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The Human Resource Function of a Retail Store
The Human Resource Function of a Retail Store
1. Describe the human resource managers role from the Human Resource Managers viewpoint.
Human resource managers have the major function of supervising and controlling people inside the company. First of all, HR manager is responsible for selection of candidates for the organization. Skills and knowledge of every work applicant should be properly examined and evaluated. HR manager should take into consideration the candidates will of professional and personal growth.
Employees are the main assets of the company. Thus, mastering of their skills and knowledge leads to development of the business. Jim Pinto in his article People are Your Primary Assets said the following people are not financial assets that depreciate in value and can be written off; they are dynamic assets that can increase in value with time (Pinto, 2006).
Moreover, HR manager should pay much attention to the character and behavior of the worker. If the person has high level of knowledge and long experience on the position, but shows a challenging attitude, he or she may create considerable issues in the team.
After hiring a new employee, HR manager should organize trainings for a person in order to describe and teach him or her about the particularities of the work. Also, HR manager should help new worker to establish effective communication with colleagues. Any professional or personal issues should be carefully examined and rectified as quickly as possible with the assistance of HR manager.
HR manager should ensure positive relations in the team and workers welfare. Encouraging working environment facilitates open communication, sharing of ideas and creates background for mutual assistance. Managers should advise employees how to improve the internal working process and make their communication with the clients more effective and efficient.
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Much attention should be paid to safety of working environment. The standards of safety should correspond to local and state requirements in order to eliminate potential legal issues and to decrease the possibility of any accidents.
HR manager should perform planned and occasional audits of different departments of the company in order to check correspondence of the divisions to companys directions, standards of safety and security, and to clear up and rectify and issues of stuff appraisal.
2. Create a human resource management strategy for the retail store.
Firstly, the HR management strategy should be directed on saving current market position of the company and its further development.
Secondly, HR managers should search for methods of increasing the customer base, including the proposition of new goods, the strategy for lowering prices and increasing the quality of services.
Thirdly, much attention should be paid to the staff. HR managers have to perform regular and occasional audit of workers performance and distribute appraisals based on the results.
3. Propose three (3) methods to improve the human resource functions at the retail store.
Mary Winslow in her article HRM-Retail Industry wrote that retail industry is characterized by a large amount of unexperienced employees (Winslow, n.d.). Managers should exercise due diligence when hiring the employees without relevant work experience. At the same time, HR managers should clearly understand that part-time workers will comprise a considerable part of employees, because inexperienced workers can apply retail positions, such as checkout clerks, wrappers, stock clerks and some types of sales personnel, which doesn't require high education, training and skill (Winslow, n.d.). That is why convenient working shifts should be created, which would help employees to combine their work with personal life (i.e. studies, looking after children etc.).
Nevertheless, HR managers should strive to increase the number of full-time workers for saving cumulative knowledge and experience. For the purpose of planned staffing, managers can provide additional benefits for full-time employees in order to facilitate personnel to work the shifts.
In addition, it should be mentioned that retail industry is characterized by offering of wide range of services to a large base of customers. Therefore, HR managers should continuously improve their knowledge of customers psychology in order to determine their needs and wishes. Moreover, special psychological and ethical trainings and seminars for the workers should be held in order to improve their communicational skills, manners, appearance, and provide better understanding of customers desires.
4. Recommend any needed changes to the organizational structure of the retail store from a human resource management perspective and explain your recommendation.
Seasonal demand fluctuations have a considerable negative effect on the retail stores, because such changes introduce instability.
Neil Kokemuller in his article HR Challenges in Retail Sector stated that the holiday buying season, from "Black Friday" through Christmas, is well-known as the busiest shopping season of the year (Kokemuller, n.d). Managers of the retail stores usually hire additional personnel during such busy seasons. Temporary employees often have insufficient experience and lack of skills. That is why the service quality may go down. HR managers can develop special plan for hiring seasonal workers. The plan should include trainings and assimilation procedures of new personnel into regular staff: a store meeting at the start of the busy season is a good way to help temporary workers learn the system and get to know the regular staff (Kokemuller, n.d).
- People are your primary assets
- HR Challenges in the Retail Sector | Small Business - Chron.com
- HRM-Retail Industry - Fibre2Fashion
