to each other because management of an organization manages all the operations of the organization whereas, human resource department acts as a part of an organization which recruits, appoints, trains and rewards employees to meet the organizational needs. Thus, it could be considered that HRM is a part of the management function. Major functionalities of human resource management are recruitment & selection, performance management, reward, employee relations, etc.

Human resource management is considered as an inherent part of management as this is executed by almost every manager in an organization rather being performed by any particular department. This is because when a manager wants to attain its desired goals and objectives, he should select the best employees amongst the available options in order to accomplish designed objectives for the success of a particular project. Human resource management is also considered as the universal function of management in the organization as it is performed by every manager irrelevant to the level they work at. However, all the functions are not performed by the manager himself and for some tasks, he asks his subordinates who are experts in managing the functionalities of organization and majorly these types of tasks are assigned to the human resource management for the objective of attaining positive outcomes (Bratton & Gold, 2017).

Analysis of the Human Resource Management approach vs. Personnel Management approach

There are many functions of human resource management in relation to the management of human resources at the workplace. Planning, manpower, placement, employment, appraisal, training & compensating employees are some of the major functions of human resource department in terms of handling the employees and in order to execute these activities in an effective manner, a separate department is being created in corporations named Personnel Department.

With respect to the context of TRAX, the requirement of human resource management is not yet felt by the organization due to less number of people. But as the organization is operating on e-commerce platform which is capable enough to expand the organizational functionalities in both domestic as well as in international markets, thus, separate department should be created in terms of enhancing workforce along with enhancing the organizational functionalities for the purpose of enhancing market share of the organization in the target market (Brewster, et. al., 2016).

In an organization, a number of employees work together with a common objective of attainment of organizational desired goals. In relation to this, the organization needs to align its employees’ efforts in one direction to reach to the desired destination and ultimately, it helps the organization to move towards sustainable growth and overall development.

TRAX is a small company based in Ireland with only 15 employees in its three stores and the company offers all types of smartphones from top brands through its e-commerce platform. One of their websites is https://refurbiphones.ie/ and on this website, the organization offers the variety of refurbished smartphones to its target audience (RefurbiPhones, 2017). The organization also provides warranty on these phones with the objective of developing a reliable brand image amongst the customers along with the objective of retaining their target customers’ interest within the organization. TRAX has another website: https://ipads4schools.ie/ and this website provide services to schools across Ireland in order to enhance the learning of students. In order to manage these functionalities, the organization needs to create separate human resource management team in order to manage the functionalities of the organization along with boosting up the demand for the services by performing the core functionalities of HRM in an effective and efficient manner (Ipads for School Ireland, 2018).

For the objective of managing organizational functionalities, the organization will adopt the following two approaches:

Personnel are known as the people working in the organization and their management is considered as an administrative function which focuses on fulfilling the duty and responsibility of appointing right candidate on the right position. This helps the organization to accomplish desired goals along with generating opportunities for enhancing the organizational performance. Personnel management is treated as the main attraction of traditional approaches under which employees are managed as per the policies and guidelines of the organization. Job analysis, planning, performance appraisal, recruitment, training, and compensation management are some of the primary activities concerned with personnel management. Apart from this, personnel management also focuses on managing labour relations along with considering employees’ grievances (Armstrong and Taylor, 2014).  

It is considered as the contemporary approach of dealing with the people at workplace and the major focus of the organization is on acquisition, utilisation, development, and maintenance of employees. The process of this functionality is to combine the strengths, and the energies of human resources in terms of human competencies (Brewster, 2017). Thus, human resource management is considered as an effective policy which ensures the appointment of qualitative as well as quantitative employees. Although, core functionalities of both personnel management and human resources are quite similar, thus, the basic difference is in the approach of managing them (Bailey, et. al., 2018).

Thus, it could be said that both the activities address same organizational activities and there is only one difference which is linked with the approaches used for addressing the fundamentals such as planning, job analysis, recruitment and selection, hiring, rewarding, appraisals, compensation management, etc. Businesstopia, 2018). The following table will show the difference between human resource management and personnel management:

Basis of difference	Personnel Management	Human Resource Management
Meaning	This is considered a traditional approach for managing personnel at the workplace	This is considered as modern approach and it is executed by all managers at all levels
Nature	Routine function	Strategic function (West, 2015).
Focus	Management is being given priority	Needs and wants of individuals are given priority
Function	Labour relation, employee welfare, and personnel administration is considered as primary functions (Collings, Wood & Szamosi, 2018).	Development, acquisition, and utilisation of human resources are considered as primary functions
Objective	Personnel are managed as per the organizational goals	Policies are developed in accordance with the employees’ needs in order to align their efforts with the organizational goals
Perspective	Employees in the organization are considered as basic input to attain the desired output	Employees are considered as valuable resources for the production of desired output
Job design	On the basis of division of labour, jobs are designed	On the basis of teamwork, jobs are designed
Interest	Organizational interest is kept on priority (Brewster, Chung & Sparrow, 2016).	Both organizational, as well as employees’ efforts, are harmonised
Orientation	Disciplined, directed and controlled function	It provides appropriate opportunities to the employees to grow and for enhancing performance
Communication	Limited or restricted communication	Open communication
Benefits	Disciplined employees and high productivity	Increased productivity, increased profitability, quality of work, flexible towards change, etc.
Outcome	Along with the attainment of organizational goals, employers’ goals are attained	Along with the attainment of organizational goals, both employees, as well as employers, are satisfied (Storey, 2014).

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the aforesaid discussion that both human resource management as well as personnel management acts substantially in the workplace. Although, personnel management is not much used in today’s business environment as its modified version has been launched as HRM. In this essay, the significance of human resource management has been discussed along with analysing whether human resource management is a management function or not. Further, the essay has discussed regarding the significance of the HRM with regards to the operations of TRAX. Although, the organization has not made a separate department for managing human resources due to less number of employees at the workplace. In relation to growth and development of the organization in near future, it is required for the organization to create HRM for the objective of enhancing organizational performance.

References

Armstrong, M. and Taylor, S., 2014. Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers.

Bailey, C., Mankin, D., Kelliher, C. and Garavan, T., 2018. Strategic human resource management. Oxford University Press.

Bratton, J. and Gold, J., 2017. Human resource management: theory and practice. Palgrave.

Brewster, C., 2017. The integration of human resource management and corporate strategy. In Policy and practice in European human resource management (pp. 22-35). Routledge.

Brewster, C., Chung, C. and Sparrow, P., 2016. Globalizing human resource management. Routledge.

Brewster, C., Mayrhofer, W. and Morley, M. eds., 2016. New challenges for European resource management. Springer.

Businesstopia. 2018. Personnel Management v/s Human Resource Management [online]. Available at: https://www.businesstopia.net/human-resource/personnel-management-vs-human-resource-management [22/11/2018].

Collings, D.G., Wood, G.T. and Szamosi, L.T., 2018. Human resource management: A critical approach. In Human Resource Management (pp. 1-23). Routledge.

Ipads for School Ireland. 2018. Trax Media Technology [online]. Available at: https://ipads4schools.ie/ [22/11/2018].

RefurbiPhones. 2017. Certified Refurbished Smartphones & Tablets [online]. Available at: https://refurbiphones.ie/ [22/11/2018].

Storey, J., 2014. New Perspectives on Human Resource Management (Routledge Revivals). Routledge.

West, M. 2015. Nature of Human Resource Management [online]. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nature-human-resource-management-monty-west [22/11/2018].