“ECONOMICS is the study of how human beings allocate their limited resources to satisfy their unlimited needs and wants.”

Professor Daw Tin Hla Kyi started with these words on the first night of lectures for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) course at the Yangon Institute of Economics.

She meant that everybody must make decisions on how to spend our available resources: Do we spend it on what we want? Or what we need?

She said that even though natural resources are abundant in Myanmar, human resources – the people who manage staffs – are scarce. If a company were compared to a computer, human resources would be considered the software.
Her message for the urgent need for more human resource workers is similar to a Ministry of Forestry slogan that said the best time to grow a tree is now and the second best time was 10 years ago.

Some Myanmar companies say employees are the software, or brains of their organisations, while motor vehicles and machinery are the hardware.

Business executives repeatedly emphasise the importance of human resource management with statements like “Our strength is the quality of our people”.

While the ‘brain drain’ is becoming a much-discussed topic among intellectuals, the role of human resource managers should be given serious attention.

In his study of human resource management, called Management, Dr Robert Daft – a professor at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in the United States – highlighted a number of areas where managers must be effective.

Dr Daft said managers are responsible for finding, recruiting, training, nurturing and retaining the best people because without them, company objectives will never be implemented successfully.

Human Resource managers start with planning, which is followed by job analysis, forecasting, recruiting and staff selection. In Dr Daft's book, this technique falls under the heading of ‘attracting an effective workforce’.

Human resource planning begins with questions about the volume of future business, turnover rates, what new technologies are emerging and how they will affect the workplace.

The answers to these questions must be used in formulating how and what human resource activities should be specified, Dr Daft said.

This includes how many managers will be needed in future, as well as what types of managers. It also questions what staff will be required to complete upcoming tasks.

After making a job analysis, a manager then prepares a written description for a specific position with a clear and concise summary of tasks, duties and responsibilities.

Job specification must include descriptions of the knowledge, skills, education, physical abilities and characteristics needed to adequately perform the job.

Developing an effective workforce includes training, development and appraisal.

Training and development represent an ongoing effort by an organisation to facilitate employees’ learning of job-related tasks.

Training may come in the form of on-the-job training in which an experienced employee is asked to take new employees under his or her own wing and demonstrate to them how to perform certain duties.

According to Dr Daft, companies in the US spend nearly US$100 billion each year on employee training.

Further employee development can be encouraged by promoting promising staff from within the workforce when openings arise. Competitive exams or tests are the tools that management should use to ensure the right candidate gets the job.

Regular performance appraisals of each and every employee is another important technique in the development of an effective workforce.

Maintaining an effective workforce is critical considering the cost of attracting and developing this valuable resource.

A company’s compensation system has an obvoius impact on strategic performance. Again, human resource managers are required to design the pay and benefits schemes to fit company strategy and to provide compensation equity.

Here, good managers should understand that a compensation package requires more than just money.

Last, but not least, when the time comes to end an employees contract good managers must know when and how to conduct this task. Dr Daft said under-performing staff members have an extremely disruptive effect on other staff. Productive staff members often resent low-performing employees who are allowed to stay with the company and are happy to see them go.

Second, exit interviews conducted with the departing employees are an inexpensive way to learn about pockets of dissatisfaction within the organisation.