1. Globalization: Growing internationalization of business has its impact on HRM in terms of problems of unfamiliar laws, languages, practices, competitions, attitudes, management styles, work ethics and more. HR managers have a challenge to deal with more functions, more heterogeneous functions and more involvement in employee’s personal life.
2. Corporate Re-organizations: Reorganization relates to mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, take over, internal restructuring of organizations. In these situations, it is difficult to imagine circumstances that pose a greater challenge for HRM than reorganizations itself. It is a challenge to manage employees’ anxiety, uncertainties, insecurities and fears during these dynamic trends.
3. New Organizational forms: The basic challenge to HRM comes from the changing character of competitions. The competition is not between individual firms but between constellations of firm. Major companies are operating through a complex web of strategic alliances, forgings with local suppliers etc. These relationships give birth to completely new forms of organizational structure, which highly depend upon a regular exchange of people and information. The challenge for HRM is to cope with the implications of these newly networked relations more and more, in place of more comfortable hierarchical relationships that existed within the organizations for ages in the past.
4. Changing Demographics of Workforce: Changes in workforce are largely reflected by dual career couples, large chunk of young blood between age old superannuating employees, working mothers, more educated and aware workers etc. These dynamic work forces have their own implications for HR managers and from HRM point of view is a true challenge to handle.
5. Changed employee expectations: With the changes in workforce demographics, employee expectations and attitudes have also transformed. Traditional allurements like job security, house, and remunerations are not much attractive today, rather employees are demanding empowerment and equality with management. Hence' it is a challenge for HRM to redesign the profile of workers, and discover new methods of hiring, training, remunerating and motivating employees.
6. New Industrial Relations Approach: In today’s dynamic world, even unions have understood that strikes and militancy have lost their relevance and unions are greatly affected by it. The trade union membership has fallen drastically worldwide and the future of labor movement is in danger. The challenge before HRM is to adopt a proactive industrial relations approach which should enable HR specialist to look into challenges unfolding in the future and to be prepared no convert them into opportunities.
7. Renewed People Focus: The need of today’s world and business is the people’s approach. The structure, strategy, systems approach which worked in post war era is no more relevant in today’s economic environment which is characterized by over capacities and intense competition. The challenge of HR manager is to focus on people and make them justifiable and sustainable.
8. Managing the Managers: Managers are unique tribe in any society, they believe they are class apart. They demand decision-making, bossism and operational freedom. However in the post liberalization era, freedom given to managers is grossly misused to get rid of talented and hard working juniors. The challenge of HRM is how to manage this tribe? How to make them realize that the freedom given to them is to enable them make quick decisions in the interest of the organization and not to resort to witch-hunting.
9. Weaker Society interests: Another challenge for HRM is to protect the interest of weaker sections of society. The dramatic increase of women workers, minorities and other backward communities in the workforce has resulted in the need for organizations to reexamine their policies, practices and values. In the name of global competition, productivity and quality the interests of the society around should not be sacrificed. It is a challenge of today’s HR managers to see that these weaker sections are neither denied their rightful jobs nor are discriminated against while in sendee.
10. Contribution to the success of organizations: The biggest challenge to an HR manager is to make all employees contribute to the success of the organization in an ethical and socially responsible way. Because society’s well being to a large extent depends on its organizations.
Very useful content. Thank you very much. Recommended.
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