Answer to Question #316978 in Management for tinku

Question

Explain what human resource management. Briefly discuss and illustrate three important trends influencing human resource management.

Answer 1

Human resource management (HRM) is the practice of recruiting, hiring, deploying and managing an organization's employees. HRM is often referred to simply as human resources (HR).

Trends

Workforce diversity

In the past HRM was considerably simpler because our work force was strikingly homogeneous. Today’s work force comprises of people of different gender, age, social class sexual orientation, values, personality characteristics, ethnicity, religion, education, language, physical appearance, martial status, lifestyle, beliefs, ideologies and background characteristics such as geographic origin, tenure with the organization, and economic status and the list could go on. Diversity is critically linked to the organization’s strategic direction. Where diversity flourishes, the potential benefits from better creativity and decision making and greater innovation can be accrued to help increase organization’s competitiveness. One means of achieving that is through the organization’s benefits package.

Changing skills requirement

Recruiting and developing skilled labor is important for any company concerned about competitiveness, productivity, quality and managing a diverse work force effectively. Skill deficiencies translate into significant losses for the organization in terms of poor-quality work and lower productivity, increase in employee accidents and customer complaints.

Corporate down sizing

Whenever an organization attempts to delayer, it is attempting to create greater efficiency. The premise of downsizing is to reduce the number of workers employed by the organization. HRM department has a very important role to play in downsizing. HRM people must ensure that proper communication must take place during this time. They must minimize the negative effects of rumors and ensure that individuals are kept informed with factual data. HRM must also deal with actual layoff. HRM dept is key to the downsizing discussions that have to take place.