There are various HR strategies used in the present business scenario to improve the firms

and each of the strategies serves particular purpose. This article contains brief information

about the most popularly used strategic tools in the present days, the tools are :

Kaizen

Quality circle

TQM among Employees

Human Capital KSA

Mentoring

The mentioned tools are explained briefly as follows

KAIZEN:

Kaizen, Japanese word for "improvement", or "change for the better" refers to philosophy or

practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing,

engineering, and business management. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life-

coaching, government, banking, and other industries. When used in the business sense and

applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions,

and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to

processes, such as purchasing and logistics that cross organizational boundaries into the

supply chain. By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate

waste (see lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses

after the Second World War, influenced in part by American business and quality

management teachers who visited the country. It has since spread throughout the world and is

now being implemented in many other venues besides just business and productivity.

CHARACTERSTICS:

As one of the most important aspects of Japanese quality, Kaizen is well-known for its

characteristics. One of the main characteristic of Kaizen is on finding the root cause of

mistakes made and correcting them. Kaizen practitioners are prepared to find even their own

errors. Each error is seen as an opportunity in the path of improvement. Kaizen is more

process-focused than results-focused. Kaizen also seeks to improve the systems rather than

the human resources. In a Kaizen environment, when an employee errs in his job, it is not

seen as an occasion to blame, but is seen as a chance to find out what went wrong with the

process. Kaizen practitioners spend a lot of their time to measure customer satisfaction and

error rates. They also make use of meetings and such opportunities to discuss avenues for

improvement. Thus, Kaizen focuses on incremental improvements rather than exact solutions

to problems. The focus of small improvements in Kaizen makes it easier to implement. Also,

if the changes made in the business process are small, the people find it easier to adjust. Since

most of the improvement proposals come from the employees, the resistance to change is

much less. In fact, people tend to enjoy such a change. This is the way in which Kaizen

principle helps to beat the competition. The Kaizen philosophy of work is to stress employee

participation in decision making process. Every employee is considered as a link in the

process of continuous improvement. Kaizen is not something which people do on an hourly

basis. Instead, it is part of their lifestyle.

5 ELEMENTS OF KAIZEN:

Management teamwork

Increased labour responsibilities

Increased management morale

Quality circles

Management suggestions for labour improvement

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT:

Total quality management (TQM) is an integrated organizational effort designed to improve

quality at every level. TQM is based on the premise that the quality of products and processes

is the responsibility of everyone involved with the creation or consumption of the products or

services offered by an organization, requiring the involvement of management, workforce,

suppliers, and customers, to meet or exceed customer expectations.

TQM views an organization as a collection of processes. It maintains that organizations must

strive to continuously improve these processes by incorporating the knowledge and

experiences of workers. The simple objective of TQM is “Do the right things, right the first

time, every time.” TQM is infinitely variable and adaptable. Although originally applied to

manufacturing operations, and for a number of years only used in that area, TQM is now

becoming recognized as a generic management tool, just as applicable in service and public

sector organizations. There are a number of evolutionary strands, with different sectors

creating their own versions from the common ancestor. TQM is the foundation for activities,

which include:

Commitment by senior management and all employees

Meeting customer requirements

Reducing development cycle times

Just in time/demand flow manufacturing

Improvement teams

Reducing product and service costs

Systems to facilitate improvement

Line management ownership

Employee involvement and empowerment

Recognition and celebration

Challenging quantified goals and benchmarking

Focus on processes / improvement plans

Specific incorporation in strategic planning

This shows that TQM must be practiced in all activities, by all personnel, in manufacturing,

marketing, engineering, R&D, sales, purchasing, HR, etc.

BELIEFS OF TQM:

Owner/customer satisfaction is the measure of quality

Everyone has owners/customers; everyone is an owner/customer

Quality improvement must be continuous

Analysing the processes used to create products and services is key to quality

improvement

Measurement, a skilled use of analytical tools, and employee involvement are critical

sources of quality improvement ideas and innovations

Sustained total quality management is not possible without active, visible, consistent,

and enabling leadership by managers at all levels

If we do not continuously improve the quality of products and services that we

provide our owners/customers, someone else will

STEPS IN IMPLEMENTING TQM:

1. Obtain CEO Commitment

2. Educate Upper-Level Management

3. Create Steering Committee

4. Outline the Vision Statement, Mission Statement, & Guiding Principles

5. Prepare a Flow Diagram of Company Processes

6. Focus on the Owner/Customer (External) & Surveys

7. Consider the Employee as an Internal Owner/customer

8. Provide a Quality Training Program

9. Establish Quality Improvement Teams

10. Implement Process Improvements

11. Use the Tools of TQM

12. Know the Benefits of TQM

Cua, McKone, and Schroeder (2001) identified nine common TQM practices:

1. Cross-functional product design

2. Process management

3. Supplier quality management

4. Customer involvement

5. Information and feedback

6. Committed leadership

7. Strategic planning

8. Cross-functional training

9. Employee involvement

HUMAN CAPITAL:

Human capital is the stock of competencies, knowledge, social and personality attributes,

including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labour so as to produce economic

value. It is an aggregate economic view of the human being acting within economies, which

is an attempt to capture the social, biological, cultural and psychological complexity as they

interact in explicit and/or economic transactions. Many theories explicitly connect investment

in human capital development to education, and the role of human capital in economic

development, productivity growth, and innovation has frequently been cited as a justification

for government subsidies for education and job skills training.

It was assumed in early economic theories, reflecting the context, i.e., the secondary sector of

the economy was producing much more than the tertiary sector was able to produce at the

time in most countries – to be a fungible resource, homogeneous, and easily interchangeable,

and it was referred to simply as workforce or labour, one of three factors of production (the

others being land, and assumed-interchangeable assets of money and physical equipment).

Just as land became recognized as natural capital and an asset in itself, and human factors of

production were raised from this simple mechanistic analysis to human capital. In modern

technical financial analysis, the term "balanced growth" refers to the goal of equal growth of

both aggregate human capabilities and physical assets that produce goods and services.

IMPORTANCE:

The concept of Human capital has relatively more importance in labour-surplus countries.

These countries are naturally endowed with more of labour due to high birth rate under the

given climatic conditions. The surplus labour in these countries is the human resource

available in more abundance than the tangible capital resource. This human resource can be

transformed into Human capital with effective inputs of education, health and moral values.

The transformation of raw human resource into highly productive human resource with these

inputs is the process of human capital formation. The problem of scarcity of tangible capital

in the labour surplus countries can be resolved by accelerating the rate of human capital

formation with both private and public investment in education and health sectors of their

National economies. The tangible financial capital is an effective instrument of promoting

economic growth of the nation. The intangible human capital, on the other hand, is an

instrument of promoting comprehensive development of the nation because human capital is

directly related to human development, and when there is human development, the qualitative

and quantitative progress of the nation is inevitable. This importance of human capital is

explicit in the changed approach of United Nations towards comparative evaluation of

economic development of different nations in the World economy. United Nations publishes

Human Development Report on human development in different nations with the objective of

evaluating the rate of human capital formation in these nations.

The statistical indicator of estimating Human Development in each nation is Human

Development Index (HDI). It is the combination of "Life Expectancy Index", "Education

Index" and "Income Index". The Life expectancy index reveals the standard of health of the

population in the country; education index reveals the educational standard and the literacy

ratio of the population; and the income index reveals the standard of living of the population.

If all these indices have the rising trend over a long period of time, it is reflected into rising

trend in HDI.

The Human Capital is developed by health, education and quality of Standard of living.

Therefore, the components of HDI viz, Life Expectancy Index, Education Index and Income

Index are directly related to Human Capital formation within the nation. HDI is indicator of

positive correlation between human capital formation and economic development. If HDI

increases, there is higher rate of human capital formation in response to higher standard of

education and health. Similarly, if HDI increases, per capita income of the nation also

increases. Implicitly, HDI reveals that higher the human capital formation due to good

standard of health and education, higher is the per capita income of the nation. This process

of human development is the strong foundation of a continuous process of economic

development of the nation for a long period of time. This significance of the concept of

Human capital in generating long-term economic development of the nation cannot be

neglected. It is expected that the Macroeconomic policies of all the nations are focussed

towards promotion of human development and subsequently economic development. Human

Capital is the backbone of Human Development and economic development in every nation.

Mahroum (2007) suggested that at the macro-level, human capital management is about three

key capacities, the capacity to develop talent, the capacity to deploy talent, and the capacity

to draw talent from elsewhere. Collectively, these three capacities form the backbone of any

country's human capital competitiveness. Recent U.S. research shows that geographic regions

that invest in the human capital and economic advancement of immigrants who are already

living in their jurisdictions help boost their short- and long-term economic growth. There is

also strong evidence that organizations that possess and cultivate their human capital

outperform other organizations lacking human capital (Crook, Todd, Combs, Woehr, and

Ketchen, 2011).

QUALITY CIRCLE:

A quality circle is a volunteer group composed of workers (or even students), usually under

the leadership of their supervisor (or an elected team leader), who are trained to identify,

analyse and solve work-related problems and present their solutions to management in order

to improve the performance of the organization, and motivate and enrich the work of

employees. When matured, true quality circles become self-managing, have gained the

confidence of management.

Quality circles are an alternative to the dehumanizing concept of the division of labour,

where workers or individuals are treated like robots. They bring back the concept of

craftsmanship, which when operated on an individual basis is uneconomic but when used in

group form can be devastatingly powerful. Quality circles can help enrich the lives of

workers or students and aid in creating harmony and high performance. Typical topics are

improving occupational safety and health, improving product design, and improvement in the

workplace and manufacturing processes. The term quality circles derive from the concept of

PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) circles developed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

Quality circles are not normally paid a share of the cost benefit of any improvements but

usually a proportion of the savings made is spent on improvements to the work environment.

They are formal groups. They meet at least once a week on company time and are trained by

competent persons (usually designated as facilitators) who may be personnel and industrial

relations specialists trained in human factors and the basic skills of problem identification,

information gathering and analysis, basic statistics, and solution generation. Quality circles

are generally free to select any topic they wish (other than those related to salary and terms

and conditions of work, as there are other channels through which these issues are usually

considered).

MENTORING:

Mentorship is a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more

knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person.

However, true mentoring is more than just answering occasional questions or providing ad

hoc help. It is about an ongoing relationship of learning, dialog, and challenge.

Performance mentoring is a structured coaching course for individuals or small groups. With

performance mentoring you and your company have available an external sounding board

who can introduce effective techniques to achieve specific goals.

The goal may be to create more economic growth, increasing sales or other concrete results.

It may also be that a particular department needs to find more motivation and job satisfaction

going forward in everyday life. Starting with the individual's resources and motivation both

identifies the potential for success and directs a new trend from which both individuals and

business can benefit.