Human Resources Management, according to Edwin B. Flippo (ND), “Human resource management is the planning, organizing, directing and controlling of procurement, development, compensation, integration, maintenance, and separation of human resource to the end that individual and societal objectives are accomplished.”.

Also, Gary Dessler defines (ND) HRM as “Human Resource Management is the process of acquiring, training, appraising, and compensating employees, and attending to their labor relations, health, safety, and fairness concerns.” Let’s talk about what those are and how they affect logistics.

• Recruitment/Talent Acquisition => Unit that staffs the company with quality employees. If the employees are not aligned with the company culture, are under or overqualified, or are not a technical fit. It will end up becoming an issue that will affect logistics.
• Organizational Climate/Appraising => Unit that ensures the company feels engaged and committed to its mission/vision/company values by creating activities on a larger scale to ensure retention of its staff. We want our valuable staff to want to stay and to feel motivated to be in the company, so we can keep being profitable into a profit.
• Organizational Structure/Health, Safety, and Fairness => Unit that defines the company’s command, accountability, and responsibility lines. It can be ensured that several business units are working cohesively to achieve the same goal with the most efficient structure and budget. This area affects logistics and gets affected by logistics and innovation since its responsible for those more significant increases or layoffs across multiple companies because their essence is more focused on the business strategy and how HR can ensure the right amount of people to meet that criterion.
• Compensation/Compensating & Labor Relationships => Unit that handles salary bandwidths and payroll and ensures all employees are paid a fair wage, considering the input of salary studies in their same field and other fields, and the personal situation of each employee, along with what the Organizational Structure considers is the ideal/most efficient Organization chart to meet the c-suite and stakeholders expectations.
• Learning and Development/Training => Unit that pushes innovation forward by training staff in the latest approaches, technologies, and concepts to do the job most efficiently. Ensures the professional growth of the employees in the company alongside the never-ending pursuit of innovation and cutting-edge technologies/strategies/approaches to ensure the company can keep on adding value with the most cutting-edge approach

This is an excellent example of why HRM is key info for any Logistics Manager. A Logistics Manager tends to be in charge of designing logistic models that can revolve around Queuing Theory. Using the example of the line to pay at a grocery store. It’s normal to wait in line to pay for your groceries. It is not normal to have a bad shopping experience because your customer service staff is rude to your customer (Unless you design the shopping experience with that in mind)

You’re not going to McDonald’s (FE) to be disrespected; you go to get food and have something to eat. And if the logistics manager doesn’t consider the lead time that CSR needs to effectively take the order, perhaps all their effort in designing the best queuing strategy becomes worthless.

• The CSR-Individual needs to be strategically chosen from a pool of candidates to ensure we have the best CSR for this particular store.
• The CSR-Role needs to be as well defined and documented as possible so that the individual who gets selected understands the expectations that a CSR has.
• The CSR-Compensation needs to be accurately defined so that the effort that recruitment makes is not going to waste. If we’re underpaying, people will quit going to any of our competitors who can offer a better paycheck. If we’re overpaying, we’re losing money since we can get the same job executed precisely as we defined for less.
• The CSR-Training needs to be in place, so the CSR can fit the lead time defined for that role and keep the door open for in-the-job innovations to reduce the lead time.
• The CSR-Climate needs to exist so that this employee feels like a part of the company because their values resonate with them, confirming that whatever the recruitment team sold as how is the company culture is what you find inside the company.

If these bits are not well defined from the start. We can have the best logistics model to solve our needs. But without the right people to solve such needs. And the model will remain In the theory.

Valuable Docs

• Definition of Human Resource Management
• The Importance of HR in Supply Chain Management
• The Concept of Human Resource Management in Logistics Processes
• HR in Logistics Industry (3 Main Roles)
• Queueing theory