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 employees who come from different backgrounds. This means that the employee should be of different gender, age, religious beliefs, work experience, sexual orientation, educational background, and ethnicity (Landy & Conte, 2010). Therefore, for the success of the organization, workforce diversity must be taken care by the management responsible.
Workforce diversity has always been a complex phenomenon for leaders to manage in many private and public organizations. In the 2000s, when most of the companies started to consider this concept, it was argued that the companies that adopted the concept were able to cultivate the success that they desired. Nowadays, workforce diversity has become the main issue in political, legal, and corporate circles. Many of the organizations see the concept of workforce diversity as a concept that leads to the achievement of the competitive advantage. This is because a viewpoint from different people facilitates creative and unique approaches that are recommended for solving a problem. However, management of this concept is still posing a challenge to many modern organizations
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 the recruitment of the ‘personnel' doing 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 aged 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 raised the need for business organizations to change their ways of doing things. Those that do things in the traditional manner are finding themselves challenged by globalization.
Globalization is a phenomenon that partly evolves because of international trade increase across the national boundaries and due to the carrying of business activities in many countries. Many companies around the world have suffered from the challenge of this phenomenon and have tried to adapt to it in very many ways.
The Automobile industry is an example of the areas that have been affected by globalization. To make sure that the industry can face this challenge, it produces those vehicles that fit in the worldwide vehicle category. Transplants are also set majorly in the areas that provide the greatest market as a technique to adapt to the challenge of globalization.
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).The organizations today concentrating on their main objective leaving the other areas being tackled by those who have specialized in those areas. In addition, employees are 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
Bekerian, D. A., & Levey, A. B. (2012). Applied Psychology: Putting theory into practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferran, C., & Salim, R. (2008). Enterprise resource planning for global economies: Managerial issues and challenges. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.
Landy, F. J., & Conte, J. M. (2010). Work in the 21st century: An introduction to industrial and organizational psychology. Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell.
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.
