Human Resources Polices and Strategies of Nike - Essay Example

The HR objective of Nike in the long run is to increase the availability of educational assistance programs to all the manufacturing employees worldwide. This objective of Nike reflects in its human resource management functions. The company has introduced educational assistance programs because it is very important to have workers who are willing to learn and who show the interest to develop themselves. Hence, their recruitment policy is to consider only those employees who have an inclination to improve their skills and educational levels.

After the recruitment and selection of employees with this kind of specific attitude, the next step of training and development is planned and implemented. The training and development of the workers are done by offering opportunities for general education purposes like if workers want to learn to read, write, and fill any gaps in their early childhood education. In another aspect, the company also conducts seminars and workshops for supervisors in factories so that they improve their production and management skills.

The main advantage of this policy to give improve the quality of human resources is to increase the value of human resources and to create a favorable learning environment in the company which is very essential to grow in the highly competitive globalized economy. The next aspect of the discussion is compensation. At Nike, the wages of the twenty thousand employees are based on the qualifications and skills, and the policies are designed so that all the hours worked (regular and overtime) are compensated.

In addition to this, the workers who have shown interest in improving their skills and who have completed any educational program are given promotions and their salaries and perks are increased. The company also has a detailed human resource information system to store all the information about the employees’ profile, education, and training, performance. It can be accessed anywhere in the world by a certain group of users. The HR department of Nike also provides employees with lots of learning tools.

It provides an orientation webpage for new employees to learn about the company. Also, Nike has invested a lot of money in software which is very useful for the business and the employees can access directly to those skill software to learn and improve their knowledge and thereby improving operational efficiency.Though Nike has become a cultural and attitude icon, it has also become a target for global criticisms of the living conditions of its workforce across the world. Hence, Nike has developed a very comprehensive factory audit standards for the organizations in its supply chain.

The standards in the factories should match the specifications of Nike, if not chances are given for improvement, and re-audit is done. With these changes in the HR policies, Nike has turned its focus more internally which means that the commitment of Nike towards its labor force has increased. This change is reflected very much in human resource policies and strategies.