Human Resource

Introduction
Human resources describe the human work effort, both physical and mental, used in the production of goods and services. Human resources are one of the three basic productive resources: natural, human, and capital.

Human resources, like the other productive resources, are considered scarce. That is, human resources are not freely available in unlimited quantities. This is why producers must pay wages and salaries to obtain the human resources they need to produce goods and services.

Not all human resources are equally valuable to producers. Some workers are not highly skilled (i.e. are less scarce) compared to others, and do not earn as high a wage. Very skilled and educated workers are typically very productive, and, therefore, are highly valued by employers. These workers usually command a high wage/salary. Examples would be a star athlete or brain surgeon. Workers who possess significant skills due to education and training are said to have high levels of human capital.

It takes discipline and hard work to develop human capital. To do so often means investing one’s time and savings in education and training courses. But the result is a reasonable expectation of higher income and usually a more interesting job.

This is the management activity taken by commercial firms, state owned enterprises and other organisations to recruit, retain and motivate their employees. In other words HRM (Human resource management)  is the bundle of policies, programmes and plans which organisations adopt with the objective of making full use of the people they employ. These include everything from recruitment and selection techniques (which initiate the relationship between firm and employee), to the mass of rules that determine how people are treated as current employees, and all the way to policies on separation (which determine whether, and in what circumstances, an employee is to be let go).
A model of strategic HRM conceptualise workforce performance as a function of capabilities (the knowledge, skills and aptitudes which employees need to carry out their work), motivation (the incentives which employees require to encourage them to perform to the best of their abilities) and work organisation (the way that work and organisations are structured so as to allow employees to perform well). To this we add employment relations (the policies, programmes and practices which govern the relationship between employees and employers) on the basis that employee relationship management is a key responsibility of the HRM function