Future Roles of HRM Practitioners in Woolworths

Running head: HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Human Resource Management
[Woolworths Supermarkets]
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Executive summary
The main purpose of this study is to analyse the future roles of the HRM practitioners in
Woolworths in response to changing demography in the workplace. This study identifies a few
future challenges to the HRM practitioners in context to their core tasks like HR planning and
job design. The changing demography requires multiple solution to be in place to provide a
workplace environment, which is in fit with the employees of all generations. The HRM
personnel need to be adaptable with the use of a few technologies like targeted recruitment
through social media platforms. This can help getting skilled and best-fit people. Moreover, job
design needs to be effectively handled, so that, motivation level in employees are not lost.

2HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
1. Introduction..................................................................................................................................3
2. Analysis of the potential impact of changing demography on the HRM, in regards to HR
planning and job design of Woolworths Supermarkets...................................................................4
2.1 Major demographics changes................................................................................................4
2.2 Impact on HR planning..........................................................................................................5
2.3 Impact on job design..............................................................................................................7
3. Conclusion and recommendations...............................................................................................8
References......................................................................................................................................10

3HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
1. Introduction
The future of working life will be lot more different than what currently exists. This will
largely be due to five forces such as technological developments, social trends, globalisation,
demography and longevity, and low-carbon developments. Demography and longevity is the
most important of all in consideration to the future working life. The three key factors of
demography and longevity impacting the future working life are birth rates, generational cohorts
and longevity. Generational cohorts can be categorised into few distinguished generations such
as traditionalists, Generation X, Y and Z, and Baby Boomers (Chung, Chen & Lin, 2016). The
demography differences such as these will potentially impact the human resources practices.
These generations have distinguished choices for their work style, needs, skills, values and
attitudes towards work. They are also different in their performance, work habits and
achievement motivation. Dealing with generation cohorts is challenging considering that their
demands will be different.
Woolworths Supermarkets is being chosen for this study to identify and analyse the
impact of generation cohorts on the human resources practices of the company. The HR practices
in consideration are HR planning and job design. Woolworths Supermarkets is the leading
supermarket brands in Australia. The number of stores of this supermarket chain is close to 1000
and the number of employees is approximately around 115,000 (Woolworths.com.au, 2019). A
business that operates such a large platform is a matter of concern concerning the subject topic.
Woolworths Supermarkets can never afford having employee shortage in the company.
Additionally, the Company can never afford being incompetent to attract talented skills and
attain maximum employee retention rate.