Human resources management (HRM) includes a variety of activities. Key among them is deciding on staffing needs and whether to use independent contractors or hire employees to fill these needs.

Others include recruiting and training the best employees, ensuring they are high performers, dealing with performance issues, and ensuring that personnel and management practices conform to regulations.

HRM and human resources development have undergone tremendous change. Years ago, large organisations looked to the Personnel Department mostly to manage the paperwork around hiring and paying people.

More recently, organisations consider the HR Department as playing a major role in staffing, training and helping to manage people.

Effective people management and development is based on drawing sound policies and procedures aimed at improving communication between em-ployees and managers and building a more satisfied and productive workforce.

Managing staff is not as simple as leading them to the pinnacle of success or improving their productivity. Good leaders should know how to bring out the best in their followers.

Performance management is the new term for the old appraisal system whereby employee performance was reviewed regularly.

Crucial factors in HR management include:

• getting the right person for the right job at the right time;

• analysing the gap between employee potential and job demands;

• organising proper training programmes for employees for an improvement in skills;

• taking care of employees.

• performance appraisal, compensation, promotional activities;

• co-ordinating between employees and management; and

• taking care of welfare activities run by the organisation.

Doing it right will surprise some and astonish the rest. Imagine a place where everyone chooses to provide you with excellent, heartfelt customer care, where you never feel you have asked a stupid question, where you always feel like you are not wasting someone's time, but feel important and special.

Getting positive feedback about your work serves will boost your morale and is something you will rarely forget. Negative criticism should also serve as a boost, because if you take your work seriously, your performance will improve.

The purpose of job analysis is to document the requirements of a job and the work performed.

Job and task analysis is performed as a basis for later improvements, including the definition of a job domain, describing a job, developing performance appraisals, sele-ction systems, pro-motion criteria, training needs assess-ment and compensation plans.

In HR and industrial psy-chology, job analysis is often used to gather information for use in personnel selection, training, classification, and/or compensation.

Mr Farrugia is a Full Member of the Institute of Professional Managers of the UK and a member of the Malta Institute of Management and the Human Capital Institute of the US.