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- [Instructor] Welcome to week one of Human Resource Management Foundations, business 210. And so now we have the privilege of diving into the course
content. Certainly want to acknowledge with gratitude that we carry out our work in learning on the land of indigenous people across our beautiful province, and
I'm always very grateful to work and learn alongside each of you on the land that (indistinct) resides of the WSANEC peoples and the Lekwungen speaking
peoples of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. So, learning goals for this week, certainly want to make sure that you can define what human resource
management is, that you understand the processes and practices contained within it, that you understand the importance of human resource management to
organizations and to employees, that you have a clear understanding of the relationship between line managers and HR practitioners. We're going to unpack
some of the business trends or topics facing our work world today and how they relate to human resources. We're also going to talk about key demographic and
employee concerns, and the link between business strategy and human resource management strategy. So lots to cover this week. In terms of human resource
management, your text articulates the definition as an integrated set of processes, practices, programs, and systems in an organization that focuses on the
effective deployment and development of its employees. So a little bit wordy, but some important components there, and also some components I think that are
missing from this definition. One, it concludes with a focus on employees, and in fact, I think HR practitioners engage with many more folks than just
employees, even if we thought about the role of HR to support candidates that are not employed with the organization at a given point, that's an important
consideration for human resource practitioners and HR management. The integrated set of processes, practices and programs, I just wanna talk about that
important term there, integrated. And so in order to have effective integration, I think strategic HR needs to very much understand vertical and horizontal
alignment. And so what I mean by that, and we'll talk about it a little bit later in a future slide is the HR strategy needs to be aligned with the corporate strategy
and the competitive strategy, so vertical alignment there. It also needs to be aligned with functional areas strategy, so marketing, research and development, the
financial strategy for the organization. So we need to have good vertical and horizontal alignment in terms of our processes, practices, and programs. So what's
encompassed under HR management? Job design and analysis, human resource management planning, recruitment and selection, retention, performance
management, orientation and training, compensation, recognition and rewards, health, safety and wellness, labor relations, and employee relations. And we're
gonna have an opportunity throughout our 14 weeks together to hone in on all of these topics or components that are embedded under the umbrella of human
resource management, learn about them and how they relate to the work of human resource management. You may have heard of an individual named David
Ulrich. He is known as sort of the guru of HR. He came up with this concept around how HR can effectively relate to the business. And he refers to this as the
three-legged stool. And that there's kind of three core components for effective HR management in an organization. And I suppose what's powerful about the
image of a stool is if you remove one of those legs, the stool itself does not stand. So suggesting that each of those legs is integrally important to the structure of
human resources. So the first leg of the stool would be HR services. So this tends to be more administrative, employee facing transactional types of services, so
these could be things like your payroll, your attendance, your simple employee issues. Another leg of the stool is your HR sort of business partnership, your
operations around that. So these are the folks in HR that work very closely with line managers, with senior leaders. They help to develop an HR agenda, they
support the organization, they're focused typically on how they can build capacity throughout the organization of the people to support delivery of the
overarching objectives. And the third leg of the stool is HR centers of excellence, these tend to be more strategic. They are HR specialists. So here you might
have folks that are specialized in strategic compensation or organizational design and development. And so again, these folks typically come into play with your
line managers, with your senior leaders, your HR business partners will pull them in based on whatever the HR need is or the solution that needs to be sought.
So again, all three components of HR are instrumental. If you have worked in human resources in a smaller organization, often you might only have one, two or
three HR practitioners as part of your HR team, and therefore you're kind of doing what I call soup to nuts, so you're having to uphold all three legs of the stool,
but you don't have whole teams necessarily supporting each of those legs, you're doing all of it yourself or amongst a very small team. We're gonna talk about
some of the contemporary issues that are facing human resource management. There's six that are identified through your text. So talking about the global
economy and what does that mean for human resource management, changes in firms and business sectors, so here we're referring to maybe downsizing,
outsourcing, mergers, acquisitions. How does technology fit into the world of human resource management? Perhaps does quality management fit into that?
We're gonna talk about the concept of human capital and demographics. So when we think about the global economy, we know that in Canada alone, our
economy is heavily influenced by international competition. In fact, 70 to 80% of our economy is affected by international competition. And so in order to
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operate globally, it means that we need to work in a much more complex environment. So if you work for an organization that is multinational or global, what
that means is you are having to comply with not just one set of legislation, you're likely complying with a multitude of sets of legislation, and that adds to the
complexity of the work. In addition, you likely have a workforce that's geographically dispersed, and so what that means is you are likely operating in various
countries or jurisdictions where there are different cultural norms and definitely different political contexts. And so again, even within the scope of that, human
resource management becomes much more complex in terms of how it serves the organization. In terms of changes in firms or sectors, it's not uncommon to
think about terms like downsizing where we're needing to shrink our workforce, thinking about things like outsourcing, where maybe we say, in fact we aren't
gonna do payroll in house, we're gonna outsource that to a third party to provide our payroll. Contracted resources. It's also not uncommon for us to think about
things like mergers and acquisitions of companies coming together. Very early on in my career, I worked for a high tech firm named Creo that was acquired by
Kodak. At the time, I think Kodak had well over 40,000 employees. I think we had about 2,500 employees at the given time. So we were a small fish relative to
Kodak being acquired, we were one of six smaller high tech firms that were acquired by Kodak. It was frankly, an effort to salvage Kodak, Kodak has since
gone bankrupt. But one of the challenges with that, and it has tentacles into sort of that global economy lens too is that headquarters for Kodak were in
Rochester, New York, and there wasn't a very strong desire to try and understand the cultural norms of Canada where many of our Creo-ites or Creo employees
resided. In fact, they brought in a senior director of HR from Rochester, New York to lead the team. Other considerations with that, acquisition was due. Did the
HR programs policies and practices stay intact or do we absorb Kodak HR practices programs and processes? And in fact, Creo absorbed Kodak's approach,
which was somewhat unfortunate because the whole reason Kodak had acquired these six smaller organizations was because they were cutting edge in terms of
some of the work they were doing and had these great cultures and good HR practices and programs to support those great cultures, and did away with all of it.
And in fact, I would say within a year of the Kodak acquisition of Creo, we lost probably the top 10% of our high performers in the organization. So again, these
are all, it's a simple example, but all things to consider in terms of thinking about how you support workforce needs for your organization. Certainly another
element of that is just sheer labor costs. So again, how do you deliver achieving on the organizational objectives at the lowest possible cost? Is something that
HR is tasked with. Technology. So just like every aspect of our life is touched by technology, human resource management is no exception to that. So certainly
cloud computing, telecommuting, artificial intelligence, even just thinking about how our world has evolved in a post pandemic context. You know, certainly
many employers have just embraced a virtual or remote workforce or at least a hybrid of that. Very few, unless there's an operational requirement have gone
back to only in office type of work. And so again, that's a different way of managing a workforce, and there's technology required to support that. Artificial
intelligence, again, so many things available to us today in terms of that artificial intelligence that can help us with our business. So from an HR standpoint, AI
can support human resources with detecting employee engagement trends. It can help us gauge group satisfaction, it can help us optimize benefit offerings, it
can help us understand the financial impact of specific programs. It can help us with even automatically transcribing meetings. So many different ways that
technology plays a role in a positive capacity with moving the HR practice forward. Quality management is another core business trend going on today. So
again, a heavy focus on quality to the customer. We've got programs like Six Sigma, Lean and Benchmarking. Benchmarking is probably more of a familiar
term for most folks, simply where we are benchmarking to competitors to improve our practice and ensure our highest level of quality. Six Sigma might be a
new term for you. So if you've taken Bus 150, you've probably heard this term, it was introduced in 1986 by Motorola, and the focus was being about making
products that were free or providing services that were free of defects. 99.99966% free of defects, in fact which is why it's called Six Sigma, is it's going to the
six percentile in terms of being free of defects. So very much about reducing the probability of error and improving business processes from a quality
standpoint. Lean is a term that some folks might be familiar with, it was adopted by Toyota in the 1930s. In fact, it's often, in Toyota was referred to the Toyota
way around eliminating ways, optimizing processes, cutting costs and boosting innovation. And so even in terms of our HR practices and programs, any one of
those could go through a Lean review to try and make sure that we're reducing waste being as efficient as possible in terms of our program and service delivery.
Human capital is a term used and so it refers to the value that employees bring, the collective value that employees bring through their knowledge, skills,
abilities and core competencies. And so when we talk about human capital, what we're trying to do is build our human capital, and we can build our human
capital by hiring wonderful human beings to come and join our organization. Then enriches our human capital, it could be that we are investing in training and
development, and so we are actually building the human capital of the folks that we already have through that. So again, certainly a term being used, and I
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would say an I underpinning of that term is the belief that people are an asset, not a cost. And so if as an organization you espouse that belief of your employees
are truly an asset, then you may use terminology like human capital because you're always thinking about how to make your human capital of greater value. So
things to consider from a diversity or demographic lens, pardon me, certainly diversity is a component when we think about demographics. So perhaps one of
the most important lenses right now from an HR standpoint, supporting inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible workplaces. Within the scope of that,
certainly we've got up to five generations right now operating alongside one another in the workplace. What does that mean? How does that show up? And how
do we honor generational differences in our workplaces? We're facing a labor skills shortage right now. You can see it, all you have to do is walk through your
local community, and every third restaurant or third retail space has a help wanted sign in the window right now. Again, a large contributing factor to that is we
have a massive population of baby boomers here in Canada. And as those folks near or get ready to near retirement, we don't have as many folks coming up just
in terms of our population to fill those seats that have been held in organizations. So an important consideration around sort of how we navigate through that
labor and skills shortage. Gender distributions. So again, when we look at organizations, how representative are they? Do you have just as many men and
women working in your workplace? And then when you start looking at your leadership and your executive roles, do you have, again, representation of both
men and women in those roles? Even with the work I do with the BC Public Service, generally we have good gender distribution broadly, but as soon as we start
moving up into the leadership ranks, we see that lesson. So it's important to understand that. And the last sort of shift happening demographically is rising levels
of education. And so we have the good fortune of having a highly educated society here in British Columbia. But the challenge that that also poses is that if we
actually need an unskilled workforce to develop the product or service that our business is about, we are likely not going to have much talent here in British
Columbia to tap into because we do have a highly skilled and educated workforce. So again, that's why we do see a lot of organizations going to other parts of
the world to tap into an unskilled workforce, because in more developed countries, it can be hard to find an unskilled workforce, particularly when we think
about managing labor costs as well. I'll just flag that this is a great TED Talk to watch, I will not share it through this video, but I encourage you to check out
Rainer Strack who looks forward at the crisis, workforce crisis of 2030, looking at kind of the demographic implications of that and how we need to start
thinking about that now. Some of the trends happening with respect to employee expectations, you may have heard of sort of this power shift dynamic
happening between the employer and employee, certainly as we've kind of come out into a new phase of the pandemic. So we're seeing more employee power
than employer power, lots of contributing factors to that. And I think underpinning that is employees expectations around wanting to do meaningful work. So I
would say that top of mind for candidates today because they have their pick around whom they can work for in a tight labor market, is, am I going to be able to
engage in work that's meaningful to me? Will I feel like I align with the vision, the values and the mission of the organization I'm working for? And so again, the
overall organizational purpose has become more and more powerful and profound in terms of what employees expectations are. Work-life balance is another
employee expectation right now. So again, organizations that were pushing employees back into office settings in a post pandemic context, have felt a rub with
that, tension with that. Many employees found that actually some of the remote or virtual work provided for some work life balance and enabled folks to throw a
load of laundry in, for example, during a lunch break or maybe some flexibility around their schedule, and hours saved with commutes to be able to maybe pick
up or drop off children at school, for example. So employees very much demanding greater work-life balance. And we're seeing this kind of shift away from a
rigid nine to five schedule to a much more flexible approach. Organizations adopting flex starts and flex finishes, flex schedules where maybe you work a four,
five, so you work a four day work week one week, and a five day work week the next. All sorts of pieces like that. Certainly even part-time schedules, right? So
folks that aren't wanting to work a full five days, a 100% of a full-time equivalency able to look at doing things differently with respect to that. So important that
we understand those concepts. And also in a tight labor market where we're competing for talent, really organizations and HR practitioners need to be providing
advice to their organizations to make sure that what you're offering is meaningful for employees that are with your organization or coming into your
organization, and you've got really good work life balance policies with respect to that. So the last piece I wanna cover today is around aligning corporate
business and human resource management strategies. So we'll use a few models here, I talked about vertical and horizontal alignment, even in the definition of
human resource management when we were talking about integration. And here maybe we can visually see that. So at the very top, organizations are going to be
deploying some type of corporate strategy, so an organization may be choosing to grow, either through building new business lines or creating greater capacity
within the market space that they currently hold. An organization could choose to deploy a stability strategy where ultimately they aren't looking to gain any
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space, they're just looking at trying to retain the market space they already hold. Or we could be looking at a renewal strategy where due to financial
circumstances of the organization, they're actually having to step back. So maybe potentially divesting themselves of a couple of business lines, shrinking their
workforce, doing their business differently. So that would be referred to as a renewal strategy. So with that, HR strategy needs to align to that. So if we're
growing, what does that mean for HR? Well, for HR it means we're probably hiring a whole bunch of folks, right? So our HR strategy absolutely needs to be
thinking about a key component of that being recruitment and selection, and what are the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies we need to help the
organization grow? Or if we're looking at a renewal strategy where we're actually divesting ourselves out of some business lines, it might mean that we're
actually shrinking our workforce. And so what does HR need to be doing to support shrinking the workforce in terms of early retirements or hiring freezes or
even things like concluding employment with folks to shrink the workforce. We then go down to the competitive business strategy. So how will your business
actually compete in the market space? So are they going to compete simply on price, or the uniqueness of the product? And so if you're competing on price,
whether it be broad or focused, ultimately every dollar and penny counts in that strategy. And so, again, from an HR standpoint, really focused on reducing labor
costs and thinking about the most efficient and effective way of deploying the workforce to support the organization. If you're focused on competing on the
uniqueness of your product, whether it be broad or focused, again, you're actually probably less worried about the costs of your labor and more focused on
specialized skills, the uniqueness of your workforce, hiring for those unique competencies that's going to make you more competitive than your competition
ultimately. And then we have the functional strategy. So hopefully through that, you saw the vertical alignment that's going on from an HR standpoint. We also
wanna make sure that there's horizontal alignment. So from an HR strategy standpoint, we wanna make sure that our strategy also aligns with operations,
research and development, marketing and the financial strategy or functional strategy within the organization. If you're enjoying the learning and want to lean in
a little bit more to this, here's some enriched learning resources. We've got the HR Leaders Podcast number six with David Ulrich, it's about a 30 minute podcast
here that you can check out. Also a five minute reading article, "Changing employee expectations: What HR leaders and organizations need to know." So that's
through SHRM and a blog. So encourage you to check those two resources out in terms of your learning. Some additional helpful sites to check out here, CPHR.
If you aren't already a student member, you might wanna check that out for BCN Yukon. Deeply discounted rates for student members, a great opportunity to
tap into learning and networking if human resources is a field you're looking to further in terms of your career. And some other sites here as well that have
useful information.
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