Key Concepts and the Relation of Topics Week 1 Flashcards
To what extent can human resources impact your career development?
Human resources does not have authority over you. Your manager does. However, Human Resources can be involved in creating a plan of progression for you.
What are the four critical economic forces? What step does this affect in Strategic HRM?
- Economic cycles
- Global trade
- Productivity and innovation improvement
- Knowledge workers
This affects step 2 in Strategic HRM.
How do economic cycles affect the Canadian economy?
The Canadian economy experiences cycles of growth and decline, often influenced by other global economies. During recessionary periods, HR departments face challenges such as managing layoffs, negotiating wage reductions, and dealing with lower employee morale. In contrast, during boom cycles, HR must focus on recruiting and developing talent to support the organization’s expansion.
How does global trade affect the Canadian economy?
International trade has always been vital to Canada’s prosperity and growth. Canada consistently ranks among the top exporting nations, with a significant portion of its jobs and economic well-being relying on international trade.
What is the definition of productivity? How does productivity and innovation effect the Canadian economy?
Productivity refers to the ratio of an organization’s outputs to its inputs. Improving productivity is essential for long-term success. However, for more than a decade, U.S. productivity has consistently outpaced Canada’s. Without innovation, this gap in productivity tends to widen over time.
How does the increase of knowledge workers impact the economy?
Extractive industries like mining and fishing have seen a decline, while industries that rely on knowledge workers—such as education, health care, tourism, trade, and public administration—have experienced growth.
What are the three critical technological forces? What step does this affect in Strategic HRM?
- Connectivity and Work Design:
- Greater connectivity allows people to get quicker answers from their coworkers more easily. But it can be difficult to be expected to always answer emails.
- Individuals may suffer productivity loss because their attention is fragmented from email and teams messages.
- Technology brings flexibility (e.g., telecommuting) but raises cybersecurity concerns. Companies may have more access to an individual’s personal information than the individual may want. If employees have company information on their personal computers which they have at home, it’s easier for them to distribute company information. If an employee browses a site with a virus while using company computer, they can unintentionally leak company information when malware enters their computer.
- Automation:
- Organizations automate to increase speed, service, flexibility, predictability, and quality.
- Robots may replace boring or hazardous jobs.
- Data and Analytics:
- AI changed data analytics roles.
- Information systems store and access data quickly.
- HR data analytics rise with systems capturing employee info.
This all affects step 2 in Strategic HRM.
What are the four critical demographical forces? What step does this affect in Strategic HRM?
- Gender Balance:
- 47% of the workforce was biologically female (2020).
- More women work in healthcare and technical fields.
- Women are more likely than men to work part-time.
- Educational Attainment:
- More degrees make job competition tougher.
- Higher education leads to advanced, knowledge-focused jobs.
- Easier access to education increases upward mobility.
- Aging Population:
- Labor shortages as older workers retire.
- More healthcare use by older people raises taxes.
- Generational Shift:
- Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha are all in the workforce.
- Each generation has different workplace expectations.
- Leadership dynamics are different for each group.
Generation X(born 1965-1980) care more about work-life balance, and like to be active participants in decision making regardless of their role. They don’t like “command and control” culture. Some writers believe that Generation X think of work as a job, while Baby Boomers think of it as a career. Generation X like to think of themselves as self reliant, while Baby Boomers think of themselves as team oriented. Generation Y seek continuous learning, ongoing feedback, teamwork, up-to-date technology, security, respect, and work-life balance. They worry they may get bored at work.
This affects step 2 in Strategic HRM.
What are the two different cultural forces? What step in Strategic HRM does this impact?
- Diversity and Social Justice
- Ethics
This affects step 2 in Strategic HRM.
Define staff authority, line authority, and functional authority. Which does HR fall into.
Staff authority is the authority to advise, but not direct others. This is HR. Line authority is the authority to make decisions about production, performance, and people. And functional authority allows staff experts to make decisions and take actions normally reserved for line managers.
What are the three beliefs of ethics. This can influence the way organizations develop ethical people.
1) Universalist approach: Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter the circumstances.
2) Situational Approach: What is good or bad depends on the circumstances.
3) Subjectivist: The individual decision maker facing a situation determines what is right and wrong after considering all aspects of their situation, factoring in their personal beliefs, upbringing, values, and beliefs.
What are the six stages of morality, according to Lawrence Kohlberg?
Stage 1: Obedience and Punichment Stage: Just looking for rewards.
Stage 2: Reciprocity Stage: This person did this for me, so I will do that for them.
Stage 3: Interpersonal Conformity Stage: What is right is depending on my peers and family.
Stage 4: Law and Order Stage: Obeying society’s rules is right.
Stage 5: The Social Contract Stage: The greatest good for the greatest number.
Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principles Stage: People are treated as ends in themselves, not as a means to an end of furthering one’s personal goal. It’s basically trying to benefit other people for their own good, and not trying to use people for yourself or even a greater cause.
What are the 6 key components(laid out in steps) of strategic human resources?
- Planning human resources: Conducting job analysis that enables the human resource manager to understand the performance standards for the job. This step facilitates the planning of employee training.
- Attracting Human Resources: Recruiting and selecting workers. This requires them to meet equal employment opportunity laws and affirmative action policies.
- Placing, Developing, and Evaluating Human Resources: Orienting new employees to the company culture, and establishing expectations for their performance. They will give performance assessments which will help individuals work on weaknesses, and helps the Human Resources department identify future training needs. Poor performance means that selection or training should be redesigned.
- Motivating employees: Internal work procedures, bonuses, and compensation should be modified to optimize performance.
- Maintaining High Performance: This involves good communication between managers and employees to maintain motivated employees, standardized disciplenary procedures, and counselling systems.
- Review, Evalution, and Audit of Human Resource Strategies: An organizations technology, work environment, and policies change frequently. These changes must be for the better.
What is the difference between an employee and a contractor?
A contractor is only paid for the period the contract is set up. Contractors do not get any benefits. Employees get reductions like Canadian Pension Plan, and employment insurance, but a contractor doesn’t. There is more security and predictability for employees. Independent contractor isn’t given benefits by the government.
What are the five steps of the Human Resource Planning Process?
1) Forecast Demand for Resources: How many employees will we need. When will we need them. Where will we need them.
2) Assess Internal and External Supply of Resources: What resources are inside the organization. Who can we promote to fulfill these roles we need to hire for. Once the company has exhausted internal options, only then do they look externally. That’s why 80 percent of roles are fulfilled internally.
3) Develop HR Objectives: What do they expect to happen because of their objectives.
4) Design and Implement HRM Programs: They try to balance demand and supply. For instance, if the organization is projecting a shortage of labour, it may choose to outsource or use overtime. Or if a surplus is expected, they allow employees to do job sharing.
5) Establish program evaluation: Using quantitative and qualitative measures, evaluate whether there is a tangible link between investments in human resource programs and organizational sustainability, and if so, to what degree.
How does a merger or acquisition change human resource needs?
After a merger or acquisition, several jobs will be redundant and layoffs and company restructuring will be necessary. New roles will be needed to be introduced as well.
What are the two types of expert forecasts?
Delphi Technique: The soliciting of predictions about specified future events from a panel of experts, using repeated surveys until convergence in opinions occurs.
Nominal Group Technique: A focused group discussion where members meet face-to-face or digitally, write down their ideas, and share them. All new thoughts on a topic are recorded and ranked for importance.
What are the two types of Trend Projection Forecasts?
Extrapolation: Extending past rates of change into the future.
Indexation: A method of estimating future employment needs by matching employment growth with a selected index, such as the ratio of production employees to sales. For example, planners may discover that for each million-dollar increase in sales, the production department requires 10 new assemblers.
What are the three other forecasting methods other than expert forecasts and trend projecting forecasts.
1) Budget and Planning Analysis: Organizations that need human resource planning generally have detailed long-range plans, short-term operational plans, and budgets to support those plans.
2) New Venture Analysis: When new ventures complicate employment planning, planners can use new-venture analysis, which requires planners to estimate human resource needs by comparison with firms that already perform similar operations.
3) Simulation and Predictive Models: Data analytics models can simultaneously use extrapolation, indexation, survey results, and estimates of workforce changes to compute future human resources needs.
What are the various attrition strategies?
1) Leave without pay. So they can travel or attend university.
2) Incentives for Voluntary Seperation. Paying employees money to leave the organization.
3) Termination or Layoffs. Permanent Seperation from the company.
4) Outplacement. Helping employees find jobs at other companies.
5) Hiring Freeze. No more hiring.
6) Early and Phased Retirement offers. Phased retirement involves reducing salary and workload. Early retirement means spreading out the pension over a longer period, but not reducing the pension.
What are the steps of strategic human resource management?
Step 1: Organizational Mission, Goals, Strategy and Analysis. A mission statement specifies what activities the organization intends to pursue and what course is charted for the future. It is a concise statement of “who we are, and what we do” and gives an organization its own special identity, culture, and path of development. Step 1 also includes cost leadership strategy, differentiation strategy, and focus strategy.
Step 2: Environmental Scan. Identify threats and opportunities. These can be grouped under five headings: economic (e.g., recession), technological (e.g., automation), demographic (e.g., workforce composition), cultural (e.g., ethnic diversity), and legal (e.g., changing laws).
Step 3: Analysis of Organizational Culture and Character: Organization Structure: the product of all of an organization’s features and how they are arranged— people, objectives, technology, size, age, and policies.
Organization Culture: the core beliefs and assumptions that are widely shared by all organizational members.
Step 4: Choice and Implementation of Human Resource Strategies. There are 5 steps following that: i) planning human resources, ii) attracting human resources, iii) placing, developing, and evaluating human resources, iiii) motivating employees, iiiii) maintaining high performance.
