Welcome to Unit 1 of MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource
Management.
When a business organization is formed, human resources are needed to provide service in
order to make the organization operate and thrive. Where do these human resources come
from? How can the human resources be chosen to achieve greater organizational
performance? Why do human resources choose to stay with or leave an organization?
Overall, what is the job of human resource management (HRM)? What do HR professionals
need to do in order to carry out HRM well? Unit 1 looks at these basic questions as well as
discussing some key development trends in HRM.
More specifically, this unit:
• explains what HRM is and how it relates to organizational management;
• analyses some of the important trends influencing HRM; and
• discusses the role of and the competencies required to be an HR manager.
Throughout the unit, you will be directed to read through the assigned topics from your
textbook, and visit the OLE website for the multimedia components. A series of
supplementary lectures will be provided to give you an overview of most of the topics, but
the textbook reading is still essential to your learning.
You will be asked to complete some activities in between textbook reading sections, which
are designed to help you consolidate the concepts covered or provide you with opportunities
for hands-on practice. In addition, a self-test and an online quiz are provided at the end of the
unit, which can help evaluate your understanding. You should attempt the self-test and the
online quiz after you have done the related reading. Suggested feedback on activities is
provided in the ePub version and on the OLE. Although these components are not counted as
formal assessment for the course, they are very useful for summarizing and reinforcing what
you have read and learnt throughout the unit.
All the learning tasks are clearly outlined in this Study Guide, and it is highly recommended
you follow this guide in your study. In this unit, you will need to cover the following
materials:
Unit 1 1
• The chapter entitled ‘Introduction to Human Resource Management’ in your custom
textbook.
This content has been selected to help you gain a more in-depth understanding of the building
blocks that are fundamental to strategic HRM.
Unit 1 outline
The following provides you with an outline for working through Unit 1. This unit explains
what HRM is, and why it’s important to all managers. You will see that HRM activities such
as hiring, training, appraising, compensation, and development of employees are part of
every manager’s job. You will also see HRM as a strategic function of an organization. The
main topics you will cover include the basics of HRM, a brief history and recent trends of
HRM, and the job of HR professionals. The page numbers refer to the page numbers in your
custom textbook. The activities, self-test, and online quiz are shown in italics. The assigned
readings are available in the OUHK E-Library and from specified online resources.
Remember to refer also to the OLE as you work through the unit.
2 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management
Basics of HRM
What is human resource management? [p. 5]
• Why is human resource management important to all managers?
• Line and staff aspects of human resource management
• Line managers’ human resource management responsibilities
• The human resource department
Activity 1.1
A brief history and recent trends of HRM
The trends shaping human resource management [p. 9]
• Workforce demographics and diversity trends
• Trends in how people work
• Globalization trends
• Economic trends
• Technology trends
Activity 1.2
Reading 1.1 (OUHK E-Library)
Today’s new human resource management [p. 15]
• A brief history of personnel/human resource management
• Distributed HR and the new human resource management
• A quick summary
• HR and strategy
• HR and performance
• HR and performance and sustainability
• HR and employee engagement
Activity 1.3
Reading 1.2 (OUHK E-Library)
The HR professional
The new human resource manager [p. 20]
• HR and the manager’s skills
• HR and ethics
• HR manager certification
• HR and the manager’s human resource philosophy
Activity 1.4
Reading 1.3 (online)
Self-test 1.1
Online quiz
Unit summary
Unit 1 3
Introduction to human resource
management
The objective of this unit is to introduce to you the basics and trends of human resource
management (HRM). The discussion starts with the fundamental meaning of HRM.
Basics of HRM
You may have learned about the basic concept and functions of management in other
foundation-level business management courses. Generally, the goal of management is to plan
and control the production process and organize and lead others to carry it out. How can this
concept of management be applied to managing human resource of an organization? Or, by
definition, what is human resource management? Now please turn to your custom textbook to
read the following topics.
Textbook topics
What is human resource management? [p. 15]
• Why is human resource management important to all managers?
• Line and staff aspects of human resource management
• Line managers’ human resource management responsibilities
• The human resource department
To understand what human resource management is, first you need to be clear on some key
terms: organization, human resource, management/manager. According to the textbook, an
organization consists of people with formally assigned roles who work together to achieve
the organization’s goals. Those people represent one of the resources needed for the
production of the organization among other physical resources such as land, machines, and
money. A person called a manager is then responsible for coordinating and putting all these
resources, physical or human, into production in order to accomplish the organization’s goals.
Correspondingly, the job of human resource management (HRM), according to the custom
textbook, is to acquire, train, appraise and compensate employees (i.e. the human resources),
and to attend to their labour relations, health and safety, and fairness concerns. These
functions of HRM are not only important for the top managers; instead, they are relevant and
require the assistance of all managers in the organization, including line managers or
frontline supervisors. You will read the reasons why the job of HRM is relevant to all
managers, as well as the role that can be played by different levels of managerial staff for
HRM. At the end of this section, the custom textbook provides you with an organization chart
showing how a typical HR department would look in a large organization. As you will see,
the HR department is divided into teams specializing in different HR functions such as
employee relations, training and development, and pay and classification. In latter units of the
course, you will have a chance to examine these HR functions more specifically. In smaller
organizations, the layout of an HR department will certainly not be so sophisticated;
nonetheless it is responsible for performing the same scope of HR functions as in larger
organizations.
4 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management
Activity 1.1
Outline the different responsibilities expected of HR managers today. With the help of
examples, explain why you think these duties are considered important in organizations.
Share your findings with your classmates and tutor in the tutorial class.
After completing any activity, don’t forget to check the feedback in the ePub version or on
the OLE.
You have now grasped the basic concept of HRM and what the HR department is usually
responsible for. In the next section, you will examine some important trends shaping HRM,
i.e. how changes in life and society are affecting the job of HRM, as well as a brief history of
it.
A brief history and recent trends of HRM
Now please move on to the following topics to examine some key trends occurring in the
environment of HRM that are changing how employers get their human resource
management tasks done. These trends include workforce trends, trends in how people work,
technological trends, and globalization and economic trends.
Textbook topics
The trends shaping human resource management [p. 9]
• Workforce demographics and diversity trends
• Trends in how people work
• Globalization trends
• Economic trends
• Technology trends
After reading the above topics, you should be able to understand and anticipate these trends
and their impacts on HRM.
Workforce demographics and diversity trends: You may pay attention to the recent and future
changes of workforce composition in Hong Kong. Overall, there is the well-known trend of
the aging population, and thus an aging workforce, in the coming decades. This has caught
the attention of both policymakers and HR professionals. In general, an aging workforce will
mean the delay of retirement and re-training of older employees, not to mention the need to
take care of their physical and psychological health.
Trends in how people work: Work has shifted from manufacturing jobs to service, or, to use a
more contemporary term, knowledge jobs. According to the Hong Kong Census and
Statistics Department (https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/home.html), the number of employees
working in the four key industries (financial services, tourism, trading and logistics, and
professional services and other producer services) in total occupies 46.9% of the entire
employment population. All of these four key industries could be considered as service jobs,
while it can be argued that some can be categorized as knowledge jobs, based on different
definitions of knowledge jobs (which is beyond the scope of our discussion here).
Globalization trends: Companies around the world are competing for cheap labour for
production and service. You may notice that modern products are usually made in developing
countries such as Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. Moreover, call centres, i.e. the
customer service officers answering your phone call, may not be located locally. The officer
Unit 1 5
that you are speaking to may be in Malaysia or India while you are holding a phone in Hong
Kong and calling a Hong Kong number.
Economic trends: This includes financial factors such as inflation/deflation or changes in
gross earnings per employee, as well as the situation (fluctuation) of the labour market such
as the size of the labour population and the unemployment rate.
Activity 1.2
Go to the webpage of the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department (https://www.censtat
d.gov.hk/home.html) and search for relevant economic factors such as average salaries of
employees, unemployment rates, and the labour population of the past five to ten years in
Hong Kong. What trends can you observe from these figures? What implications do they
have for HR professionals in Hong Kong?
Technology trends: It may be technology that most characterizes the trends shaping HRM
today. The use of social media, mobile technologies, and big data analyses are the major
technological trends affecting every function of business, not only HRM. You should prepare
and equip yourself with necessary technological skills to meet the job demands of the
knowledge market in the information age.
The following reading examines the potential benefits of Web 2.0 on HRM functions, which
echoes the discussion of technology trends you have just read. The authors have conducted a
thorough literature review and developed seven propositions that summarize the gap between
Web 2.0 and HRM, i.e. the areas of understanding that we can further develop so as to better
reap the benefits of Web 2.0 tools.
Reading 1.1 (OUHK E-Library)
Azeem, M F, and Yasmin, R (2016) ‘HR 2.0: Linking Web 2.0 and HRM
functions’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 29(5), 686–712.
This article is available in the OUHK E-Library → E-Reserve. (See the Course Guide
section ‘E-Library E-Reserve readings’ for more information.)
According to the authors, the Web 2.0 regime refers to the use of social media tools to
connect with both internal and external stakeholders. However, according to the observation
of other scholars, Web 2.0 technologies are only creating marginal benefits for almost all the
major HR practices including HR planning, recruitment and selection, training and
development, performance and reward management, and employee career and relationship
management. The authors thus propose two major questions for readers’ consideration: (1)
whether Web 2.0 tools can benefit the major functions of HRM, and (2) to what extent Web
2.0 tools help HR managers to reap maximum efficiency and effectiveness out of the major
HRM functions. As a contemporary student of HRM, you should bear these two questions in
mind and try to explore the potential benefits of Web 2.0 tools as they have become
ubiquitous in today’s business environment. You may or may not follow the propositions of
the authors as the starting point of your investigation; but after reading this article you should
at least be able to explain how Web 2.0 tools may help lower the costs of staffing decisions,
improve employees’ performance, and most importantly achieve a competitive advantage for
the organization through better HR decisions.
Now please go on to the following topics for a brief history of the concept of HRM and its
latest practices in the business world.
6 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management
Textbook topics
Today’s new human resource management [p. 15]
• A brief history of personnel/human resource management
• Distributed HR and the new human resource management
• A quick summary
• HR and strategy
• HR and performance
• HR and performance and sustainability
• HR and employee engagement
If you have gained some years of experience in the workplace, you should have heard the
terms ‘personnel management’ and ‘personnel office’. In fact, it is not uncommon to still see
a ‘personnel department’ rather than a ‘human resources department’ in some organizations.
Personnel management is an older HRM term. In the era of personnel management, the
personnel department was mostly an administration unit responsible for handling the
personnel records of an organization. When personnel management became HRM, the
personnel of an organization ceased to be seen as a cost to be controlled; instead, it became
seen as an important resource for production or even a source of competitive advantage for
the organization. The major difference between personnel management and HRM is therefore
how employees are perceived and treated within an organization. Under the concept of
personnel management, employees can be likened to ‘paper records’ to be filed, stored and
(easily) discarded. For HRM, employees are resources to be acquired, developed, and
retained for competitive advantage.
The custom textbook also discusses the concept of distributed HR as the latest trend of HRM.
In short, distributed HR means that the tasks of HRM do not lie with the HR manager or the
top management; instead, line managers or even employees themselves are also responsible
for the construction and development of a capable HR pool (or human capital) for the
organization. Moreover, it is commonly accepted nowadays that HRM should play a strategic
role in the organization, and thus the concept of strategic HRM has emerged. You will go
through this topic in detail in Unit 2. Last but not least, the custom textbook introduces
HRM’s relationship with performance measurement, sustainability, and employee
engagement. These are all important performance indicators to reflect the efficiency and
effectiveness of HRM.
Activity 1.3
You have now read some of the latest trends in the development of HRM. Many people
believe that the application of artificial intelligence (AI) is possibly the next wave of
development in different business areas including HRM. The following online article
discusses the impact of AI technology on the workplace. After reading, do you think that AI
could possibly replace the job of the HR professional? If not, in what ways can AI facilitate
the job of HR professionals?
Unit 1 7
Reading 1.2 (OUHK E-Library)
Greenwald, T (2017) ‘How AI is transforming the workplace’, The Wall Street
Journal, 10 March.
This article is available in the OUHK E-Library → E-Reserve. (See the Course Guide
section ‘E-Library E-Reserve readings’ for more information.)
The HR professional
Now please move on to the following topics to see what competencies are required for a
capable HR professional in today’s organizations.
Textbook topics
The new human resource manager [p. 20]
• HR and the manager’s skills
• HR and ethics
• HR manager certification
• HR and the manager’s human resource philosophy
Clearly, the job of the HR manager is becoming increasingly complex nowadays. The custom
textbook has chosen some important areas for your consideration on how to prepare for a
career as an HR professional today. In addition to general managerial skills such as leadership
and communication, a focus on ethics is an important quality of modern managers. In short,
ethics in business means that the company’s practices meet desired and acceptable moral
standards in a community, not to mention legal standards. Moreover, cultural awareness and
inclusiveness should form the HR philosophy of a manager as well as the company. A
rejection of racism and discrimination seems to be an undisputable value in contemporary
society. Therefore, a modern HR professional should embrace this philosophy himself/herself
and help to disseminate it across the entire organization.
In Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Institute of Human Resource Management (HKIHRM) was
established to develop, maintain, and enhance professional HRM standards in Hong Kong.
The Institute also aims to increase the value and influence of the HRM profession. Upon
registration, members can view a variety of reports that the Institute publishes regularly
regarding HRM trends in Hong Kong, such as pay trends and training and development
needs.
While we are on the topic of the value of the HRM profession in Hong Kong, the following
article published in 2015 makes the claim that HR professionals in Hong Kong are generally
unhappy. Let’s read through it and find out what is wrong with Hong Kong’s HRM
profession.
Activity 1.4
Read the following online article (Reading 1.3). What do you think are the major sources of
unhappiness for HR professionals in Hong Kong? What can be done to remedy the situation?
8 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management
Reading 1.3 (online)
Ang, J (2015) ‘Why HR professionals in Hong Kong are unhappy’, Human Resources
Online, 23 June.
http://www.humanresourcesonline.net/hong-kong-hr-professionals-unhappy/
Now that you have reached the end of Unit 1, it is time to attempt a self-test and an online
quiz to see if you have achieved the learning outcomes set for the unit.
Self-test 1.1
Please attempt the following questions to review your learning of the topics in this unit.
- Give examples of how HRM concepts and techniques can be of use to all managers.
- Outline the various kinds of trends that have an impact on HR management. Give an
example of each.
Online quiz for Unit 1
Now, please attempt the online quiz on the OLE. You will receive immediate feedback on
how accurately you have mastered the contents of Unit 1.
Unit summary
In this unit, you have been introduced to the basics of HRM and recent trends in the field.
Specifically, you will have achieved three learning objectives through your reading and
completion of the different activities and self-tests. You should now confidently be able to
explain what HRM is and how it relates to organizational management, analyse some of the
important trends influencing HRM, and discuss the role of and the competencies required to
be an HR manager. You have also gone through some supplementary readings to examine the
HRM context in Hong Kong. Overall, you have gained both academic knowledge and
practitioners’ insights into the work of HR professionals and how they can contribute to the
operation of an organization. Unit 2 will focus more specifically on the strategic role of HRM
in organizational management.
Unit 1 9
Unit 2
The job of HRM: its strategic
role
Introduction
Welcome to Unit 2 of MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource
Management.
In Unit 1, you learned about the basics and recent trends of human resource management
(HRM). The HR department of an organization is responsible for providing the organization
with sufficient and qualified human resources to make the organization operate and thrive.
However, finding and recruiting qualified human resources is never an easy or casual task.
The HR manager has to understand the strategic goals of the organization and thus recruit
human resources that can support the pursuit of those goals. In this sense, the management of
human resources is a strategic function of the organization that plays a critical role in
developing and sustaining the business of the organization.
Unit 2 therefore looks at the strategic role of HRM in an organization and examines how
HRM contributes to the development of the business model, and discusses how it affects and
is affected by the strategy formulation of the organization.
More specifically, this unit:
• defines strategic human resource management (SHRM) and gives an example of SHRM
in practice;
• examines the linkages between HRM and strategy formulation; and
• examines various examples of HR metrics and the importance of HR audit.
As in the study guide of Unit 1, you will be directed to read topics from your textbook, and
visit the OLE to access the multimedia components. Activities, a self-test and an online quiz
are provided for you to practice, consolidate and evaluate your understanding. Be sure to
attempt these and check the feedback given in the ePub version or on the OLE.
All the learning tasks are clearly outlined in this Study Guide, and it is highly recommended
you follow this guide in your study. In this unit, you will need to cover the following
materials:
• The chapter entitled ‘Human Resource Management Strategy and Analysis’ in your
custom textbook.
Unit 2 11
In addition, there is a reading and video for this unit which are available online. They have
been selected to help you gain a more in-depth understanding of the building blocks that are
fundamental to strategic HRM.
Unit 2 outline
The following provides you with an outline for working through Unit 2. The page numbers
refer to the page numbers in your custom textbook. The activities, self-test, and online quiz
are shown in italics. The assigned readings are available in the OUHK e-library and from
specified online resources.
Remember to refer also to the OLE as you work through the unit.
12 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management
Basics of strategic management
The strategic management process [p. 36]
• The management planning process
• What is strategic planning?
• The strategic management process
Types of strategies [p. 39]
• Corporate strategy
• Competitive strategy
• Functional strategy
• Managers’ roles in strategic planning
Activity 2.1
Activity 2.2
The strategic role of HR professionals
Strategic human resource management [p. 41]
• What is strategic human resource management?
• Sustainability and strategic human resource management
• Strategic human resource management tools
HR metrics, benchmarking, and data analytics [p. 46]
• Benchmarking
• Strategy and strategy-based metrics
• What are HR audits?
High-performance work systems [p. 51]
Activity 2.3
Activity 2.4
Reading 2.1 (OUHK E-Library)
Employee engagement
Employee engagement guide for managers: employee engagement and
performance [p. 52]
• The employee engagement problem
• What can managers do to improve employee engagement?
• How to measure employee engagement
• How Kia Motors (UK) improved performance with an HR strategy
aimed at boosting employee engagement
Video 2.1
Self-test 2.1
Online quiz
Unit summary
Unit 2 13
Human resource management strategy and
analysis
The focus of this unit is the strategic role of HR professionals and how they contribute to the
strategic planning of the organization. Before we begin our discussion of this, we will first
briefly review the basic concepts of strategic management.
Basics of strategic management
You may have learned about strategic management in other management courses. Its goal is
to deploy and allocate resources to achieve competitive advantage and address the challenges
an organization faces. What is the role of managers in this process? Now please turn to your
custom textbook to read the following topics.
Textbook topics
The strategic management process [p. 36]
• The management planning process
• What is strategic planning?
• The strategic management process
Types of strategies [p. 39]
• Corporate strategy
• Competitive strategy
• Functional strategy
• Managers’ roles in strategic planning
The chapter starts the explanation of strategic management with a description of the basic
management planning process, which involves the setting of organizational goals and the
planning of actions to achieve the goals. In an organization, a strategic plan is usually
designed by the top management to inform its managers and employees about the strategic
position of the organization and where the organization will be going in the future. Both the
setting of organizational goals and the analysis of the strategic position and direction of the
organization are crucial steps in the overall strategic management process. The custom
textbook summarizes a seven-step strategic management process and introduces you to
various facilitating tools such as the SWOT analysis and the vision and mission statements.
Acquaint yourself with these tools and concepts and then attempt the following activity.
Activity 2.1
Differentiate between a company’s strategy, vision, and mission.
After completing any activity, don’t forget to check the feedback in the ePub version or on
the OLE.
You have now learnt the basic concept of strategic management. In practice, organizations
often engage in three different levels of strategy making. These are corporate strategy,
competitive strategy, and functional strategy. Now attempt the following activity to check
your understanding about the two major competitive strategies.
14 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management
Activity 2.2
Suggest, with explanations, two companies that are adopting a cost-leadership competitive
strategy and another two companies that are adopting a differentiation competitive strategy.
Share your suggestions with your tutor and classmates in the tutorial class.
Figure 3-5 in the custom textbook summarizes the relationship between the three levels of
strategy and the key questions to be addressed by managers on each of the levels. Although
making these different levels of strategic plans is usually the job of top managers, other
managers including HR managers can supply ‘competitive intelligence’ for the top managers
to make better decisions, as these middle or lower managers usually possess more in-depth
and up-to-date knowledge regarding their respective areas. For example, within the
organization, it should be the HR manager who has the best knowledge on relevant
employment legislation and labor market trends. He or she can therefore supply the top
management with important insights into whether the organization should grow into a new
business (a corporate strategy), based on how easily qualified employees in that business
might be recruited; or he or she may advise on whether the organization should employ a
cost-leadership strategy (a competitive strategy) from the perspective of reducing the human
costs of the organization.
The strategic role of HR professionals
After learning the basics of strategic management, it is time to look at the role of HR
professionals played in the strategic planning of the organization. Please now move on to the
following three topics to gain a better understanding of the concept of and tools used in
strategic HRM.
Textbook topics
Strategic human resource management [p. 41]
• What is strategic human resource management?
• Sustainability and strategic human resource management
• Strategic human resource management tools
HR metrics, benchmarking, and data analytics [p. 46]
• Talent management
• Benchmarking
• Strategy and strategy-based metrics
• What are HR audits?
High-performance work systems [p. 51]
According to the custom textbook, strategic HRM refers to the formulation and execution of
HR policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviours the
company needs to achieve its strategic goals. More specifically, we can say that the strategic
role of HRM in the organization is to identify the opportunities and threats in the external
environment that are related to the HRM function, and the strengths of weaknesses of the
organization’s workforce in achieving the strategic goals. In other words, the job of HRM
professionals is to help minimize the gap between the competencies of the organization’s
workforce and the organizational capabilities needed to deal with the opportunities and
challenges in the business environment. The custom textbook provides two examples of how
Unit 2 15
the Shanghai Ritz-Carlton Portman Hotel and Zappos prepared their employees to achieve
organizational goals. You may try to respond to the question under each case and raise
discussions in the tutorial class.
The custom textbook raises the issue of sustainability as an important organizational goal in
today’s business and discusses how HRM can contribute to this goal. In fact, organizational
sustainability in general and sustainable HRM in particular have become rather hot topics in
recent management and HRM studies. To gain a better understanding of what they are,
attempt the following activity.
Activity 2.3
Conduct an Internet search (using Google, Yahoo, Baidu, etc.) to find the definitions of key
terms such as ‘organizational sustainability’ and ‘sustainable HRM’. Then think about why
sustainable HRM should be a strategic goal of an organization. Share your opinions with your
tutor and classmates in the tutorial class.
The custom textbook also introduces to you some management tools for translating the
company’s strategic goals into HRM policies and practices, as well as for some metrics and
analyses for assessing the effectiveness of such policies and practices. One particular analysis
you should get familiar with is HR audit, which refers to an analysis by which an
organization measures where it currently stands and determines what it has to accomplish to
improve its HR functions. This analysis is critical in designing the training and development
activities for the employees in order to equip them with the necessary competencies to
respond to current and future demands of the organization. Lastly, you should understand that
a major reason of implementing all these tools and analyses is to build a high-performance
work system (HPWS), which refers to a set of HRM policies and practices that together
produce superior employee performance.
Now, attempt the following discussion question to summarize what you have learnt about the
strategic role of HRM in an organization.
Activity 2.4
Explain with examples how HRM can be instrumental in helping a company create a
competitive advantage. Share your opinions with your tutor and classmates in the tutorial
class.
The following reading provides you with additional tips on how to transfer traditional HR
into strategic HR.
Reading 2.1 (OUHK E-Library)
Crowley, J (2017) ‘Transforming transactional HR to strategic HR: 7 ways to do it’,
HR Strategy and Planning Excellence Essentials, March.
This article is available in the OUHK E-Library → E-Reserve. (See the Course Guide
section ‘E-Library E-Reserve readings’ for more information)
According to the author, traditionally, ‘the job of the HR professional was to deal with the
technical and administrative aspects of personnel management’, and thus was often labelled
16 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management
as ‘personnel administration’. The author proposes seven things HR professionals can do to
transform their work from transactional to strategic HR. These tips are:
• introduce employee self-service;
• automate your most basic processes;
• align business goals with a people strategy;
• delegate repetitive tasks;
• start thinking three steps ahead;
• report on meaningful workforce metrics; and
• stay ahead of the trends.
Overall, these tips as a whole suggest that HR professionals should move away (by
automation or delegation) from traditional paperwork towards a greater focus on the tasks of
HR planning and assessment.
Employee engagement
The last part of Unit 2 discusses an important practice in today’s HRM — employee
engagement. In short, employee engagement targets the psychological attachment of
employees toward the organization. Essentially it aims to enhance employees’ commitment
and loyalty to the organization. Please go through the following topics to gain a sense of what
employee engagement is, why it is important to the organization, and the challenges in
implementing it. An example of Kia Motors (UK) is provided to facilitate your
understanding. You will notice that the topic of employee engagement will reappear several
times in subsequent units of the course.
Textbook topics
Employee engagement guide for managers: employee engagement and
performance [p. 52]
• The employee engagement problem
• What can managers do to improve employee engagement
• How to measure employee engagement
• How Kia Motors (UK) improved performance with an HR strategy
aimed at boosting employee engagement
You have largely completed your study of Unit 2. Before ending our discussion, please watch
an online video to enrich your knowledge on the role of HRM in an organization’s strategic
management.
Video 2.1
Please watch the video entitled ‘CHRO conversations: Interview with Caroline
Mandeville’ which is available at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCPA3wI0WYs
The video is an experience sharing offered by the chief human resources officer (CHRO) of
Nuveen on the key challenges faced by today’s HR professionals. The challenges include 1)
the effective use of technology such as A.I., 2) talent attraction and management, and 3) the
changing nature of work requirements. In order to be the strategic adviser in the organization,
Unit 2 17
HR professionals have to recognize and understand well these future trends and challenges of
the business world and then propose appropriate HR strategies for the organization to cope
with these challenges. What recommendations could you think of to tackle these challenges?
This is not a self-test question but a question that you will certainly bear in mind when you
enter the world of HR professionals. There is a chance that your suggestions, with proven
performance records, will be put into future’s HRM textbooks.
Now that you have reached the end of Unit 2 it is time to attempt a self-test and an online
quiz to see if you have achieved the learning outcomes set for the unit.
Self-test 2.1
Please attempt the application case entitled ‘Siemens builds a strategy-oriented HR system’ at
the end of your custom textbook chapter. Then answer the three questions that follow by
applying the concepts you have learnt in this unit.
Online quiz for Unit 2
Please attempt the online quiz on the OLE. You will receive immediate feedback on how
accurately you have mastered the content of Unit 2.
Unit summary
In this unit, you have been introduced to the linkages between HRM and strategic
management, thus highlighting the strategic nature of HRM in an organization. Specifically,
you will have met three learning objectives through your reading and completion of different
activities and self-tests. You should now feel able to define SHRM and give examples of
SHRM in practice, describe the linkages between HRM and strategy formulation, provide
various examples of HR metrics and explain the importance of HR audit confidently. You
have also gone through a supplementary reading and an online video to examine strategic
HRM from practitioners’ perspectives. Overall, you have learned how HR professionals can
work as strategic partners to the top management of the organization by examining the issue
from both theoretical and real-world perspectives.
18 MGT B349 Managing Key Functions in Human Resource Management