Trends And Challenges In Human Resources

Trends and Challenges in Human Resources

Human resources (HR) departments face many existing and future challenges when working with employees such as diversity issues, turnover, health and safety, and benefits. These challenges will change as employees become more skillful and want more out of the company they work for to make them satisfied in the areas of pay and benefits. In this paper, reviewed will be the impact on HR regarding existing and future trends, existing and future challenges, advantages of turnover, performance appraisals, and safety and health in the workplace.

Existing trends in HR

Some of the major trends affecting human resource management today are the modern labor force, organizational strategy, growth, technology, and the changing nature of employment relationships. Companies struggle to determine who will participate in the workforce of the future. This can be done by examining the aging workforce, the diverse workforce, and the skill deficiencies of the workforce. Trends in organizational strategy include putting in the effort to maintain high-performance work systems that will develop changes in the organization’s size and structure. Today, human resource management has stepped up to play an important role in helping organizations. Human resource management’s goal is to gain and keep an advantage over competitors by simply developing into high-performance work systems. “Among the trends that are occurring in today’s high-performance work systems are reliance on knowledge workers; empowerment of employees to make decisions; and the use of teamwork (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhert, & Wright, 2003, p. 36).”

More than ever traditional managers are seeing that human resource management is playing a more central role rather than just an administrative function. Managers are looking at human resource management as a way to support a company’s strategy by helping to plan for meeting broad goals including profitability, quality and market share. Major changes in technology especially the internet, is playing a large role in changing organizations including presenting new ways to handle human resource management. “Advances in computer-related technology have had a major impact on the use of information for managing human resources (Noe et al., 2003, p. 49).” Human resource information system (HRIS) are computer systems that are being used to acquire, store, manipulate, analyze, retrieve and distribute information in relation to an organization’s human resource management.

Human resources involved in e-businesses have the challenge of quickly identifying and hiring talented employees. The sharing of information technology is changing the way that human resource departments handle record keeping and information sharing. By using modern technology human resources are able to automate much of their work in managing employee records. They can provide employees access to information such as enrollment forms for training, benefits, and other programs.

Existing Challenges in HR

Almost on a daily basis, executives, managers, professionals, and business owners are challenged by frustrating employee related issues. These human resource management challenges cost companies time, money, lost opportunities, resources, and reduced productivity. Some of the biggest challenges facing human resource management are: workplace diversity, employee turnover, mismatched employment, and employee absenteeism.

The continued 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 work. The challenges and problems faced of workplace diversity can be turned into a strategic organizational asset if an organization is able to capitalize on this melting pot of diverse talents. With the mixture of talents of diverse cultural backgrounds, genders, ages and lifestyles, an organization can respond to business opportunities more rapidly and creatively, especially in the global workforce. Importantly, if the organizational environment does not support workplace diversity the company risks losing talent to their competitors.

Meeting the demands of today's changing business environment requires building and retaining a loyal and motivated staff. However, finding and keeping quality employees also pose a challenge to human resource management. Today's workers are no longer inclined to stay at one company for the duration of his or her careers. The most talented professionals often are courted by other businesses and the effects of turnovers can be costly. The time and money it takes to recruit, rehire and retain can quickly cut into the company’s bottom line. Employee turnover is inevitable but when excessive can put a company into the red. Many new employees do not become fully productive until they’ve been trained and gain experience, a process that usually takes several months. The time, effort, and money invested in those employees, walk out the door when they leave.

Human resource management also faces the challenge of putting competent employees into jobs in which the employee is destined to fail. Mismatched employment is the single most important factor in company success. Mismatching employees to the wrong jobs places managers and employees at opposite ends of a motivational tug of war. These mismatches cause risks within the company. One of the main problems with mismatched employment is the mismatch in behavioral style. Behavioral styles predict no more and no less than how an individual will respond to problems, people, pace of the environment and procedures. Mismatches between job and personal styles and inter-personal styles do not necessarily guarantee failure, but do ensure that stress and conflict will eventually happen.

Employee absenteeism is having a greater impact on human resource management than ever before. Direct disability and absence management costs are now 7.1 percent of payroll. Short-term absence costs, as a percentage of total payroll costs, have more than doubled from 2.0 percent in 1997 to 4.2 percent. Long-term disability costs, as a percentage of total payroll costs, have increased by 8% (Kettner, 2008). In order to counteract the cost of absenteeism, many corporations are beginning to use practices such as independent medical evaluations, employee assistance programs, and work life programs.

Annual Performance Appraisals and Performance Management

Every company has to make decisions concerning the regulation of employee performance. Not everyone agrees on