Challenges in HRM in meeting the employee needs

This essay discusses the challenges faced by HRM in meeting employee needs, focusing on employee retention, diversity, and training. Strategies to overcome these challenges are also explored.

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HRM Strategies
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Topic – Challenges in HRM in meeting the employee needs
Introduction
In an organization, the human resource management is a strategic approach to the
management of the people effectively. The HRM strategies help a business to gain the
competitive advantage. The main purpose of the human resource is to maximize the
performance of the employees in order to serve the strategic objectives of the organization.
Hence, HR is primarily concerned with the people’s management concentrating on the systems
and the policies as per the views of Bratton and Gold (2017). The HR department in an
organization deals with the recruitment, performance, appraisal, training and development, the
rewards management and many others. It is also the duty of the HR to be concerned about the
industrial relations, a change in the organization for balancing the requirements with the
practices. Undoubtedly, due to the extensive range of responsibilities, the human resource
managers face variety of challenges in keeping the balance between the employees, the
customers and the organizations (Stone & Deadrick, 2015). They face issues in meeting the
employee needs and the major areas of challenge are the employee retention, the training and
compliance and discrimination and diversity. This essay will focus on these three areas where
the HR practitioners face difficulty in the emerging market. The challenges will be explained
through an organization where I have worked for two years (the organization will be referred to
as XYZ due to privacy concerns).
Discussion
The overall, purpose of the Human Resource is to ensure that the organization can
achieve huge success in every aspect through the people. The human capital is managed by
the HR professionals who take the initiative to implement policies and the procedures. Every
organization should perform the human resource planning in order to identify the contemporary
and future human resource requirements for achieving the goals. More clearly said, the human
resource planning is the method for ensuring that the human resource requirements and the
processes for addressing those requirements (Noe et al., 2017). There are a number of human
resource management challenges which needs to be addressed because it is an essential
function of an organization. The HR challenges can be the environmental challenges, the
individual or the organizational challenges.

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The world is rapidly changing and the change has remained constant from several
centuries. The changing environment leads to changing requirement and the organizations must
follow measures to refrain from being obsolete from the industry. The HR department has been
given the responsibility to make adoptive policies to be applied to the diverse workforce.
Another factor is globalization. The whole world is being transformed into the global business
and the main competition is between the foreign and the domestic companies. The competition
has led to the effective workforce lay off(Stone & Deadrick, 2015). The HR practitioner keeps
the organization’s culture global and wider. The evolution of the government legislation is a big
challenge for the HR professionals in an organization. They find difficulty in implementing these
legislations in the organization. However, the major issue is in the handling of the human
resource or the employees of the organization. The employees are one of the most important
stakeholders of an organization.
The HR professionals have found that the employee turnover and the employee
retention is probably the most serious challenge in the workforce management. Almost 47 % of
the HR leaders have found that the employee retention and the turnover can create a massive
problem for a particular organization. The employee turnover is caused by the so many factors.
It has been found that the employees leave an organization due to the poor leadership quality of
the leader, less salary as compared to service, lack of proper education opportunities, toxic
workplace environment, lack of work life balance and many others (Sekiguchi, Froese & Iguchi,
2016). Employees leave because of the excessive workload, when the management does not
give an employee significant recognition, the staff members are not given sufficient power for
making decisions, when the management does not give clear briefs and clear guidelines as
expected by the employees. There are other reasons too. In the XYZ Company, it has been
observed that the employees are leaving because of the excessive work pressure and non-
flexible working hours. The organization is facing difficulty in addressing the customer demands
as there is less number of employees. The employees are the real resources of a company and
their motivation extremely matters for enhanced production and development of an organization.
When they under huge pressure and restrained under a fixed working time, they lose the agility
and motivation to work further.
The human resource challenge in dealing with diversity, workplace discrimination is
another significant issue. Evidently, each year brings changes in the workplace, the society, the
government, culture and technology which proves to be challenging for the employees to adjust
with. In order to keep in terms of the contemporary market conditions, the business

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organizations try to get the talent pool. They invest in incorporating people from every corner of
the world. The diversity in the workforce is healthy as it brings positivity in the workforce
through many ways (Nankervis et al.,2016). Firstly, it increases the employee productivity,
reduces the legal claims, improves the internal and public image, enhances the customer
loyalty, maximizes the ability to communicate with the customers properly and increases the
adaptability levels in the context of a diverse marketplace. However, when there is diversity,
there is diversity related challenges too. A diverse workforce gives rise to the discrimination and
cultural conflicts. The language also becomes a significant problem due to which people fail to
share their individual values, pinions, perspectives with each other’s (Tafti, Mahmoudsalehi &
Amiri, 2017). It creates at environment of misunderstanding. When a person feels discriminated
by other persons in the workforce, insulted and alienated by the co-mates, the de-motivation
level increases and reflects on the performance of the person. In the XYZ Company, the HR
practitioner has felt the problem of discrimination. Since, this is a multi-national company; there
is regular assembly of people from different corners of the world. They are different from each
other culturally, ethnically, academically which creates difficulty in driving them towards a
common organizational goal.
On the other hand, HR practitioner also faces the emerging issues of employee training
and compliance. Training is considered to be that type of human resource function that revolves
around the employee skills development, the abilities and knowledge improvement. In every
organization, it is necessary for meeting the organizational goals. The training of the employees
makes room for a high-performing, motivated and competent workforce for addressing the
future demands of the market (Collings, Wood & Szamosi, 2018). The employee potential is
maximized through the training programs resulting in higher productivity. However, the HR
practitioners find difficulties in implementing the training programs for lack of interest, improper
programs and lack of required budget and support of the management. When an organization
faces issues in the performance, the usual response is to provide proper training to them. The
needs assessment of the training programs perceives the gaps between the desired and the
present performance (Hecklau et al., 2016). Training programs might not be the solution every-
time but there should be proper communication when necessary. The training and compliance
requires equal support of the employees and if they are in lack of interest, no training can help
them improve. In the XYZ company, the problem faced by the human resource is in
implementing the training programs. The management of the organization is ready to provide a
learning opportunity to the employees but they fail to take the responsibility of their self-

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development. The training programs have proved unsuccessful due to the indifference of the
employees.
Conclusion
Hence, the present paper clearly described the emerging human resource issues in
managing the needs of the employees. The paper described three areas specifically where the
HR practitioners face issues in people management. The first area is the employee retention.
The HR practitioners are suggested to arrange the employee recognition programs which can
improve the employee relationships, the organizational culture and employee motivation. In
order to address the diversity and discrimination related problems, the HR practitioners must
arrange for the inclusion programs and cultural –sensitivity trainings. It will help the people in the
workforce to believe that diversity is healthy and everyone must support it. In order to increase
the interest of the employees regarding making training program successful, the HR department
should engage the employees having solicited various suggestions, ideas and feedbacks. They
must be encouraged to set their own career objectives based on their individual needs.

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