Managing Organizations
April 12, 2022Assessment 3: Individual Reflective Journal – Individual Assignment
April 13, 2022Introduction
In this era of Globalization, business organizations are experiencing several issues or challenges within their business and management. Due to intense competition and price war, business organizations are getting more exposed to such issues and challenges. Presently, every business organization is endeavoring to achieve more profitability and sustainability within the market. But growing increasing challenges in the business and management are restricting the business organizations to achieve the same. In this context, this research paper will discuss the most contemporary issues and challenges relating to human resource management which are witnessed within the business organizations.
Research Topic
The research topic is issues and challenges in HR management. The management of human resources has extensive strategic significance in the achievement of organizational growth and excellence. Human resources are considered the most valuable resource and act as a nervous system for the business organization. But, HR management is comprised of several issues and challenges like planning, acquisition, development of human resources, etc. It is essential for every business organization to efficiently deal with these issues and challenges to ensure a smooth flow of business operations towards the organizational goals and objectives.
Literature Review:
HR management:
HR management refers to the procedures of employing staff, training them, compensating them, framing policies associated with them, and developing strategies to retain the employees. In simpler terms, it is the procedure of hiring and developing employees so that they become more valuable to the organization towards the organizational goals. However, it also includes different challenges and issues which crop up in front of HR managers. Thus, HR managers must identify and address these issues to avoid an obstruction in the organizational activities (Bratton, and Gold, 2017). Below are the main issues as well as challenges:
- Retention: It is a common notion that the major job of HR is to recruit and employ new talents within the organization. But the reality is that majority of HR activities revolve around retaining the existing talents of the organization. Employee retention is a major challenge as it is a fine balancing act among the organizational culture, remuneration, and incentives ().
- Training and Compliance: the training is a vital aspect of employee development. But it is a major challenge for the HR department to develop appropriate training and development strategies that can suit best its employees. This is because the competency level generally varies from person to person and applying a similar training program may not be effective (Gatewood, Feild, and Barrick, 2015).
- Health and safety: Health and safety is a major concern of the HR department of the business organization. The appropriate health and safety strategies ensure the organization maintains safety at work. But it is not an easy task and requires immense attention while developing strategies for health and safety (Stone, and Deadrick, 2015).
- Discrimination and diversity: As the business environment is becoming more globalized, the organizations are exposed to cross-culture workforces. It may lead to discrimination among the employees on the grounds of caste, religion, gender, disability, color, ethnicity, etc. Thus it is a major challenge for HR management that no such incidence may occur within the workplace. The organization must adopt a zero-tolerance policy to deal with the incidence of discrimination among the employees. It will restrict the employees from further discrimination incidence (Bratton, and Gold, 2017).
- Adapting to Innovation: The majority of employees tend to avoid the changes in business processes or operations. They do not prefer to adopt or upgrade with the developing technology or innovation. Thus, it becomes a major challenge for HR management to convince the workforce to adopt the innovation for their personal and professional development (Gatewood, Feild, and Barrick, 2015).
As human resources in an inevitable part of the organization in myriad areas, right from the strategic planning to the company’s brand image, it is highly beneficial for the business organization to identify the key areas of issues and challenges so that the HR manager can develop adequate and appropriate strategies to eradicate those issues.
Research Design:
The research design is a crucial process while performing research as it helps in associating links between the methods and research topic and connecting the same with the data which are collected. Various types of research design can be performed within the research such as exploratory, descriptive and explanatory. In the exploratory research design, no standardized model is utilized and a major concentration is done on exploring new knowledge (Lewis, 2015). Consequently, the descriptive research design standardized process is used. Unlike descriptive research, explanatory research is performed for a problem that was not appropriately researched earlier, demands priorities to develop an operational definition, and provides a well-researched model. The said topic of issues and challenges in HR management is very broad which requires an appropriate understanding of its notions. In that context, this research will utilize an explanatory research design. This research design is most appropriate for the said topic because explanatory research is defined as an endeavor to associate ideas to comprehend cause and effect (Taylor, Bogdan, and DeVault, 2015). By implementing the explanatory research design, the researcher tries to recognize the factors behind the cause of the issues. As issues and challenges in HR management is a common phenomenon within the business organization, the exploratory or descriptive research design may be ineffective in obtaining the most appropriate evaluation. Thus, explanatory research for issues and challenges in HR management will concentrate on describing the different aspects of the study in a more proficient and detailed manner (Taylor, Doherty, and McGraw, 2015).
Research Methods:
The research methodology is also an integral part of the research which ensures the implementation of the right methodology to accomplish the research objectives. For this particular research, the primary data collection will be utilized as it helps in accumulating the most recent and fresh data for this respective research. The primary data collection can be performed in various ways such as interviews, surveys, experiments, focus groups, etc (Taylor, Bogdan, and DeVault, 2015). As the said topic is directly associated with the employees and HR department of the organization. The most appropriate method will be an interview with the internal stakeholders of the business organization it will enable the researcher to address particular issues as per the situation. The interview will be able to attain vital information that the researcher wants to know in regards to the issues and challenges in HR management (Taylor, Doherty, and McGraw, 2015). Some of the major questions which will be asked during the interviews of the internal stakeholders of the organization are stated below:
- Do you think that organization’s HR executives are completely aware of the needs and requirements of the employees?
- What is the major motive behind retaining the right and talented employees of the organization?
- Does the organization’s HR requirements are systematically ascertained and an effective plan is developed to satisfy the requirements of the employees?
- Do you think that organization has been successful in providing appropriate training and development to its workforce?
- Does the organization duly support its employees which are experiencing any issues and challenges?
Research Approach
The research approach equally plays a vital role in the successful completion of the research. There are two major types of research approaches that are followed by the researchers known as qualitative research and quantitative research. Qualitative research is mainly exploratory research which is utilized to attain an understanding of fundamental opinions, reasons, and motivations. This type of research approach provides insights into the core of the problem and assists in developing hypotheses or ideas for prospective quantitative research. On the other hand, quantitative research is utilized to quantify the issues and challenges through generating numerical data and those data can be transformed into utilizable statistics (Merriam, and Tisdell, 2015). This respective research is mainly utilized to quantify opinions, perspectives, attitudes, behaviors, and other variables and generalizing the results from a larger sample population. In this respective research, the researcher has followed the qualitative research approach as the sample population for this research is small and respondents belong to the internal stakeholder of the organization. It is most suitable for this research because qualitative research is beneficial in revealing trends in opinions and thought and diving deeper into the core of the problems. The issues and challenges in human resource management are major problems that can be mainly seen within the organization and qualitative research within the organization will result in gaining valuable information from the HR executives as well as employees (Creswell, and Creswell, 2017).
Conclusion
From the research mentioned above, it can be concluded that no doubt HR management is a vital task for every business organization to accomplish its goals and objectives. But it comprises several major issues and challenges which must be addressed and removed by the human resource management promptly to reduce the adverse impact of the same within the workforce. This respective research has successfully presented the research topics, literature review, research methodology, research approach, research design, etc to get the comprehensive results from this research analysis.
References:
- Bratton, J. and Gold, J., 2017. Human resource management: theory and practice. Palgrave.
- Creswell, J.W. and Creswell, J.D., 2017. Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approach. Sage publications.
- Gatewood, R., Feild, H.S. and Barrick, M., 2015. Human resource selection. Nelson Education.
- Lewis, S., 2015. Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Health promotion practice, 16(4), pp.473-475.
- Merriam, S.B. and Tisdell, E.J., 2015. Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. John Wiley & Sons.
- Stone, D.L. and Deadrick, D.L., 2015. Challenges and opportunities affecting the future of human resource management. Human Resource Management Review, 25(2), pp.139-145.
- Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. John Wiley & Sons.
- Taylor, T., Doherty, A., and McGraw, P., 2015. Managing people in sports organizations: A strategic human resource management perspective. Routledge.