Challenges of Human Resources - Essay Example

Challenges of Human Resource Departments Challenges of Human Resource Departments With a dynamic world in the 21stcentury, most Human Resources Departments encounter certain strategic challenges. Human resources department is indeed on of the most challenging departments in an organization especially considering the fact that it deals with the training, hiring, and retention of diverse employees. In their quest to align their staff with the organization’s mission and vision statements, most human resources managers have to balance between the organization interests, employee interests, and stakeholder interests (Vance & Paik, 2011).

This paper discusses the biggest problems facing human resources departments today, critically summarizing the key issues that human modern human resource managers have to grapple with in their management of the company’s personnel. Recruitment and outsourcing Perhaps this is one of the notorious bottleneck that most human resource managers face in their quest to hire new employees. More often than not, contemporary human resource heads use the recruitment exercise as a marketing exercise in order to get the best-suited employees for the job.

This has always been difficult, as various employees have fixed interests ranging from financial stability to company interest (Aswathappa, 2005). This has led to many human resource departments hiring employees either ion contract or freelance basis, depending on the type of employees and the expertise they bring to the company (Vance & Paik, 2011). Often, salaries employees demand more in terms of rewards as compared to their counterparts on contracts or freelance, a factor that has motivated HR managers to make use of seasoned recruiters in searching for highly qualified employees (Sims, 2007).

  Leadership development and talent retention Identified by the Pricewaterhousecoopers as a major challenge in most HR departments, leadership development has a significant bearing on the company’s course considering the fact that a highly successful company takes into consideration employee concerns and rewards. It is a common phenomenon that as organizations expand, their demand for promotable and highly motivated leaders can never be overemphasized. This helps the prospective staff to take up created leadership roles in order to spur the organization to greater length and new heights of development.

In fact, leadership development has a strong connection to customer retention in that good leaders often inspire confidence in their employees in addition to the motivation they impart on the employees (Aswathappa, 2005). On the contrary, HR managers who may not possess the required leadership skills may send their employees packing by their unbecoming characters. Additionally, the Society for Human Resource Management in their November 2005 poll found out that going by the current trends, talent retention is a challenge facing organizations and by 2022, it will be the leading problem in the corporate world.

The insufficiency of technical talent affects most HR departments especially when it comes to tacking role that are technical in nature. The training and retention of employees with technical skills normally has some element of uncertainty as these individuals are in high demand by most corporates (Sims, 2007).  Culture and Conflict Resolution Every human resource department has a duty to shape the culture of the organization. This comes as a challenge as most of the employees to a given company may originate diverse cultural backgrounds.

The difference in cultures may mean that some employees may have unique values that do not resonate well with the rest of the employees (Sims, 2007). This may range from employee ethical principles to the adherence to organization culture. Although new perspective and ideas come with diverse cultures, the danger of cultural intolerance looms with it. It is due to such difference that conflicts may arise among employees and the formulation of a cohesive organization culture by the human resource department may not fit everyone’s interests especially those employees with extreme values and beliefs.

Although organizations, through their respective human resource departments have tackled the issue through structured conflict resolution mechanisms, employee conflicts remain a challenge to most corporates. Some HR departments manage this pitfall by involving all employees and stakeholders in key decisions pertaining to the welfare of employees (Aswathappa, 2005).  Partnership and employee satisfaction Since the evolution of the HR from personnel administration to the human resource management, most human resource managers feel that they ought to form part of the executive board that makes and implements key decisions within a company (Vance & Paik, 2011).

Through collaborating with other line departments and executive committees, human resource departments play a pivotal role in advocating for employee concerns and interests at the executive level. Normally, human resource managers and departments face the challenge of exclusion by the company management as far as the undertaking of fundamental aspects of the company is concerned. According to Sims (2007), some of the issues discussed at the top level might have had direct relationship to the welfare of the employees thus exclusion is a problem that most HR heads have to endure.

On the other hand, employee satisfaction has a connection to how the management handles the affairs of the employees. If both the top management and the HR department operate in a manner that adds value to employee job description, the job satisfaction level of the employees will go up. Otherwise, lack of the employee satisfaction in their respective jobs pose a great threat to human resource departments of major and small companies (Sims, 2007). References Aswathappa, K. (2005). Human resource and personnel management: Text and cases.

New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill. Sims, R. R. (2007). Human resource management: Contemporary issues, challenges, and opportunities. Greenwich, Conn: Information Age Publ. Vance, C., & Paik, Y. (2011). Managing a global workforce: Challenges and opportunities in international human resource management. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe.