Every Manager Is An Hr Manager Management Essay

Human resources management is one of the most important management job among profit or non-profit organizations. Throughout the process of recruitment, promotion and discharge, human resource management undertake these activities by evaluating and connecting people to get the best interest and benefits for their organization.

When handling HR for small business or start-ups, the founder may take the responsibility to hiring, training, managing and departing the first groups of employees. It is crucial to manage other departments as well as finding a group of like-minded people to build a brand new organization from the ground up. In a sense, small business managers are essentially tough line human resource managers that carry out all the individual employee’s duties unassisted.

As the organization grows, specialized HR managers will often join in to build human resources department. Furthermore, it can be subdivided in to line HR, strategic HR and corporate HR as a representative of certain layer of management hierarchy. However, regardless of whether there is a human resources department in the organization, every manager will still directly or indirectly control the resources of every single employee. They undertake the same responsibilities of “obtaining, developing, utilizing, evaluating, maintaining, and retaining the appropriate number and skill mix of employees to accomplish the organization’s objectives” (Dessler, Cole, & Sutherland, 2002) with professional HR managers.

Human resource management played a major role within the Marine Swanson International Commons from Learning and Teaching Centre in University of Victoria. As a long term volunteer student and founding member of this community, from the very first recruitment for the grand opening ceremony to the most thriving and inclusive global community at Uvic, I personally experienced the importance of HR management in every step. The most unique feature of International Commons is the diversity. Not only is the fact that students and staffs are coming from different part of the world, they also taking different discipline and levels of study which strictly delimited their flexibility of time to contribute our community. As most of the members are international students including exchange students, international degree students and landed immigrations in continuing study, most exchange undergraduate students and doctorial students may only stay in Victoria less than two semesters. Even international degree students may experiencing the intensity of massive work load under the continuing pressure of compete with local student in academy and looking for co-op opportunities. As the time approaching graduating, participating time won’t be guaranteed. Therefore, recruiting for new blood became the necessity to keep this community operate. After the semester of grand opening ceremony, our director aware of this issue and began to build major groups to make out community running smoothly. We first recruit work study students and long term committed volunteers to form a relative fixed committee that managing focus group and office group on weekly basis. By holding, co-organizing or participating diversity forms, cultural clubs and multicultural performance events, we rapidly gained the reputation of engaging community that creates fun and multicultural experience that open for all students, faculty and staff. Special session has been built based on each events, faculty director, professor or staff come join the group meeting to help training volunteers for their academy, different kind of skills specialized for international student including language barrier, public speaking skill, health and wellness etc. After special training, sessional volunteer hold their own presentation or training session for other communities and prospective volunteers. By creating warm welcome environment for every student walk by IC office, to hold variety of events that attract and satisfying international student’s need, build training session from volunteer to volunteer high volunteer mobility turned into positive and helped our community thrive in an unexpected way. It also build an efficient rewarding system to encourage volunteer participating.

Part B: Responding to the changing environment

1. Provide brief background information about your chosen organization, including the organization’s goals and values, business activity/activities, number of employees, etc.

The International Commons at Uvic mainly support all international students to build strong connection and sense of belonging while study abroad. This organization offers academic support by senior student volunteer and faculty staff. Provides multicultural, health and recreational workshop special designed for international students. It creates a welcoming space where local students and international students can connect, study and participant variety of events together. Over two hundred students engaging our community events each semester, approximately quarter of them are the main contributor.

2. Conduct a SWOT analysis for your organization identifying the organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses as well as the external opportunities and threats. Comment on the business challenges and trends affecting your organization today, including changing demographics, increasing workforce diversity, aging employees, skills shortages, etc.

Strengths

What advantages do you have?  

What do you do well?  

What relevant resources do you have access to?  

What do other people see as your strengths?

Weaknesses

What could you improve?  

What do you do badly?  

What should you avoid?

We are able to respond very quickly to help individual student’s need.

We can always come up with new ideas and forms of presentation to attract more students and volunteers into our community.

We have a large group of consultant including faculty staffs, professors from almost all departments.

People see our community as a fast grow, representing new voices for international students as well as domestic students around campus.

We have small long term volunteer group, with different levels of presenting and organizing skills. Holding workshop regularly can help to improve the overall level.

We are vulnerable to important volunteers being leaving. It happens from time to time due to variety of reasons.

Due to the shortage of operating budgets, we should eliminate unnecessary deposits in the early stages.

Opportunities

Where are the good opportunities facing you?  

What are the interesting trends you are aware of?

Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale with government policy related to your field.

Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes. 

Threats

What obstacles do you face?  

What is your competition doing?  

Do you have bad debt or cash flow problems?  

Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your business?

We are the first student based, University jointed official international community on campus.

Our community is expanding rapidly, with many potential donor and participator.

With more international exchanges, we can seize this opportunity to maximise our influence.

We don’t have a well-established management hierarchy, some of our volunteer and staff could getting overwhelmed occasionally.

We still need to working on how to build a good relationship with our local multicultural communities and potential supporters.

Comment:

By conducting SWOT analysis, lots of potential challenges are affecting us today and the near future. Weakness and threats including lack of communication with off campus communities, shortage of operating funds and all participants have various levels of skill. With more international exchanges, other similar communities and organizations are grown up at the same time, stand up to the competition would be another important issue to bring up.

3. Explain how your organization is responding to these challenges, for example, contracting, job sharing, outsourcing, etc.

We are currently began to build different level of volunteers based on their participation. Each presentation group, focus group and event group have their own consultant and senior volunteer leader. After gaining reputations around campus, we reached out to connect with multicultural clubs, international associations based on students in Great Victoria area, participating diversity forums etc.

Part C: The Legal Environment

Investigate the employment legislation in the jurisdiction you are working in. Explain the implications of these laws on HRM policies and practices that you encounter.

As an employer, University of Victoria gained its reputation and named Top 50 BC Employer three years in a row from 2010. (University of Victoria, 2012) It obeys the standard legislation, all employees belong to the Canadian Union of Public Employees with local code 951. As a public employer, Uvic take Human rights legislation into actions. These actions including host diversity research forum participated partially by the International Commons community each year to raise the awareness of diversity and equity issue around campus and larger communities in our island, brought up the equity issues of LGBT and build a national-wide network to support staff and students on campus etc. (Mediacorp Canada Inc., 2012) Health insurance, entitlements and other benefits are included based on the BC Employment Standards Act. Some of the benefits are above the Employment Insurance benefit entitlement such as maternity and paternity leave top-up. (Mediacorp Canada Inc., 2012)

For such a large public employer, its HR department also focused on supporting and balancing variety of associations which represent the benefits of Professional Employees, faculty members and CUPE locals. The University continuing negotiates with various groups to prevent strike and job action. Collective barging could be an ongoing process using legal agreement to protect communities’ right.

Conducted by Canadian employment laws, Uvic HR department managed to all types of employee. Creating equal opportunity by applying policies and practices into our community. Managing diversity activities to ensure the effectiveness of multicultural working environment inside associations. To make these things happen, legal environment will always be the crucial part in our community.