Managing human resource learning
Developing knowledge management in a learning perpedtive means that organizing and managing the employment relations in the firm becomes of central importance. This places human resources management in a central position literally as knowledge manager. The knowledge flows and learning forms must be consciously and carefully combined and configured in such a way that they together become complementary and useful for short term problem solving and adjustments,as well as long-term innovative performance of the firm.
Theoretically,systems thinking can contribute to building a coherent model of complementary and stategically oriented managing of human learning and knowledge creation. In practical human resource management the main functions:recruitment,selection,developing training,apprising,rewarding and retaining are often isolated or loosely coupled and neither strategically nor systematically related.The different main functions are decided and executed by different agents in the firm,such as central management,staff personnel and middle level line leaders. Decisions on recruitment and selection may well be only loosely coupled to the decision on employment training and career development in the firm, and often incentives and rewards for the employees do not improvement of employee creativity, learning and knowledge sharing. In a cohesive and complementary resource management model the insights into drivers of knowledge and learning must be guidelines for relations between the main functions of human resource management.
Cohesion and complementarities in the elements of human resources management are important,but it is even morn important that learning and knowledge production are in line with strategic considerations on the innovative performance of the firm.With this imperative the relations between the decision levels of the firm must be consolidated; the relations between strategic, tactical and operative decisions are essential.At the strategic level it is important to integrate product or sevice strategy with a knowledge strategy and the manpower strategy. On the tactical level instruments and procedures must be created to efficiently plan and guide the operational decisions and the functional coherence of these.In this way the relations between the management levels of the firm become integrated and future oriented.
The main challenge is, however,to ensure that the relations work both top down and bottom up, in such a way that competence strengths and knowledge resources becomes input to tactical planning and strategic aims(Hendry,1995).A systematic and dynamic human resources learning system must work both ways and must itself be a learning forum with information on potentials, objectives and caveats, which are necessary input for continuous development of the resource-based positions of strengths.