Human resource management is the most critical topic when it comes to the management area of an organization. It involves the recruitment of the right personnel, planning employee requirements, job analysis, training and orienting, salaries and wages management, provision of benefits, resolving conflicts, evaluating employee’s performance and communicating with the company employees at all levels. Because workers in an organization have similarities and differences, equity and diversity are two things that should be considered when it comes to human resource management.
Equity is regarded as the act of ensuring that that all the individuals are treated equally without any of them being discriminated. Diversity on the hand can be viewed as having the employees who come from different backgrounds. This means that the employee should be of different gender, age, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, work experience, sexual orientation, educational background and ethnicity (Landy & Conte, 2010). Therefore, for the success of the organization, workforce diversity must be taken care.
In the 2000s, the human resource management practices were very different compared to those of today. Workplace diversity was not a major thing for many organizations. In most organizations, the management involved in the recruitment of the ‘personnel’ did things in its way. Many human resource departments, despite considering the education background, could only give jobs to employees of their ethnicity or race. They could also provide job avenues for a particular age and deprive the opportunity to the young people. In addition, most of the organizations did not give the employees an avenue to air their views whenever there was a need for them to do so. Giving a particular age an opportunity was advantageous. This is because, for instance, young people could not work the same way the old people could do; the older crop of employees also possessed experience, which many young people did not possess.
Today, the change of the term ‘Personnel Management’ to human resource management is also an indicator that some of the practices have changed. The reason is that global competition has led to the need for business organizations to change their ways of doing things. Workers that are given the avenues to work in most organizations are fetched from different backgrounds. However, rather than most organizations having their employees, outsourcing has become the primary strategy (Varma & Budhwar, 2013). In addition, employees are being given an opportunity to air their views. The change in technology is the main factor that has led to the change in human resource management practices.
The main area that has recently been affected by technology is the recruitment area. In the past years, recruiters relied on print publications to get prospects and post jobs for any open position. However, the internet has brought about efficiency that was not there before. Other areas such as performance management and training have also been influenced significantly (Bekerian & Levey, 2012).
References
Landy, F. J., & Conte, J. M. (2010). Work in the 21st century: An introduction to industrial and organizational psychology. Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bekerian, D. A., & Levey, A. B. (2012). Applied psychology: Putting theory into practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Varma, A. & Budhwar, P. A. (2013). Managing Human Resources in Asia-Pacific: Second Edition Global HRM Volume 20 of Global human resource management (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
