8: Managing People

Background

Human resource management (HRM) plays an important role in an organization because HRM affects how effective staff members function. Based on our class discussions and readings, the main purpose of HRM is to make sure that organizations and their staff members perform the tasks efficiently and efficaciously in order to achieve its mission. Furthermore, HRM’s ultimate goal is to “attract, develop, motivate, and retain employees”(1). Not only HRM focuses on planning, staffing, assessment, and development, but it also puts an emphasis on organizational values. Some of the important values expected of staff are accountability, commitment to the organizational mission, building trust, integrity, and honesty.

NCRIC is an organization that values HRM function highly. For example, during staffing stage of immigration assistants, the organization ensures that candidates have sufficient knowledge, interest, and experience with immigration issues. Moreover, these candidates are able to speak Spanish fluently.

Once the candidates are hired as immigration assistants, they undergo a special training--the development stage of HRM--that involves shadowing and doing an actual phone interview with a client in Spanish; the supervisor, then evaluates how well did they do the phone interview.

In order to increase staff commitment to the organization, the organization encourages staff members to attend special lectures that are relevant to immigration issues. Furthermore, to motivate staff members, especially the immigration assistants, the supervisors invite them to have lunch as a gesture of acknowledging and rewarding the hard work that the staff put into the organization; having lunch with supervisors also becomes a great way to get to know one another at the personal level and to build trust.

Finally, before immigration assistants end their internship contract, the supervisors asks the immigration assistants personally to evaluate the overall internship experience verbally.

Analysis

One of the key problems that relates to NCRIC’s organizational capacity is the lack of personnel to concentrate on the development of the organization, such as marketing and fundraising. If this idea--to hire a person to focus on organization’s development--had never been brought to the table for discussion and/or consideration during the planning stage of HRM, then the organization has been misdiagnosing the human resource need of the organization.

Another challenge of the organization is to have the immigration assistants evaluate the overall internship experience verbally in front of the supervisor. Evaluations and feedback of staff members are significant and can improve the organization’s function; however, the organization may not receive honest feedbacks when these evaluations are not done anonymously.

Recommendations

• • NCRIC should discuss and assess the potential hiring of a staff member that will support the development aspect of the organization, such as marketing and fundraising.

  • NCRIC should develop a bi-annual assessment that includes supervisory ratings, self-ratings, co-worker ratings, and/or group ratings.

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(1) Lecture slide, week 11, Tuesday, p. 10