A Human resource manager is famously known for his major responsibility of looking after the welfare of the company’s personnel. But as global market competition increases, the role of human resource manager has diversified to an extent of supervising the quality of a firm’s products so as to enable the products to compete in the world market.
The emergence of the importance of quality as a tool for competition has lead to the existence of aspect of total quality management in any company. Total quality management is aimed at satisfying the customers by making sure that the products and services released to the market are free of any defects (Walker, 1998, p. 7).
This trend of assigning the human resource department with the responsibility of managing quality is due to the fact that this department is majorly respected for its ability to train and develop human resource. Therefore, for successful implementation of total quality management in a firm the Human Resource Manager must play a pivotal role as an agent of change.
The Human Resource manager can promote the improvement of quality of services and products of a firm in many ways. From his known responsibilities of sourcing for high quality personnel, training and development of these personnel and development and maintenance of systems of rewarding well performing employees (Stoner, et al. 2003), the Human Resource manager controls important processes that can be a driving force for the realization of a firm’s total quality management.
These enable development of the culture of total quality. The Human Resource manager has a role of linking the employees with the senior management (Yuki, 1994). In this way the HR manager establishes avenues of communication between the employees and the senior management. This enables the HR manager to enlighten the employees of their importance to the organization in achieving total quality management.
The HR manager builds trust through dialogue and exchange of ideas. This helps to dispel fears to changes in their roles played by the employees. These changes in roles of different employees are needed by the total quality management. This can be the basis of offering training to all personnel to perceive their fellow workmates in other departments as immediate customers. The personnel can only realize this by being a role model to these workers. He can show this by instilling the attitude of customer first throughout the organization.
Since the HR manager is an expert in surveying and monitoring the attitudes of the workers (Melcrum, 2008), he gathers information on latest performance by the employees. This information on performance can be critical in starting off well. Therefore the HR manager carries out surveys to establish areas facing problems as far as operations are concerned.
This is because failure to realize improvement in quality of product can affect the performance of the organization. To effectively implement the total quality management program, the HR personnel monitors the perceptions and attitudes of employees as far quality is concerned (Eliot and Turnbull, 2005).
Apart from campaigning for the culture of total quality management, the HR manager assesses the training and management needs. During this assessment the HR manager determines the kind of knowledge and skills to be taught, how they are to be taught, how they will be recognized in terms of performance and how they will be rewarded.
In conclusion, it is clear that the HR manager has a critical role to play as far as management of quality of a company’s products and services is concerned. He achieves this by instilling the culture of total quality management to the employees; act as a role model in perceiving people in the working environment as the immediate customers to the products and services being offered.
Finally, the human resource links the employees and the top management ensuring that all necessary conditions required enabling production of quality products and services are provided in order to meet customer needs.
References
Elliott, C. Turnbull, S. 2005. Critical Thinking In Human Resource Development. London: Routledge.
Melcrum.com 2008. Special Report On Internal Branding. Web.
Stoner, J.A. F., Freeman, R. E, And Gilbert, D R. 2003. Management Sixth Ed. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall Of India.
Walker, J. W. 1998. Are We Using The Right Human Resource Measures? Human Resource Planning. 21(1),1-4
Yuki, G. 1994. Effective Leadership In Open Systems, Leadership In Organizations (3rd Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, Nj: Prentice-Hall.