The effective management of an organization’s employees (i.e. its human resources) is arguably the single most difficult, most complex, most ambiguous, yet most important task that managers face. It is an area of management policy-making that is not characterized by rigorous globally accepted professional standards. This is true for at least four reasons:
- HR policies refer to human behavior, which is complex, often conflict-ridden, and culturally dependent.
- There are many different HR policy instruments and practices.
- The success or otherwise of different HR policies, programs and plans is difficult to evaluate.
- Many managers believe that people management is just common sense.
In order to understand those four reasons, the following explanations can be read
Human resource policies refer to human behavior
Because human resource policy deals with managing people, it involves human behavior and relationships that are inherently complex, potentially conflict and sometimes problematic. Machines or money markets are so much easier to deal with than people, so that (contrary to much popular opinion) being a production engineer or a finance officer is arguably far easier and more straightforward than being responsible for ‘people management’.
In order to understand HR policy properly, whether as an analyst or as a practitioner, you need to acquire many skills. You need to know how and why organizations make the choices they do and behave the way they do; this means you need a theory of the firm.
But you also need to know how and why workers behave and react in the ways they do, whether as individuals or in groups; and you need to be able to judge how they might behave and react if circumstances (e.g. the HR policies) were to alter; this means, among other things, that you need effective theories of motivation.
These are formidable requirements, and they imply that you need to blend together the different social science disciplines, for example, economics, industrial relations and organizational behavior. HR policy is therefore inherently multidisciplinary, which might make it more interesting for some but definitely makes it more difficult for everyone.
You also need to know more than just the theory; you need to know the empirical work too. This requires a grasp of research design, a store of complex information, and the ability to manipulate and interpret that information, which is why statistical expertise is becoming part of the HR professional’s job description. So, to understand and design HR policies properly is not a trivial intellectual task.
Many human resource policy instruments and practices
A second reason why HR policy is hard to get right comes from its multiplicity of policy instruments. Policy-makers in all fields have policy instruments. One problem for HR policy-makers is that there are so many HR instruments available to them: hiring policy, induction policy, training policy, employee development policy, pay and rewards policy, job design decisions, career or promotion policies, and so on.
Adding to the complexity, each area of HR policy is likely to have some impact on the others. This means that it is unwise to analyze any single policy in isolation from the others. One should instead see it in the context of the whole, which means having a sense of possible ‘HR strategies’, or groups of policies. The very multiplicity of policies makes the whole subject ambiguous.
Human resource policies, programs and plans are difficult to evaluate
A third reason why HR policy is so difficult is that HR policies, programs and plans are very hard to evaluate properly, so that managers cannot easily establish whether their policy choices are wise.
Neither can outside analysts easily find out whether a firm’s policies, or those of a set of firms, are working optimally.HR managers often distinguish between policies (local sets of rules or codes established help coordinate people management activities within an organization), programs (interventions designed by HR managers to achieve specific objectives such as a change program following a merger or redundancy programs resulting from a prolonged decline in sales) and plans (specific instruments or tools such as an incentive plan). These three active forms of intervention can be contrasted with HR practices, which are informal rules or codes – ‘the way things are done around here’. These are helpful distinctions to use when evaluating HR activities.
Natural scientists can conduct controlled experiments to assess the full consequences of a course of action. Social scientists cannot usually do this, and when they can it is normally possible only in the artificial environment of the social science laboratory. Running controlled experiments in the real world of work is exceedingly hard, and very rare. So HR policy evaluations have to be done indirectly, and with much less precision. The result is that no one can be at all confident that managers are in fact doing the right thing, even if their HR policy choices look plausible by the standards of common sense or some theory.
People management is just common sense
The fourth reason why HR is so hard to get right is the prejudice shared by so many managers that people management can be done by almost anyone, and requires common sense rather than special training. It seems that everyone has an opinion on HR issues. HR is sometimes seen as an area of management that should be done by those who are not quite good enough to do other more demanding management tasks. Read also: 5 Basic Steps to Create A Successful Human Resource Plan.