HRM Environment (Strategic Implications of Dynamic HRM Environment)

The world has been changed a lot in the past few decades. Today's managers are facing a number of behavioural issues and challenges in their organizations. Some important changes in work places (recently seen) are fast changing employee expectations; declining loyalty towards working organizations; increasing number of women, old aged employees, and minorities among others.

In short, there are a lot of challenges and opportunities today for managers to use HRM concepts. In this section, we are going to review some of the more critical issue confronting managers. To solve those issues for which HRM offers solutions or at least some meaningful insights toward solutions. 

1. Globalization

It is well known to us that this is the age of globalization. It occurs when the organization extends its activities to other parts of the world, actively participates in other markets, and competes against organizations located in other countries.

Challenges

Managing is a global company posses many different challenges and opportunities. But for our purposes, a very important consideration is how HR and behavioural processes differ widely across cultural and national boundaries. They are:

• Values, symbols, and beliefs differ sharply among cultures.
• Different work norms and the role work plays in a person's life influence patterns of both work related behaviour and attitude toward work.
• They also affect the nature of supervisory relationships, decision-making styles and processes and organizational configurations/compositions.
• Group and inter-group processes, responses to stress and the nature of political behaviours also differ from culture to culture.

The challenges in front of managers are : 

• How to manage growing dissatisfaction?
• How to design motivational packages?
• How to learn and develop managerial abilities?
• How to deal with cross-culture differences, etc.

Opportunities

Globalization has also opened new avenues (ways) of opportunities if managed properly. Some of them are expanded market and revenue, opportunity to learn new things, better cared opportunities for employees among others. Therefore, managers need to improve their practices to face the challenges before them. 

2. Workforce Diversity (Heterogeneity)

The second important challenge today is the management of diversity. The term diversity refers to the differences among people. Diversity may be reflected along various dimensions. But most managers tend to focus on age, gender, ethnicity, and physical abilities, and disabilities.

Diversities trend in organizations are:

• Average ages of workers in many countries are gradually increasing because of declining birth rate and people are living and working longer.
• Increasing number of women workers, foreigners, migrants, refugees, black employees, disables retirees and so on. 

Challenges: The challenges for organization is to make people accommodating to the diverse groups of people at work place by addressing their different lifestyles, cultural factors, family needs, and work styles. Managing people through single method was a fact till the other day. But now, it is being replaced by one that recognizes the value differences among workers in organizations. 

Opportunities: If diversify is managed properly, it can increase creativity and innovations. On the contrary, diversify, if not managed properly, can result in higher turnover, increased interpersonal conflict, and ineffective communication. 

3.Technological Advances 

.It can be studies under two broader headings:

a. Technological Advances for Quality and Productivity: Another competitive challenge that has attracted much attention of HR manger is quality and productivity through technological advances. Quality is an important issue for several reasons. They are: 

• First, more and more organizations are using quality as a basis for competition.
• Second, increasing quality helps to increase productivity because making higher quality products generally results less waste and rework.
• Third, enhancing quality helps to reduce costs.  

b. The ever increasing concern for quality products and services has given birth to today's buzzword ' Total Quality Management-TQM'. Similarly, the delivery of quality services in service sector has become very critical. The challenge for managers across the world is therefore, to have human resources to deliver quality products and services to the customers and clients. Technology is means to that end. Globalization has increased the degree of concern towards quality and productivity because it has given birth to tough competition. The implications for HR are obvious: the more closely people work together, the more important it is to understand HR processes and concepts. Motivating employees to get involved in quality improvement efforts, increasing the level of participation throughout organization, and rewarding people on the basis of contribution to quality are common suggestions and all rely on human behaviour.

4. Changing Nature of Work (Improving People Skills)

Previously, world economy was based on agriculture and then it moves towards industry based. But today, most of the developed countries' economy is based on knowledge and service sector. This trend has brought reduction in managerial ranks, decentralized decision-making, increased responsibility to the employees, participation, team work, increased automation and so on. 

Challenges: Increased competition and quality awareness have demanded high level of skills and knowledge. Employers must train and reeducate their less skilled employees. Moreover, managers must become more responsive to the needs of their skilled employees. Moreover, managers must become more responsive to the needs of their skilled employees to keep them from going to work for a competitor.

Opportunities: The other side of the coin is that if  people can be duly trained, developed and motivated to the newly required skills, they will be assets to the organization. The opportunities are that : (a) People will get more reward, (b) they will be more motivated and productive, and (c) they will be  a greatest weapon to compete in the market.

5. Legal Trends

External environment is changing every day. Therefore, HR managers must prepare themselves for events that have a significant effect on both people and organizational lives. Government laws/legislations are becoming more favourable towards employees every year as compared to the past. Moreover, HR managers do not face the same laws globally. Country specific laws and regulations also affects HRM practices of a global company. "Think globally, act locally" is the policy adopted by most of the HR managers these days. This is also called GLOCALIZATION- localization of globalization. 

6, Empowerment of Employees 

Previously, people worked under tight control of their supervisors or manager. Today, managers are bound to work as coaches, advisors, facilitators or as team leaders so as to compete in the market place and satisfy employee demands. The following Chinese proverb illustrates the importance of empowerment. 

Chinese Proverb: "Give a person a fish, and you feed that person for a day: Teach a person to fish, and you feed that person for life. " 

Challenges: The trend is towards the use of self-managed work teams, quality circles, job enrichment, self-appraisal, MBO, etc. What's going on is that managers are empowering employees. They are putting employees in charge of what they do. And in doing so, managers have to learn how to give up control. Hence, employees have to learn how to take responsibility for their work and make appropriate decisions. 

Opportunities: In many organizations, employees have become associates or team-members. And there is a blushing (fusion) between the role of managers and workers. Decision making is being pushed down to the operating level. Workers are given the freedom to choices about schedules, procedures and solving to the work related problems. The ultimate result that can be derived from doing so are: (a) Higher level of motivation, (b) Increased productivity, and (c) Readiness for change and greater responsibility, etc. 

7. Managing Organization Change 

It has been said that "nothing is certain in the world except the change". Manaage4rs must be prepared to introduce organizational change. It is a compulsion, not a choice. This has always been a concern. But the rapid and, constant environmental faced by businesses today has made change management even more critical. 

Challenges: Organizations have to apply many different change programs. They are like the reorganizations of departments, disposal of poor performing units, downsizing, employee outsourcing and the like. SO, managers and employees must prepare themselves flexible enough to cope with the change. 

Opportunities: The study of HR can provide insights into helping the managers to better understand the continual change. They can learn how to overcome resistance to change, how best to create an organizational thrives (works) on change, etc. 

8. Improving ethical behavior 

Another important challenge facing managers in workplace is ethics. It is the individual's personal beliefs regarding what is right and wrong or good and bad. Members of organizations are increasingly finding themselves facing ethical dilemmas (contradiction). They are facing the situations in which they are required to define right and wrong conduct. But the problem is what is ethical in one organization, time or place may not be so in another organization, time or place. 

Challenges: It is being realized throughout the world that the level of ethics is in declining trend. The major reasons for it are the critical behavior explained above. Likewise Ethics has become the greatest standing problems to try to improve ethical behaviours. 

Opportunities: What constitutes (really mean) good ethical behavior has never been clearly defined. To solve this problem, managers are writing and disturbing codes of ethics. Such activities are necessary to guide employees behavior. They are offering seminars, workshops, and similar training programs to try to improve ethical behaviors.