As you examine the following list, consider where your organization stands with respect to its practices.

1. Planning

• forecasting long-term human resource requirements for the business
• analyzing human resource availability, both in the marketplace and within the firm
• determining immediate human resource staffing needs

2. Recruiting

• seeking and attracting prospective employees from the inside & outside workforce
• objectively interviewing and selecting potential candidates from among applicants
• successfully hiring selected candidates
• orienting new employees to the company, their co-workers and the job

3. Retaining

• maintaining safe and healthy working conditions
• providing capable and consistent supervision, and appropriate job tools and resources
• maintaining a healthy company atmosphere with a sense of community and belonging
• providing appropriate base compensation and benefits founded on marketplace information
• respecting employees' rights in the workplace
• maintaining equal employment opportunity
• providing a vehicle for help/assistance for employees in personal distress
• keeping employees informed of important organizational issues, events, or decisions that will affect them

4. Energizing

• designing each department, team and job such that it allows for a sense of personal responsibility, challenge, creativity, skill variety, task importance, autonomy, teamwork, and achievement for every employees
• allowing for degrees of employee involvement, open communication, and flexibility in defining job requirements and planning expected employee performance
• providing ongoing praise, constructive criticism, and assistance to help employees develop and become more self-managed
• taking timely, corrective action to confront inadequate performance, or to reproach disruptive or destructive behavior
• continually building sufficient employee skills in areas of work, people and self management
• objectively and honestly reviewing and evaluating job performance with employees
• providing an appropriate blend of rewards and recognition based on a) individual job accomplishments and skill improvement, b) unit performance, and c) organization performance
• celebrating individual, group, and organizational accomplishments

5. Developing

• providing job progression/enhancement opportunities, or career advancement paths, for those employees with career aspirations and potential (and helping them smoothly transition into new roles or jobs)
• helping employees both to assess their job/career values, interests, skills and options, and obtain career input/feedback from manager, staff, and peers
• assisting employees to make appropriate career choices for both the organization's and the employee's benefit, as well as to ensure appropriate employee/job fit (i.e., putting right people into the right positions)
• having a humane process for discharging continually non-performing individuals, whose career development lay outside the organization

As a company grows, more and more attention needs to be paid to all these five areas, especially a) since there are exceedingly more people to manage and align with the company's goals, and b) because today's workforce has become more demanding of, and less loyal to organizations than they have been in the past (1, 2).

In order to maintain employee productivity and employment stability for the long-term, an organization must develop a consistent human resource management strategy that effectively encompasses all the five areas listed above. There is little to be gained by adopting refined practices in one human resource management area without equally sound foundations in the other areas.

Some References

1. Knowledge Workers Require a Special Touch, Harvey Gillman, Inside Guide, Spring 1990
2. The Brash Pack, Katherine Ann Samon, Working Women, August 1990
3. New American Workplace, Joann Muller, Boston Globe Article, Sunday, September 22, 1996.


Harvy Simkovits, CMC, President of Business Wisdom, works with owner managed companies to help them grow, prosper and continue on by offering innovative approaches to business development, company management, organization leadership and learning, and management education. He can be reached at 781-862-3983 or .