Human resource management can be described as the process of combining several factors and tasks in order to achieve the objectives of a company or organization. Others define it as the function within an organization that usually focuses on the hiring and allocation of duties in a company.
Most of the time, human resource management has thus been known to deal with issues related to people. These issues include among others: performance management, hiring employees, and duties allocation and employees motivation (Mathis & Jackson, 2008).
Human resource management has of late been a major concern to many managers where most of them have shifted their focus from the operating efficiency of employees working in the company towards managerial efficiency. As a result, this has brought integration of several human factors to achieve specific goals and objectives for the company.
While in the past the management has focused on decision making, financial and production strategies and issues such as employee retention, motivation of the workers as well as their satisfaction was of low priority. Nowadays, this has all changed due to the complex issues that surround management.
While in the past, workers in an organization used to perform specific duties, nowadays most companies’ employees perform diverse duties that require different skills to which the advancing technologies have been a major boost in the transfer and sharing of these skills. The role of human resource management has thus come to play by coordinating human input in all these activities aiding successful completion of activities.
Despite the desire for the human resource management to work efficiently, there are some challenges which the department faces and they include: Environmental challenges which are usually external forces from the company management. External challenges are those factors that cannot be controlled by the company management but influences its performance thus it becomes very difficult to ignore them as their contribution to the company success cannot be undermined. For the human resources department thus to work efficiently, there is need for these external factors to be monitored since they may pose either threats or opportunities towards the company’s desire to expand (Mathis& Jackson, 2008).
Another challenge has been with advancements in technology: There has been increased usage of the internet and at present almost if not all businesses use internet in their operations in one way or the other.
If any company wants to succeed in achieving its goals and objectives, there is a need to adopt the use of internet since it has become a common communicating platform through which companies are practically doing everything from marketing their strategies to copying what their rivals are doing (Condrey & Perry, 2010).
The evolving workplace is another challenge to most companies. The diversity in the work force and the changing and ever evolving roles across the two genders affect the management of the human resources. When one considers factors such as race, sex and culture diversity it becomes important to note that these people can rarely approach life in the same approach.
Individual productivity is another challenge that faces human resource managers. Since an increase in employee productivity equates to increased company productivity, there is need to motivate the employees in order to ensure their productivity is increased and this is a major challenge to most companies as more companies are cutting down their employees wages thus offering no incentive for them to increase their productivity (Condrey& Perry, 2010).
Human resource management is the science or the art of combining several tasks and factors in order to achieve business objectives and while in the past managers concentrated mainly on increasing productivity and profitability of their businesses, the fact that human beings are integral to the increased productivity has of late made human resources management such an important avenue for any company that wishes to succeed.
Reference List
Condrey, S. E; Perry, J. L. (2010). Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government: 3rd Edition. New York: John Wiley and Sons
Mathis, R. L; Jackson, H. J. (2008). Human Resource Management: 12th Edition. New York: Cengage Learning