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Unit 2: e-Human Resource Management

2.6.1 The HR Philosophy Notes

The HR philosophy is a statement of how the organization regards its HR, what role the
resources play in the overall success of the business, and how they are to be treated and
managed. It is a very general statement, which can be interpreted and implemented in
different ways and can be found in the organization’s “statement of business value”. It does
however not describe how and which activities should be performed for managing the HR.
2.6.2 The HR Policies and Programmes
An HR policy, used in this context, does not mean an HR policy manual. The HR policies
do not contain rules prescribing the HR activities to be performed. They however, provide
guidelines flowing from the strategic business needs to align the different HR activities to
create an HR system that contributes to the same business needs. HR programmes are the
efforts, which should be undertaken to align these HR activities. Thus, the HR policies
provide guidelines for HRM issues related to the strategic needs of the organizations and
HR programmes represent coordinated efforts to implement these policies related to the
strategic needs.
2.6.3 The HR Practices and Processes

The HR practices describe how behaviour of employees can be directed to contribute to
organizational performance. They describe what the HR system should try to achieve with the
employees. Three roles are necesary to achieve the right behavour of employees. Such as:
1. Leadership role
2. Managerial role

3. Operational role.
These roles contain statements about what the HR system should achieve. A statement from
the managerial role could be for example: Give people the freedom they need to do their
jobs. This level describes actual HR practices implemented in specific circumstances and
enhances accuracy in measurement. The HR processes area deals with “how” all other HR
activities are identified, formulated, and implemented. Where HR practices are used to elicit
and reinforce needed behaviours by workers, HR processes define how activities are to be
carried out considering these levels of analysis is critical to understand the use and
effectiveness of human capital management systems. If for instance the focus lies on the HR
philosophy then it enhances generalisations but it reduces the accuracy by neglecting variations
in HR system implementations. Focusing solely on HR practices enhances the accuracy in
measurement but neglects the importance of other HR practices that are also used.
2.6.4 Performance of the HR System

It is important to know how the performance or effectiveness of the HR system can be
measured. The effectiveness of the HR system is since the mid 1990s heavily debated. The
reason for this is that it is not clear to what extent HRM contributes to the firm performance.
Different studies have focussed on different aspects of the effectiveness of the HR system.
Some studies focus solely on financial numbers like return on investment, assets or equity
while others focus on the balanced score card to gather other data as well as customer and
employee indications. In addition, surveys of workforce satisfaction are used as indicators
of performance. It is expected that the use of the e-HRM technology has an impact on the
performance as it is expected that the implementation of e-HRM speeds up transaction
processing, reduces information errors, and improves the tracking and control of HR actions.
For this research, it was studied how the outcomes and the effectiveness of the HR system
could be measured.

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