An organization consists of people with formally assigned roles who work together to achieve the organization's goals. A manager is the person responsible for accomplishing the organization's goals, who does so by managing the efforts of the organization's people.
Most experts agree that managing involves five functions: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. In total, these functions represent the management process. Some of the specific activities involved in each function include:
- Planning. Establishing goals and standards; developing rules and procedures; developing plans and forecasting.
- Organizing. Giving each subordinate a specific task; establishing departments; delegating authority to subordinates; establishing channels of authority and communication; coordinating subordinates' work.
- Staffing. Determining what type of people you should hire; recruiting prospective employees; selecting employees; training and developing employees; setting performance standards; evaluating performance; counseling employees; compensating employees.
- Leading. Getting others to get the job done; maintaining morale; motivating subordinates.
- Controlling. Setting standards such as sales quotas, quality standards, or production levels; checking to see how actual performance compares with these standards; taking corrective action, as needed.
We are going to focus on one of these functions—the staffing, personnel management, or human resource management (HRM) function. Human resource management is the process of acquiring, training, appraising, and compensating employees, and of attending to their labor relations, health and safety, and fairness concerns. The topics in HRM should therefore provide the concepts and techniques to perform the "people" or personnel aspects of your management job. These include:
- Conducting job analyses (determining the nature of each employee's job)
- Planning labor needs and recruiting job candidates
- Selecting job candidates
- Orienting and training new employees
- Managing wages and salaries (compensating employees)
- Providing incentives and benefits
- Appraising performance
- Communicating (interviewing, counseling, disciplining)
- Training and developing managers
- Building employee commitment
- Equal opportunity and affirmative action
- Employee health and safety
- Handling grievances and labor relations
