Human Resource Management in Australian Fashion Industry

APPLIED MANAGEMENT

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Human Resource Management in Australian Fashion Industry
Australian fashion industry has seen a significant growth in last few decades. In this industry,
human resource management plays a very critical role in the success of any firm or brand.
From increasing cost of labourers to enhanced requirement of skills, Australian fashion
industry is facing many kinds of challenges. Since this industry requires a skilled workforce
for producing products that can attract consumers hence the role of human resource
management becomes greater.
Throughout the employee lifecycle, it is the role of the HR to ensure that employees are
developing as per the changing need of the industry. This is because employees add value to
the products of company which becomes very much critical factor in the success of the
business (Gardetti and Torres, 2017). Competition in the industry has gone to such higher
levels that producing differentiated products from their competitors can be difficult. Rarity
and inimitable are difficult to manage in the present day competition and hence it is the
human resource that helps a company to show itself distinct in the industry.
Human resource management’s role in the fashion industry starts from attracting more and
more numbers of talents in the organisation. For this, every company needs to design
attractive job design and will have to take the help of the technology in this process.
Technology helps the HRM in reaching to maximum possible candidates. The use of social
media platforms such as LinkedIn becomes very much significant in this regards. There must
be use of technology based platforms so as to remove the challenges that company might face
in engaging with customers as the use of social media tools are helpful interacting with the
consumers (Nayak and Padhye, 2015). HRM in the fashion industry will help the company to
improve the efficiency of their processes. This can be understood by the fact that if the HRM
is able to hire employees that have innovative minds then there is higher chance that design
and the innovation in the products will be better than their competitors.
In fashion industry, idea plays the biggest role in the creating competitive advantage over the
rivals. For this, it is essential that HRM of the company maintains diversity at the workplace
which can be ensured when the policy towards hiring remains discrimination free.
Interestingly, hiring people from different cultural backgrounds can help the firm in gaining
ideas from those cultures. Since in every culture fashion is different hence adding people
from different culture into their firm will help the firm in adding to their consumer base on

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the basis of design and variety they will have for the people of different cultures. Since
Australia is a society where people from different parts of the world lives hence it becomes
crucial for the fashion industry to improve their fashion range. Companies like Gangell prefer
to hire employees on the basis of the passion and attitude of the individual. They are giving
lesser importance on the resume and more importance to the candidate’s key attributes
(Bolza, 2016). They also prefer to hire people with video conferencing tools. Large numbers
of students from different parts of the world comes to study in Australia. It has become the
education hub. This makes it easier for the HR managers to hire new talents.
These days fashion industry in Australia is investing a lot of their money on their talent
development programmes. This is usually done by the HR by making innovation in their
methods of giving training and development. HRM in today’s time is concentrated towards
developing their employees in terms of their technological knowledge. HRM wants that all
their employees must be able to perform as per the changing needs of the market. For this, it
is crucial that employee remains technologically efficient which again explains the fact that
technological trainings have to be given in an appropriate manner (Acharya, et al. 2018). The
frontline employees have become the major focus for the company these days. In the time
when doing effective marketing and sales is the only ways in which companies can achieve
success, the role of the frontline employees have become very much important. They help the
company in their customer relationship management.
There is huge change in the Employees related laws within Australia especially the ones that
are related to minimum wage act or the laws related to compensation and benefits. It is
crucial that HRM find ways of managing their employees by designing an incentive and
compensation plans that suits them. The major reason for higher employee turnover the
Australian fashion industry is the fact that the incentive schemes and other kinds of benefits
that are given to their employees are poor than that of the other industry. This is creating a
kind of gap between the expectation of the employees and that of the company (Pucci,
Simoni and Zanni, 2015). It is also having critical impact on the employee relations. At the
same time, it is also a challenge for the organisations in the industry to make sure that they
reduce the cost of their operations. Maintaining the balance in between the two is the serious
challenge for the company.
There is also the complication about proper performance management system. Employees
often get frustrated when they do not find that their performance is being valued or properly