What is Human Resource Management?

To understand what human resource management is, it’s useful to start with what managers do. Elance is an
organization. An organization consists of people (in this case, people like Elance’s own in-house sales managers
and Web designers) with formally assigned roles who work together to achieve the organization’s goals. A
manager is someone who is responsible for accomplishing the organization’s goals, and who does so by
managing the efforts of the organization’s people.
Most writers agree that managing involves performing five basic functions: planning, organizing,
staffing, leading, and controlling. In total, these functions represent the management process. Some of the
specific activities involved in each function include:

●● Planning. Establishing goals and standards; developing rules and procedures; developing plans and
forecasts
●● Organizing. Giving each subordinate a specific task; establishing departments; delegating authority to
subordinates; establishing channels of authority and communication; coordinating the work of subordinates
●● Staffing. Determining what type of people should be hired; recruiting prospective employees; selecting
employees; setting performance standards; compensating employees; evaluating performance; counseling
employees; training and developing employees
●● Leading. Getting others to get the job done; maintaining morale; motivating subordinates
●● Controlling. Setting standards such as sales quotas, quality standards, or production levels; checking to
see how actual performance compares with these standards; taking corrective action as needed.

In this book, we will focus on one of these functions—staffing, personnel management, or human resource
management function. Human resource management (HRM) is the process of acquiring, training, appraising,
and compensating employees, and of attending to their labor relations, health and safety, and fairness concerns.
The topics we’ll discuss should therefore provide you with the concepts and techniques every manager needs to
perform the “people” or personnel aspects of management. These include:

●● Conducting job analyses (determining the nature of each employee’s job).

●● Planning labor needs and recruiting job candidates.
●● Selecting job candidates.
●● Orienting and training new employees.
●● Managing wages and salaries (compensating employees).
●● Providing incentives and benefits.
●● Appraising performance.
●● Communicating (interviewing, counseling, disciplining).
●● Training employees, and developing managers.
●● Building employee relations and engagement. And what a manager should know about:
●● Equal opportunity and affirmative action.
●● Employee health and safety.
●● Handling grievances and labor relations.

Manager: Someone who is responsible for accomplishing the organization’s goals, and who does so
by managing the efforts of the organization’s people.
Organization: A group consisting of people with formally assigned roles who work together to achieve
the organization’s goals.

Human Resource Management Processes?

To understand what human resource management is, it’s useful to start with what managers do.
Acquisition: means attracting and recruiting the needed labor or personnel in the organization.
Training: the selected employees need specific training to learn work policies, procedures, systems, culture,
values, and other important work tasks.
Appraisal: it includes feedback on the performance by offering discrepancies in desired performance and the
actual performance of the employees. The appraisal offers either positive or negative conclusions relying on the
actual performance. It leads to compensation activities.
Compensation: includes offering suitable salaries, wages, benefits and incentives to all of the employees as
per their jobs and HR’s central policies.
Labor Relations: HR and labor relations play a pivotal role in strengthening the employer-employee
relationship. It is important that the employees be provided an environment where they can improve their skills
and constructively use them. When the office management and the employees are both focused on the objective
of creating an effective organization, they build a healthy work environment.
Health and Safety: The HR also makes sure the provision of health and safety to employee in terms of office
environment, safe infrastructure, hazard control, safety from physical or mental torture, media allowance and
insurance, medical treatment, sexual harassment or any other potential health and safety issues.
Fairness: deals with offering equal employment opportunity by ensuring no prejudices or discriminations based
on gender, race, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, geographical orientation, language, and religion.

Personnel Aspects of a Manager’s Job?

To understand what human resource management is, it’s useful to start with what managers do.
• Conducting job analyses: managers have to conduct job analyses for the existing and vacant positions
or the future positions in the organization to determine the job description and specifications. This will
help in developing documented evidence of expectation from employees to perform their duties and helps
in recruitment and selection activities.
• Planning labor needs and recruiting job candidates: The HR managers have to also plan the current
and future labor needs based on past trends, and upcoming projects and consider several factors such as
promotions, turnover rate, retirement, and other related factors.
• Selecting job candidates: managers have to screen out the job application received against any vacant
job position and invited them for required tests or interviews to select the final required applicants.
 • Orienting and training new employees: The managers should design effective orientation and training
programs for new employees to develop a general sense of purpose and know-how.
• Managing wages and salaries: The managers have designed appropriate salary packages for all the
employees in the organizations and decide wages considering the organizational policies and state rules
and regulations.
• Providing incentives and benefits: the HR managers also have to decide on a variety of incentives and
benefits for all employees based on their job levels, skills & expertise and decide when and how to offer
them to increase employee motivation performance, and commitment.
• Appraising performance: managers also have to conduct regular performance appraisals to assess the
current performance of employees compared to their assigned roles.
• Communicating: managers have to effectively communicate with all of the employees about the
organizational policies and procedures, performance-related feedback, task assignment, role clarity, and
other important work outcomes.
• Training and developing managers: the HR managers are also responsible to train and develop other
managers (e.g., first-line managers or managers from other departments) to implement HR’s policies and
procedures perfectly.
• Building employee commitment: HR managers have to develop employees’ commitment to the
organization by enhancing their motivation levels and by offering regular performance-oriented feedback.

Why Is Human Resource Management Important to All Managers?

The concepts and techniques in this book are important to all managers for several reasons.
More important, it can help ensure that you get results—through people.2 Remember that you could do
everything else right as a manager—lay brilliant plans, draw clear organization charts, set up modern assembly
lines, and use sophisticated accounting controls—but still fail, for instance, by hiring the wrong people or by not
motivating subordinates. On the other hand, many managers—from generals to presidents to supervisors—have
been successful even without adequate plans, organizations, or controls. They were successful because they had
the knack for hiring the right people for the right jobs and then motivating, appraising, and developing them.
Remember as you read this book that getting results is the bottom line of managing and that, as a manager, you
will have to get these results through people. This fact hasn’t changed from the dawn of management. As one
company president summed it up: For many years it has been said that capital is the bottleneck for a developing
industry. I don’t think this any longer holds true. I think it’s the workforce and the company’s inability to recruit
and maintain a good workforce that does constitute the bottleneck for production. I don’t know of any major
project backed by good ideas, vigor, and enthusiasm that has been stopped by a shortage of cash. I do know of
industries whose growth has been partly stopped or hampered because they can’t maintain an efficient and
enthusiastic labor force, and I think this will hold true even more in the future.3

Line and Staff Aspects of Human Resource Management

All managers have always been, in a sense, human resource managers, because they all get involved in recruiting,
interviewing, selecting, and training their employees. Yet most firms also have a human resource department with
its own top manager. How do the duties of this human resource manager and department relate to the human
resource duties of sales and production and other managers? Answering this requires a short definition of line
versus staff authority. Authority is the right to make decisions, to direct the work of others, and to give orders.
Managers usually distinguish between line authority and staff authority. In organizations, line authority
traditionally gives managers the right to issue orders to other managers or employees. Line authority therefore
creates a superior (order giver)–subordinate (order receiver) relationship. When the vice president of sales tells
her sales director to “get the sales presentation ready by Tuesday,” she is exercising her line authority. Staff
authority gives a manager the right to advise other managers or employees. It creates an advisory relationship.
When the human resource manager suggests that the plant manager use a particular selection test, he or she is
exercising staff authority.
On the organization chart, managers with line authority are line managers.
 Those with staff (advisory) authority are staff managers. In popular usage, people tend to associate line
managers with managing departments (like sales or production) that are crucial for the company’s survival. Staff
managers generally run departments that are advisory or supportive, like purchasing and human resource
management. Human resource managers are usually staff managers. They assist and advise line managers in areas
like recruiting, hiring, and compensation.
Authority: The right to make decisions, direct others’ work, and give orders.
Line authority: Traditionally gives managers the right to issue orders to other managers or employees.
Staff authority: Gives a manager the right to advise other managers or employees
Line manager: A manager who is authorized to direct the work of subordinates and is responsible for
accomplishing the organization’s tasks.
Staff manager: A manager who assists and advises line managers.

Line Managers’ Human Resource Management Responsibilities

However, line managers do have many human resource duties. This is because the direct handling of people has
always been part of every line manager’s duties, from the president down to first-line supervisors. One major
company outlines its line supervisors’ responsibilities for effective human resource management under these
general headings:
1. Placing the right person in the right job
2. Starting new employees in the organization (orientation)
3. Training employees for jobs that are new to them
4. Improving the job performance of each person
5. Gaining creative cooperation and developing smooth working relationships
6. Interpreting the company’s policies and procedures
7. Controlling labor costs
8. Developing the abilities of each person
9. Creating and maintaining departmental morale
10. Protecting employees’ health and physical conditions
And we’ll see in this chapter that, if anything, digital tools like LinkedIn hiring and cloud computing are actually
expanding many line managers’ HR responsibilities.

Line Managers’ Human Resource Management Responsibilities

Line Function
Line authority: A Line manager is one who is authorized to direct the work of subordinates and is
responsible for accomplishing the organizational goals. An HR manager exerts the line authority in his
own department. They, generally, cannot exercise any line authority outside their own department;
however, they exert implied authority throughout the organization.
Implied authority: Everybody in the organization knows that the HR department has access to the top
management in areas like promotion tests, and other affirmative action. As a result, HR manager’s
suggestions are often seen as orders from the top side. This carries more weight with supervisors who
are troubled by staffing problems.

Coordinative Function
Functional Authority: HR managers also have to coordinate the personnel activities of the
organisation. This duty is often referred to as functional control. In this job, the HR managers have to
ensure that the line managers are implementing the organization’s HR objectives, policies and
procedures.

Staff Functions
Staff authority: A staff manager is one who assists and advises the line managers. Assisting and
advising the line managers is the basic job of every HR manager.
For example, the HR managers assist the line managers in the following ways:

i. In hiring, training, evaluating, rewarding, counseling, promoting, and terminating the employees.
ii. Innovator/ advocacy
iii. In administering various benefit programs e.g.,, health and accident insurance, retirement,
vacations etc.
iv. In complying with equal employment and occupational safety laws.
v. In handling grievances and improving labor relations.
vi. By carrying out the innovator role, by providing up-to-date information on current trends and new
methods of solving problems.
vii. By playing Employee Advocacy Role. It helps in defining how the management should be
treating employees, making sure that the employees have the mechanics to contest the unfair
practices and representing the employees’ interests within the framework of its main
obligations to senior management.
viii. By playing the strategic role, it helps the top management in drafting and implementing the
strategies.
ix. Thus, a large scale unit will have a Departmental head, by whatever name he is called, handling
the HR department. His status will be equal to any other executive in the organisation.

Figure 1-1 Human Resource department organization chart showing typical HR Job titles
Source: “Human Resource Development Organization Chart Showing Typical HR Job Titles,” www.co.pinellas.fl.us/persnl/pdf/ orgchart.pdf.
Courtesy of Pinellas County Human Resources. Reprinted with permission.

The Human Resource Department

In small organizations, line managers may carry out all these personnel duties unassisted. But as the organization
grows, line managers usually need the assistance, specialized knowledge, and advice of a separate human resource
staff. In larger firms, the human resource department provides such specialized assistance. Figure 1-1 shows
human resource management jobs in one organization. Typical positions include compensation and benefits
manager, employment and recruiting supervisor, training specialist, and employee relations executive. Examples
of job duties include:
 ●● Recruiters: Maintain contacts within the community and perhaps travel extensively to search for
qualified job applicants.
●● Equal employment opportunity (EEO) representatives or affirmative action coordinators:
Investigate and resolve EEO grievances, examine organizational practices for potential violations, and
compile and submit EEO reports.
●● Job analysts: Collect and examine detailed information about job duties to prepare job descriptions.
●● Compensation managers: Develop compensation plans and handle the employee benefits program.
●● Training specialists: Plan, organize, and direct training activities.
●● Labor relations specialists: Advise management on all aspects of union– management relations.

The trends Shaping Human Resource Management

Working cooperatively with line managers, human resource managers have long helped employers hire and fire
employees, administer benefits, and conduct appraisals. However, trends are occurring in the environment of
human resource management that are changing how employers get their human resource management tasks done.
These trends include workforce trends, trends in how people work, technological trends, and globalization and
economic trends.
Workforce Demographics and Diversity Trends
The composition of the workforce will continue to change over the next few years; specifically, it will continue
to become more diverse with more women, minority group members, and older workers in the workforce.12
Table 1-1 offers a bird’s-eye view. Between 1992 and 2022, the percent of the workforce that the U.S. Department
of Labor classifies as “white” will drop from 85% to 77.7%. At the same time, the percent of the workforce that
it classifies as “Asian” will rise from 4% to 6.2%, and those of Hispanic origin will rise from 8.9% to 19.1%. The
percentages of younger workers will fall, while those over 55 years of age will leap from 11.8% of the workforce
in 1992 to 25.6% in 2022.13 Many employers call “the aging workforce” a big problem. The problem is that there
aren’t enough younger workers to replace the projected number of baby boom–era older workers (born roughly
1946–1964) retiring.14 Many employers are bringing retirees back (or just trying to keep them from leaving).
With overall projected workforce shortfalls (not enough younger workers to replace retirees), many
employers are hiring foreign workers for U.S. jobs. The H-1B visa program lets U.S. employers recruit skilled
foreign professionals to work in the United States when they can’t find qualified American workers. U.S.
employers bring in about 181,000 foreign workers per year under these programs, although such programs face
opposition.15
Other firms are shifting to nontraditional workers. Nontraditional workers are those who hold multiple
jobs, or who are “temporary” or part-time workers, or those working in alternative arrangements (such as a
mother–daughter team sharing one clerical job). Others serve as “independent contractors” for specific projects.
Almost 10% of American workers—13 million people—fit this nontraditional workforce category.
Some employers find millennials or “generation Y” employees (those born roughly between 1982 and
2004) a challenge to deal with, and this isn’t just an American phenomenon. For example, the New York Times
recently reported that because China’s one-child rule led many parents to pamper their children, China’s senior
army officers are having problems getting millennial-aged volunteers and conscripts to shape up.16
On the other hand, millennials also bring a vast array of skills. They’ve grown up with social media and
are expert at collaborating online. And, having grown up with Apple and Google, they’re comfortable with
innovation.
Trends in How People Work
At the same time, work has shifted from manufacturing jobs to service jobs in North America and Western Europe.
Today over two-thirds of the U.S. workforce is employed in producing and delivering services, not products. By
2020, service- providing industries are expected to account for 131 million out of 150 million (87%) of wage and
salary jobs overall. So in the next few years, almost all the new jobs added in the United States will be in services,
not in goods-producing industries.17
On-demannd workers Anyone who has registered on Uber already knows something about on-demand
workers.18 At last count, Uber was signing up almost 40,000 new independent contractor drivers per month, a
rate that was doubling every few months. Today, in more and more companies like Uber, Elance, and Airbnb,
employees aren’t employees at all, but are freelancers and independent contractors who work when they can on
what they want to work on, when the company needs them.19 So, for example, Airbnb can run in essence a vast
lodging company with only a fraction of the “regular” employees one like Hilton Worldwide would need (because
the lodgings are owned and managed by the homeowners themselves). Other sites tapping on-demand workers
include Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Elance-oDesk, TaskRabbit, and Handybook (which lets users tap Handy’s
thousands of freelance cleaners and furniture assemblers when they need jobs done).20 The head of Elance-
oDesk, which places millions of short-term professionals via its site, says those on its site are viewed as “mobile,
independent bundles of skills.”21
The fact that employers increasingly rely on such Uber-like “extended workforces” has implications for
HR. For example, companies that rely on freelancers, consultants, and other such nontraditional employees will
need to create personnel policies on matters like compensation for these “nonemployees,” and become more
expert as talent brokers in matching specific workers with specific tasks that need to be done.
 On-demand models like Elance’s and Uber’s have detractors. Some people who work for on-demand
services say the sometimes menial jobs can make them feel somewhat disrespected. One critic says such work is
unpredictable and insecure. An article in the New York Times said this: “The larger worry about on-demand jobs
is not about benefits, but about a lack of agency—a future in which computers, rather than humans, determine
what you do, when and for how much.”22 Some Uber drivers recently sued to become regular (rather than
freelance independent contractors) employees.
Human capital One big consequence of such demographic and workforce trends is employers’ growing
emphasis on their workers’ knowledge, education, training, skills, and expertise—in other words on their “human
capital.”
Service jobs like consultant and lawyer always emphasized education and knowledge. And today’s
proliferation of IT-related businesses like Google and Facebook of course demands high levels of human capital.
The big change is that even “traditional” manufacturing jobs like assembler are increasingly high-tech. Similarly,
bank tellers, retail clerks, bill collectors, mortgage processors, and package deliverers today need a level of
technological sophistication they wouldn’t have needed a few years ago. So in our increasingly knowledge-based
economy, “… the acquisition and development of superior human capital appear essential to firms’ profitability
and success.”23
For managers, the challenge here is that they have to manage such workers differently. For example,
empowering workers to make more decisions presumes you’ve selected, trained, and rewarded them to make
more decisions themselves. Employers, therefore, need new human resource management practices to select,
train, and engage these employees.24 The accompanying HR as a Profit Center illustrates how one employer took
advantage of its human capital.

Globalization Trends
Globalization refers to companies extending their sales, ownership, and/or manufacturing to new markets abroad.
Thus Toyota builds Camrys in Kentucky, while Apple assembles iPhones in China. Free trade areas—agreements
that reduce tariffs and barriers among trading partners—further encourage international trade. The North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the European Union (EU) are examples.
Globalization has boomed for the past 50 or so years. For example, the total sum of U.S. imports and
exports rose from $47 billion in 1960, to $562 billion in 1980, to about $5.1 trillion recently.27 Evolving
economic and political philosophies drove this boom. Governments dropped cross-border taxes or tariffs, formed
economic free trade areas, and took other steps to encourage the free flow of trade among countries. The
fundamental economic rationale was that by doing so, all countries would gain, and indeed, economies around
the world did grow quickly until recently.
At the same time, globalization vastly increased international competition. More globalization meant more
competition, and more competition meant more pressure to be “world class”—to lower costs, to make employees
more productive, and to do things better and less expensively.
As multinational companies jockey for position, many transfer operations abroad, not just to seek cheaper
labor but to tap into new markets. For example, Toyota has thousands of sales employees based in America, while
GE has over 10,000 employees in France. The search for greater efficiencies prompts some employers to offshore
(export jobs to lower-cost locations abroad, as when Dell offshored some call-center jobs to India). Some
employers offshore even highly skilled jobs such as lawyer.28 Managing the “people” aspects of globalization is
a big task for any company that expands abroad—and for its HR managers.29
Economic Trends
Although globalization supported a growing global economy, the past 10 or so years were difficult economically.
As you can see in Figure 1-2, gross national product (GNP)—a measure of the United States of America’s total
output—boomed between 2001 and 2007. During this period, home prices (see Figure 1-3) leaped as much as
20% per year. Unemployment remained docile at about 4.7%.30 Then, around 2007–2008, all these measures fell
off a cliff. GNP fell. Home prices dropped by 10% or more (depending on city). Unemployment nationwide soon
rose to more than 10%.
Why did all this happen? It’s complicated. Many governments stripped away rules and regulations. For example,
in America and Europe, the rules that prevented commercial banks from expanding into new businesses such as
investment banking were relaxed. Giant, multinational “financial supermarkets” such as Citibank emerged. With
fewer regulations, more businesses and consumers were soon deeply in debt. Homebuyers bought homes with
little money down. Banks freely lent money to developers to build more homes. For almost 20 years, U.S.
consumers spent more than they earned. The United States became a debtor nation. Its balance of payments
(exports minus imports) went from a healthy positive $3.5 billion in 1960, to a huge minus (imports exceeded
exports) $497 billion deficit more recently.31 The only way the country could keep buying more from abroad
than it sold was by borrowing money. So, much of the boom was built on debt.
Around 2007, all those years of accumulating debt ran their course. Banks and other financial institutions
found themselves owning trillions of dollars of worthless loans. Governments stepped in to try to prevent their
collapse. Lending dried up. Many businesses and consumers stopped buying. The economy tanked.
Economic trends are pointing up today, and hopefully they will continue to do so. For example, the
unemployment rate had fallen from a high of more than 10% a few years ago to around 5% in 2015, and economic
activity was also picking up.

Technology Trends
However, it may be technology that most characterizes the trends shaping human resource management today.42
For example, the consulting firm Accenture estimates that social media connections via tools like LinkedIn will
soon produce as many as 80% of new recruits—often letting line managers bypass the human resource
management
unit.43
Five main types of digital technologies are driving this transfer of functionality from HR professionals to
automation. Employers increasingly use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (rather than,
say, as many employment agencies) to recruit new employees. Employers use new mobile applications, for
instance, to monitor employee location and to provide digital photos at the facility clock-in location to identify
workers. The feedback, fun, and objectives inherent in gaming support many new training applications, and
websites such as Knack, Gild, and True Office enable employers to inject gaming features into training,
performance appraisal, and recruiting. Cloud computing and more intuitive user interfaces enable employers to
monitor and report on things like a team’s goal attainment and to provide real-time evaluative feedback. Finally,
data analytics basically means using statistical techniques, algorithms, and problem-solving to identify
relationships among data for the purpose of solving particular problems (such as what are the ideal candidate’s
traits, or how can I tell in advance which of my best employees is likely to quit?). When applied to human resource
management, data analytics is called talent analytics.
As one example, talent analytics is revolutionizing how employers look for job candidates. For example,
one employer reportedly operated for many years on the assumption that what mattered was the school the
candidate attended, the grades they had, and their references. A retrospective talent analytics study showed that
these traits didn’t matter at all. What mattered were things like: their résumés were grammatically correct, they
didn’t quit school until obtaining some degree, they were successful in prior jobs, and they were able to succeed
with vague instructions.44
Technological change is also affecting the nature of jobs.45 when someone thinks of “tech jobs,” jobs at
Apple and Google come to mind, but technology affects all sorts of jobs. At Alcoa’s Davenport Works plant in
Iowa, a computer at each work station helps each employee control his or her machines or communicate data.
One former college student became a team leader in a plant with automated machines. He and his team type
commands into computerized machines that create precision parts.46 As another example, about 17 million
people now use information technology to work from remote locations at least once per month. “Co-working
sites” offer freelance workers office space and access to Wi-Fi and office equipment.47
Trends in Nature of Work
High-tech jobs: Smart devices that allow continuous connectivity continue to blur the line between work life and
personal life. “I think one of the challenges in HR is trying to figure out how to have engaged employees” without
having them work around the clock, Kushner said. “For the most part, most organizations haven’t thought through
what that differentiator should be. Telecommuting and flexible hours are just the first steps down that pathway”
of navigating the issues surrounding constant connectivity and work/life balance, he said.
Service Jobs: The service sector, also known as the tertiary sector, is the third tier in the three-sector economy.
Instead of product production, this sector produces services maintenance and repairs, training, or consulting.
Examples of service sector jobs include housekeeping, tours, nursing, and teaching.
Knowledge work and human capital: The term “knowledge worker” was first coined by Peter Drucker in his
book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959). Drucker defined knowledge workers as high-level workers who apply
theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through formal training, to develop products and services. He
noted that knowledge workers would be the most valuable assets of a 21st-century organization because of their
high level of productivity and creativity. They include professionals in information technology fields, such as
programmers, web designers, system analysts, technical writers, and researchers. Knowledge workers are also
comprised of pharmacists, public accountants, engineers, architects, lawyers, physicians, scientists, financial
analysts, and design thinkers.

Important Trends in HRM

The New HR Managers
- Focus more on big-picture (Strategic) issues
 - Find new ways to provide transactional services
- Acquire broader business knowledge and new HRM proficiencies

High-Performance Work Systems

Increase productivity and performance by:
- Recruiting, screening, and hiring more effectively
- Providing more and better training
- Paying higher wages
- Providing a safer work environment
- Linking pay to performance

Managing Ethics
Ethics
- Standards that someone uses to decide what his or her conduct should be
HRM-related Ethical Issues
- Workplace safety
- Security of employee records
- Employee theft
- Affirmative action
- Comparable work
- Employee privacy rights

HR Certifications
An HR certification is a professional title that demonstrates your mastery of subjects related to human resources.
Becoming a certified HR professional typically involves taking a course or passing an exam. Getting an HR
certification shows your understanding of industry-standard practices in human resources, which can help you
find a job, qualify for advanced positions or increase your earning power.

Evidence-based HRM
- Actual measurements
- Existing data
- Research studies

Strategic HRM
Strategic human resource management (strategic HRM) provides a framework linking people management and
development practices to long-term business goals and outcomes. It focuses on longer-term resourcing issues
within the context of an organization’s goals and the evolving nature of work. It also informs other HR strategies,
such as reward or performance, determining how they are integrated into the overall business strategy.

Diversity, Equal Employment Opportunity, and Affirmative Action

Diversity
The variety or multiplicity of demographic features that characterize a company’s workforce, particularly in terms
of race, sex, culture, national origin, handicap, age, and religion. Workforce diversity is the collective mixture of
employees' differences and similarities (including individual characteristics, values, beliefs, experiences,
backgrounds, preferences and behaviors).
Equal Employment Opportunity
Aims, through legal compliance, to ensure that anyone, regardless of race, color, disability, sex, religion,
national origin, or age, has an equal opportunity based on his or her qualifications.
Affirmative Action
Employers take actions, to comply legally or voluntarily, in the recruitment, hiring, promotion, and
compensation of protected classes to eliminate the current effects of past discrimination.