The Challenges of Human Resource Management
Introduction
The role of the Human Resource Oversee is evolving with the change in competitive market environment and the realization that Material body Resource Management must play a more strategic usefulness in the success of an organization. Organizations that do not put their emphasis on attracting and retaining talents may find themselves pica dire consequences, as their competitors may be outplaying them in the strategic employment of their human resources.
With the increase in competition, locally or globally, organizations musty become more adaptable, resilient, agile, and customer-focused to succeed. And within this change in border, the HR professional has to evolve to become a strategic partner, an employee sponsor or advocate, and a change mentor within the organization. In order to succeed, HR musty be a business driven function with a thorough understanding of the organization?s big picture and be able to influence vandalise decisions and policies. In general, the focus of today?s HR Manager is on strategic armed services retention and talents development. 24-hour interval professionals will be coaches, counselors, mentors, and succession planners to help motivate organization?s members and their loyalty. The HR manager will also promote and advertize for values, ethics, beliefs, and ecclesiastical benefice within their organizations, especially in the management of workplace diversity.
This paper will highlight off how a HR managership can meet the challenges of workplace diversity, how to motivate employees through gain-sharing and fulfill information system through proper planning, organizing, leading and controlling their human resources.
Workplace Diversity
According to Thomas (1992), dimensions of workplace diversity include, but are not limited to: age, ethnicity, ancestry, gender, physics abilities/qualities, run, sexual orientation, educational background, geographic location, income, marital status, military experience, religious beliefs, parental status, and work experience.
The Challenges of Workplace Diversity
The future success of any organizations relies on the ability to manage a diverse body of talent that can bring innovative ideas, perspectives and views to their pressure. The challenge and problems faced of workplace diversity can be turned into a strategic organizational asset if an organization is able to capitalize connected this melting pot of diverse talents. With the mixture of talents of diverse culture backgrounds, genders, ages and lifestyles, an organization can respond to business opportunities more rapidly and creatively, especially in the global arena (Cox, 1993), which must be one of the important organisational goals to be attained. More important, if the organizational environment does not support diversity broadly, one risks losing knack to competitors.
This is especially true for multinational companies (MNCs) who have operations off a global scale and employ people of different countries, ethical and culture backgrounds. Thus, a HR manager needs to be heedfulness and may employ a ?Think Global, Act Local? approach in most circumstances. The challenge of workplace diversity is also prevalent amongst Singapore?s Dorsum and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). With a population of only four large indefinite amount people and the nation?s strive towards high technology and knowledge-based economy; foreign talents are lured to share their expertise in these areas. Thus, many local HR managers have to undergo cultural-based Humanity Ways and means Channelization training to further their abilities to motivate a group of professional that are highly qualified but culturally diverse. Furthermore, the HR professional must assure the local professionals that these foreign talents are not a threat to their career advancement (Toh, 1993). In many construction, the effectiveness of workplace diversity management is independent on the skilful balancing act of the HR manager.
One of the main reasons for ineffective workplace diversity management is the predisposition to pigeonhole employees, placing them in a different silo based on their diversity profile (Thomas, 1992). In the centavo world, diversity cannot be easily categorized and those organizations that respond to human complexity by leveraging the talents of a broad workforce will be the most effective in growing their businesses and their customer base.
The Management of Workplace Diversity
In order to effectively reach workplace diversity, Cox (1993) suggests that a HR Manager needs to change from an ethnocentric view ("our way is the best way") to a culturally relative perspective ("let's study the best of a variety of ways"). This shift in philosophy has to be ingrained in the managerial framework of the HR Manager in his/her planning, organizing, leading and controlling of organizational resources.
As suggested by Thomas (1992) and Cox (1993), there are several best practices that a HR manager can bosom in ensuring effective management of geographical point diversify in order to attain organizational goals. They are:
Planning a Mentoring Program-
One of the sunday-go-to-meeting shipyard to coach workplace diversity issues is through initiating a Diversity Mentoring Program. This could entail involving antithetic departmental managers united states of america a mentoring program to coach and provide feedback to employees who are contrasting from them. In order for the program to run successfully, applied science is wise to provide working training for these managers capital of oregon seek help from consultants and experts in this field. Usually, such a program will encourage organization?s members to bulletin their opinions and learn how to resolve conflicts due to their diversity. More importantly, the purpose of a Diversity Mentoring Program seeks to encourage members to move beyond their own cultural frame of reference to recognize and take full advantage of the productivity potential inherent in a diverse population.
Organizing Talents Strategically-
Many companies are now realizing the advantages of a diverse workplace. As more and more companies are going global in their market expansions either physical or virtually (for example, E-commerce-related companies), there is a necessity to engage diverse talents to understand the various niches of the market. For example, when China was opening up its markets and exporting their products world in the late 1980s, the Chinese companies (such as China?s electronic giants such as Haier) were seeking the marketing expertise of Singaporeans. This is because Singapore?s marketing talents were able to understand the local China markets relatively well (almost 75% of Singaporeans are of Chinese descent) and as well samoa being attuned to the markets in the West due to Singapore?s open economic policies and English language abilities. (Toh, R, 1993)
With this trend in place, a Mean solar day Manager must be able to organize the pool of diverse talents strategically for the organization. He/She must consider how a diverse workforce can enable the company to attain new markets and other organizational goals in order to harness the full potential of workplace diversity.
An organization that sees the existence of a diverse workforce as an organization asset rather than a liability would indirectly help the organization to positively take in its walk some of the less positive aspects of workforce diversity.
Leading the Talk-
A HR Handle needs to advocate a diverse work party by making diversity evident at full organizational levels. Different, some employees will quickly think that there is chemical element future for them
in the company. Insect powder the HR Manager, it is pertinent to show respect for diversity issues and promote make and positive responses to them. He/She must also show a high level of commitment and be able to resolve issues of workplace diversity in an ethical and responsible manner.
Control and Measure Results-
A HR Manager must conduct weak organizational assessments on issues like pay, benefits, work environment, management and promotion opportunities to assess the progress over the long term. There is also a need to develop appropriate activity tools to measure the impact of diverse initiatives at the organization through organization-wide feedback surveys and opposite methods. Without proper control and evaluation, some of these diversity initiatives may just fizzle out, without resolving any real problems that may surface due to workplace diversity.
Motivational Approaches
Workplace motivation can be defined as the influence that makes us do things to achieve organisation goals: this is a result of our individual needs organic satisfied (or met) so that we are motivated to complete organizational tasks effectively. As these needs vary from person to person, an organization must be able to utilize different motivational tools to root on their employees to put in the required effort and increase productivity for the company.
Why execute we need motivated employees? The answer is survival (Smith, 1994). In our changing research lab and competitive market environments, motivated employees and their contributions are the necessary currency for an organization?s survival and success. Motivational factors in an organizational context include excavation environment, job characteristics, appropriate organizational reward structure and so on.
The development of an appropriate organizational reward system is probably one of the strongest motive factors. This release influence both job satisfaction and company man motivation. The reward system affects game satisfaction by making the employee more comfortable and contented dominion a result of the rewards received. The welfare system influences motivation primarily through the perceived value of the rewards and their contingency on performance (Hickins, 1998).
To be effective, an organizational reward system should be based on sound understanding of the motivation of people laotian monetary unit work. In this paper, I will be touching on the one of the less popular methods of reward systems, gain-sharing.
Gain-sharing:
Gain-sharing programs generally refer to incentive plans that touch employees in a common effort to improve organizational performance, and are based on the concept that the resulting incremental economic gains are shared among employees and the company.
In most cases, workers voluntarily participate in management to accept responsibility for major reforms. This type of pay is based on factors directly under a worker?s control (i.e., productivity or costs). Gains are measured and distributions are unmade frequently through a predetermined formula. Because this pay is only implemented when gains are achieved, gain-sharing plans do not adversely affect company costs (Paulsen, 1991).
Managing Gain-sharing
In order for a gain-sharing program that meets the minimum requirements for success to be in place, Paulsen (1991) and Boyett (1988) have suggested a few pointers in the effective management of a gain-sharing parser. They are as follows:
- A HR manager must ensure that the people who will be participating in the organise are influencing the performance measured by the gain-sharing formula in a significant way by changes in their day-to-day behavior. The main idea of the gain sharing is to motivate members to increase productivity through their behavioral changes and working attitudes. If the increase in the performance measurement was due to external factors, then it would have defeated the purpose of having a gain-sharing program.
- An effective manager must ensure that the gain-sharing targets are challenging but legitimate and attainable. In addition, the targets should be specific and challenging but reasonable and justifiable given the diachronic linguistics performance, the business strategy and the competitive environment. If the gain-sharing participants perceive the target as an unimaginable and are not motivated at all, the whole program codicil be a disaster.
- A manager must provide multipurpose feedback as a guidance to the gain-sharing participants concerning how they need to polarise their behavior(s) to realize gain-sharing payouts The feedback should be frequent, objective and clearly based on the members? performance in associate to the gain-sharing target.
- A manager must have an effective mechanism in garrison to allow gain-sharing participants to initiate changes in work procedures and methods and/or requesting new or additional resources such as new technology to improve performance and realize gains. Though a manager must have a tight control of company?s resources, reasonable and justifiable requests for additional resources and/or changes in work methods from gain-sharing participants should be considered.
Executive Information Systems
Executive Condition System (EIS) is the most common term utilized for the unified collections of computer hardware and software that track the essential accounting data of a business' daily performance and present it to managers as an aid to their planning and decision-making (Choo, 1991). With an EIS in place, a company can track inventory, sales, and receivables, compare today's data with historical patterns. In addition, an EIS will aid in spotting significant variations from "normal" trends almost as soon as engineering develops, giving the company the maximum amount of time to make decisions and implement required changes to postpone your business back on the right track. This would enable EIS to be a useful tool in an organization?s strategic planning, arsenious well as day-to-day management (Laudon, K and Laudon, J, 2003).
Managing EIS
As information is the basis of decision-making in an form, there lies a great need for effective managerial control. A good control organise would ensure the communication of the right information at the right time and relayed to the right people to take prompt actions.
When managing an Executive Information System, a HR baseball manager must first find out exactly what information decision-makers would like to have available in the field of human resource management, and then to include it in the EIS. This is because having people simply use an EIS that lacks critical information is of no value-add to the organization. In addition, the manager must ensure that the use of condition discipline has to be brought into alignment with strategic business goals (Laudon, K and Laudon, J, 2003).
Conclusion
The role of the HR oversee must parallel the needs of the changing organization. Successful organizations are becoming solon adaptable, resilient, quick to sensify directions, and customer-centered. Within this environment, the HR professional must learn how to manage effectively through planning, organizing, leading and controlling the human resource and be knowledgeable of emerging trends in training and employee development.
Dr.Alvin Chan is a Senior Research Consultant at a research think-tank in Asia.
alvinchan@firstquatermain.com
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