Occupational Health & Safety Essay

In any organization, the role of the Human Resource department can not be overemphasized. This is because this department is laden with numerous responsibilities that are cogent to organizational productivity. I would like to see them as the power house and organizational engineer that detect, fix and make sure that the organization is productive and function at an optimum level. Generally, the effectiveness of an organization’s HR determines the effectiveness of the organization workforce. The strength and coordination of an organization’s workforce is to a large extent dependent on the efficiency of the HR department of the company. In order to achieve smooth running of an organization and maintain a safe and healthy workplace, there are some basic practices that are carried out by the Human Resource Department. In this essay, focus will be drawn on some of these practices, highlighting their importance and the role they play in ensuring organizational progress by achieving organizational short and long term goals. I will be making a brief discussion of these practices in the following paragraphs. One of the major practices associated with the human resource is job analysis. Job analysis can be said to be a detailed process or an act that involves the identification and determination of specific job roles and the responsibilities and importance of the specified job duty. Job analysis becomes important because it determines the qualification for job positions, the compensations to be paid, the hierarchy of the job position and the scope of duties and responsibilities that comes with the job position. It also identifies the kind of training and development that the job will require and the formulation of a job design. Furthermore, as a follow-up to job analysis, in order to maintain a safe and coordinated work environment that will ensure organizational productivity, HR makes sure that they painfully select the right people for the right jobs. Once the nature and specifications for the particular job is identified, it then becomes easy to look out for the person that has the right qualification for the job description. No one wants to put a round peg in a square hole and this makes selection an important task. Selecting the wrong person could cause great damage and result in a huge loss for the company. Generally, there are several methods used in the selection process. This includes interviews, personality tests, IQ tests, physical and cognitive ability tests and the use of biographical data. In addition to the above, the HR of a company organizes training for incoming staffs and those that are already in the system. Training is important in HR because this is where the new staffs are introduced to the organizational goals, the dress code, customer relation, and the organizational structure and culture. In the case of current staffs, training is sometime needed in the case of updating the employees about the new company policies and keeping them informed about new developments as well as developing basic skills that will be needed in their working environment. Apart from this, another practice used by the HR to maintain a safe and healthy workplace is performance measurement. Performance measures and feedback are ways of evaluating the overall productivity of individual employees in relation to organizational input. This practice is a sort of evaluation that shows what is happening, diagnose possible inadequacies and this serves as an impetus for the organization to strategize new ways or/and seek solutions to the problems that are identified. On the overall, it is a way of knowing the exact state of the organization as it is and not as it posses itself to be. Finally, men are social beings that have emotions and rational ability. People generally perform better when rewarded for good performances. In the HR practice, incentives are given so as to encourage workers to perform better and be more committed to the organizational goals that are set. Incentives serves as a motivator as it has a psychological effect on the workers and makes them want to put in more effort because they are being appreciated for their good performances.