HR practice critical to nation building, say stakeholders

Human resources stakeholders have emphasised the need for organisations to provide a good employees’ welfare to enable them to contribute significantly to economic development.

According to the professionals at the 13th yearly conference of the Lagos State Chapter of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria (CIPM), recently, human resource personnel are well positioned to play an instrumental role in helping their organization achieve its goals of becoming a profitable and responsible firm and work towards economic development.

A communiqué issued at the end of the three-day conference, recommended that, employers should provide medical faculty, paid and unpaid holiday, allowances for family and children to promote work-life-balance of employees.

It stressed the need for organizations to engage in succession planning to promote employee career development.

Speaking at the event, the President and Chairman of Council, Anthony Arabome, said personnel practitioners have the duty to build a virile, profitable and effective organization and promote national economic growth and development.

He noted that conference was organised to promote personnel management practice, improve the professional competence of members, informs the governments, industries and the general public about the activities of the institute and of its members.

Also, the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of the CIPM, Sunday Adeyemi, in a paper titled: “The State of the Industry”, said that personnel management practice was influenced by nine major trends, which includes these are globalization, generational diversity, sustainability, personnel technology, mass communication, open innovation and technology.

He focused on the extent to which globalization and technology have promoted talent sourcing, compensation management, performance management, human resource management planning, career management were also addressed.

Another guest speaker and member of council, Ola Azeez, said that satisfaction of major stakeholders, which include employees, customers, government and the public were the major conditions for improved productivity and sustainability.

He said that organization mission; vision and value should take cognizance and be premised on the proper assessment of external environment, strategy, strategic framework, operations framework, execution and result.

He asserted that organization’s profitability and customer satisfaction and retention could only be achieved through effective human resource performance and management. “This is because land, capital, machine and equipment could only be transformed into good quality goods and services through effective human resource management”.

Chief Executive Officer, OML Africa, Anita Wiate Asinor, in her paper titled: “Tools and framework for performance management in relation to setting up an human resources department”, sees “human resource management as the strategic and comprehensive approach to managing people and the work place culture.

According to her, performance management is about directing and supporting employees to work effectively and efficiently towards the achievement of the organizational organizational objective.

She added that the human resources department serves as strategic partner, change agent, administrative expert and employee champion. “The key result areas of human resources department include recruitment and selection, performance management, reward management and career management among others. Effective performance management should be development driven and be linked to various aspects of the business performance management could be operationalized by stating the objectives, monitoring of performance, review of performance and improvement and development of employee performance”, she said.

Delivering a paper on Diversity and Sexual Harassment in the Workplace the Managing Director of Warm Waters Nigeria Limited, a subsidiary of UACN Plc, Folakemi Oshiyemi, argued that sexual harassment occurs when employer or a representative of the employer sexually harassed an employee through promise of preferential treatment, threat of detrimental treatment in the present and future employment status.