Management Challenges by HRM managers - Essay Example

Management Challenges by HRM managers Abstract Without any doubts, management today is not an easy task. In fact, a manager now days face many challenges and not coping with them puts a question mark on their survival. One of the most important objectives of managers is to ensure high performance working of its employees. Despite the fact that it sounds good, it is one of the most difficult tasks for anyone on this planet. This is because it is now about achieving high performance working, however, it is about achieving high performance working in an era of globalization, technological advances, and temporariness and balancing it with work force diversity, quality assurance, ethical standards, and labor shortage. This paper sheds some light on some tools that are effective in guaranteeing high performance working. Introduction For the past four or five decades, the competition in the market has reached its intense possible levels. The market is becoming a ruthless place where there is no room for mistakes. Increased customer awareness, technological advances, globalization, ethical concerns, new competitors, and many other factors made life a tough job for many firms. In this scenario, they had no choice but to find ways through which they can possibly reduce their costs and increase their productivity at the same time (Bloisi, pp. 13-56, 2007). This started a new revolution in the field of management that asked managers to increase the productivity of their employees make sure that they work to their full potential in an effective and efficient manner. “High performance working” and “performance management” are the products of this same ideology. The rest of this paper focuses on how human resource managers can implement “high performance working” in their company. Findings There has been a lot of research on this topic and tons of data is available in this regard. Moreover, high performance working has several possible dimensions. This paper focuses only on a few those that are vital factors in the eyes most of the authorities. Employee motivation is one of foremost sources of increasing employee productivity. It is quite understandable that highly motivated employees in most of the cases are the highly productive ones. Google has been bearing enormous costs for motivating its 19,865 employees. Insurances, chefs, sick leaves, parental leaves, transport facility, tuition reimbursements, on site facilitates of gym, saloons, car wash, saloons, swimming pools and many more are just few to mention. By doing all this, Google has just one thing in mind, employee satisfaction. Google’s HR people seem to understand and have full faith on the fact that “employee satisfaction is the pre requisite of customers satisfaction”. This also explains why according to the reports of 2008, Google has revenues of more than 21 billion US dollars and this is on an increasing trend despite the fact that there is a serious recession in the market. If a company who desires high performance working from its employees should make sure that all its employees are motivated enough to achieve the organizational goals effectively and efficiently (Foot & Hook, pp. 56-74, 2005). Under motivated employees for that company are more of a liability and manager should focus on motivating them in some or the other (Bratton & Gold, pp. 63-74, 2001). Moreover, if there is no possible way to increase their motivational levels then it is better to get rid of them because liabilities for long are not good for any organization. The question here is that all managers know about motivation, then how are able to get better results from their employees as compared to others. The answer lies in finding the “best fit” tool or approach of motivation the “effective usage” of those tools (Bloisi, pp. 13-56, 2007). Managers often commit the mistake of perceiving money as the only motivational factor. However, today this is not the case. In fact, there are many cases where money is not even the dominating motivational factor. Aspects like challenging jobs, work teams, hygiene, work place, job security, performance appraisal, feedback, authority, job significance, task significance, say in decision-making, recognition, self-efficacy, effective leadership, affiliation and others are some of the motivational tools that are worth considering (Mathis & Jackson, pp. 37-39, 2007) (Foot & Hook, pp. 56-74, 2005). This is the point where the managerial and leadership skills of a manager come in to play. Now, the job of a manager is to identify the motivational tool that would be the most effective in any particular situation. For example, for an employee who is a high achiever and is well settled in his life, money may not be the motivating factor at all (Bloisi & Hunsaker, pp. 26-41). Moreover, for a person, who is eager to make friends, affiliation and socialization would be the most effective motivational tools. For employees who are hyper active are of participative and authoritative types a little say in the decision making would be very fruitful. Therefore, if the manager can find the right mix of motivational tools then he or she can easily achieve the goal of high performance working (Murray, pp. 23-47, 2002). Another important source of creating a high performance-working environment is deeply rooted in employee training. According to a survey, on an average, in Asian countries including Japan, the training expenses per year per employee are as low as 241 US dollars. However, for Western countries, especially United States and Europe, they touch the peak of 724 US dollar per year per employee (Burns & Sinfield, pp. 14-16, 2008). This shows why Western countries are the trendsetter in industrialization than the Asian countries. Concisely, employee training is also a pre-requisite for high performance working of an organization. Training is not only improving employee skills but it also involves communicating the expectation, goals, and objectives of the company clearly. Moreover, important guidelines of the top management on issues like corporate social responsibility, ethical standards, diversity, quality assurance and others reach to employees through training and development (Bloisi & Hunsaker, pp. 26-41). In short, even a nonprofessional can understand that trained and developed employees are more productive as compared to others. As mentioned in the start of this paper that organizations now face the pressure of improving their productivity constantly. In turn, their employees face the same pressure since they also make up a small portion of output of the company. This has in turn forced the employers to increase the working hours of employees, ask more from them and forced them to increase their productivity. This has lead to situation where employees are complaining that their work is eating up their personal life (Mathis & Jackson, pp. 37-39, 2007). They are finding it difficult to maintain a balance between their employment life and personal life. It is quite logical that employees who are not discontent with their personal life will not perform to their best in their work lives. The question in front of HR managers now is of giving flexibility to their employees. Flexibility in terms of flexi time, flexi work place, flexi assignments, and others forms of flexibility. A recent study reveals that most of the employees look for jobs that can give them maximum mileage for striking a balance between their personal and professional lives (Burns & Sinfield, pp. 14-16, 2008). On the other hand, it is important here to note that flexibility in terms of performance of employees is not desirable to accept under any circumstances. The key to high performance management lies in the answer of question that how much flexibility is acceptable under respective circumstances (Murray, pp. 23-47, 2002). Another vital tool of implementing high performance management is to implement “performance management system.” Performance management is one of the most well known and widely used theories of management that asks the managers to evaluate constantly and carefully, the performances of their employees in light of the goals and objectives of the company (Bratton & Gold, pp. 63-74, 2001). The process actually asks the managers to set difficult and specific goals for the company and then define it to each employee. In addition, proper feedback during the process is also very important. In this way, after regular intervals, the mangers can sit down to evaluate the performance of all employees (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, pp. 2-7, 2009). The employees who are performing higher than the expectations or goals deserve all the appreciation and rewards (Dessler, pp. 85-142, 2004). However, managers should find remedies for those employees who are not performing well. In this way, a constant check on performance leads higher performance and helps HR mangers in attainment of the company goals and objectives. In addition, it is also the leadership ability of manager counts. Many experts draw a line between management and leadership. They view management as the attainment of organizational goals in effective and efficient way. However, leadership is the ability of an individual to influence other (Dessler, pp. 85-142, 2004). If a manager can transform him to a leader and that would not come by a title but it would come when his subordinates would view himself as a leader. It is quite understandable that if a manager gets the license of influencing his employees then he can get his work done from them very easily. However, this is not that simple. Leadership requires a lot of effort, time and a balance between the concern of production and the concern for employees, leader member relations, task structure, position power, and power distance. Summary This paper has tried to look into the matters of employee, motivation, and employee training and performance management system as a way for managers to ensure “High performance working.” All three of these factors are pre-requisites for high performance working and without implementing these concepts in some way or the other, it is almost impossible to fulfill the dream of high performance working. However, it is the job of the HR manager to decide and evaluate that what tools he or she would use in respective situations. References Bloisi, W. (2007). Introduction to Human Resource Management. McGraw-Hill Bloisi, W. Cook, C. & Hunsaker, P. (2006) Management, and Organisational Behaviour. McGraw-Hill. Bratton, John, & Gold, Jeffrey. (2001). Human Resource Management: Theory and Practice. Routledge. Burns, T. & Sinfield, S. (2008). Essential Study Skills. Sage. Dessler, Gary. (2004). Human Resource Management. Prentice Hall. Foot, M. & Hook, C. (2005). Introducing Human Resource Management. Prentice Hall. Mathis, Robert L., & Jackson, John H. (2007). Human Resource Management. Cengage Learning. Murray. (2002), Work and Employment Relations in the High Performance Workplace. Continuum. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2009). Managing and Developing Performance When the Manager's/Specialist's Results are Level 2. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Retrieved 20 November 2009, < http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/hrh/api-eng.asp> Read More