Answer 1
Human resource management(HRD) can be defined as a process of recruiting, selecting, training,
evaluating, motivating and maintaining a pool of efficient employees and also maintaining proper
relations with the employees, ensuring their safety, welfare and healthy measures in accordance
with the labour and compliance laws. Effective human resource management encourages employees
to work efficiently towards accomplishment of organisational goals and objectives. Human resource
management, these days, is now expected to make optimum utilization of employees skills and
competencies with an objective of retaining them.
There are few trends which influence human resource management which are enumerated below:
Changes in the business environment : With changing internal and external environment,
employees need to improve their skills and competencies in response to these changes. HRD
facilitates this development with the aid of various programs from time to time.
Poor performance : HRD addresses performance issues of employees who lack skills or are
demotivated and are not performing as per the expectations, for the organizational
performance improvement with the aid of HRD programs like performance improvement
programs(PIPs), employee engagement programs etc.
Launch of new products : With growing competitive environment, an organisation needs to
launch new products from time to time. First level is the employees who are to be made
aware about the product USPs or the need of new product. Also they are made aware about
the skill set and abilities to respond to such product launches and changes. This is where the
role of HRD comes into play.
Higher performance standards : With the view to ensure long term success, organizations
focuses on establishing higher performance standards for their employees. HRD programs
enable the employees to be aware about their skills and their areas of improvement so that
they can meet the higher performance standards set by the organizations. A high
performance rate of employees lead to high productivity and long term success of an
organization.
Career progressions requirements : HRD programs focuses on improving employees’
attitude, behaviour, skills and knowledge that can enable them to perform better and grow
in their career. It also prepares them for the next progression level in their career.
Answer 2
Performance management can be defined as the process of acquiring and processing the
information needed to improve an individual employee’s performance and accomplishments. It is a
process wherein an employee’s performance is evaluated with the aid of day to day, month on
month or any other activities that he has performed for completing the tasks assigned to him/her
and how relevant was the work to the growth of the organization.
There are various methods of performance management which are broadly classified into two major
heads:
1. Past oriented methods
2. Future oriented methods
Past oriented methods
These refer to the old methods/techniques for performance evaluation. These are more of a trait
driven rather than being process driven. Employees are majorly evaluated on the basis of
established standards like personality, ability to judge, attitude, leadership, initiative, versatility,
commitment, domain knowledge, punctuality etc. These can further be divided into seven major
methods as below:
1) Confidential report : A descriptive report is prepared and submitted by the immediate
reporting authority of the employee. It covers the strengths and weaknesses of the
employee but it lacks suggestion for improving his performance. Feedback is kept
confidential and is not shared with the employee. This leads to employee being de-
motivated if he himself/herself could not judge the areas of improvement.
2) Essay method : An essay is written by the appraiser or a short narration about the employee
mentioning the strengths and weaknesses of the concerned employee. The major demerit of
this method is that it can be biased as it is subjective in nature. Thus, there are chances that
the appraiser may write biased essay if he/she doesn’t like the employee.
3) Critical incidents method : An employee is appraised by taking a on-the-job real life like
situation and he is asked to perform/share in response to the situation as he would do in
real life. This gives a clear picture about the way of thinking of the employee in any
particular situation.
4) Checklist method : In this method, the appraiser provides a rating to the employee based on
a checklist which is prepared keeping in mind the requisites in on-the-job responsibilities of
the employee. Checklist includes objective type of questions and or descriptive type
questions that the appraiser is required to answer. Thereafter ratings for all questions are
added in certain proportion and a resultant number is arrived which is the rating of the
employee. The main demerit of this method is that the appraiser can be biased towards the
employee, which may lead to difference in actual rating.
5) Forced choice method : This method requires the appraiser to provide rating to the
employee on the basis of descriptive questions wherein choices are to be rated as most
likely to least likely choice as per employees performance.
6) Paired comparison method : In this method, performance of an employee is compared with
the other employees in the same job role/function/grade and are compared one by one and
thereafter rating the employee.
Future oriented methods
With changing needs of the organisations and technological advancements, there arised a need to
have modern approaches for performance management. Some of future oriented methods are
enumerated below.
1) Human resource accounting method : An employee is appraised on the basis of money. It
includes the cost incurred by the employee towards recruitment, training, development and
compensation against the revenue/productivity of the employee. If value is
positive(expenses are less and productivity more), then employee is considered valuable,
otherwise negative.
2) Management by objectives(MBO) method: This is by far most commonly used performance
appraisal method. In this method, an employee is asked to establish goals for themselves in
assistance with their supervisors. At the end of year, they are rated on the basis of
performance vs achievement for the goals set by the employee himself. This mutual goal
setting approach leads to high employee satisfaction, strong job commitment and enhanced
motivational level for the employee.
3) 360 degree appraisal method : This method as name suggests provides a better picture of
the employee performance. In this method, organisation appraises an employee based on
the feedback received from various sources such as subordinates, superiors, colleagues and
the employee himself/herself. The feedback received from various sourced is kept
anonymous and helps in providing a better picture of employees performance and helps to
determine the strengths, weaknesses and exploit opportunities for their self development.
Answer 3 A
