[CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN HUMAN

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2013

College Name Student Name

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CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN HUMAN

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

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This essay discusses contemporary studies in human resource management in two parts. Part A discusses the role of e-HRM and outsourcing the HRM function in large organization. Part B describes the workforce development strategy.

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Part-A: Human Resource Management in Large organization

With the advent of globalization and information age, we live in an era where people, skills and knowledge plays an instrumental role for the overall growth of the organization. Employees of the organization, which are now termed as the human resources were earlier in the industrial age, called labors. Human Resource Management, as a practice, has made its foray into the higher management as the organizations are growing in terms of market share and employee strength. Also, nowadays, organizations are going international with its offices opening in various countries throughout the world. Hence, it is important to manage such a diverse force of human resources with the standard and fair practices and at the same time giving personalized attention and feedback to individual employee.

Outsourcing HR Function

With the growing need of keeping themselves updated with the latest technologies and human resource practices around the world, large organization might consider outsourcing the human resource management functions to third party so that business can focus on the core competency. There are several advantages and disadvantages of this approach. Advantage that comes with outsourcing the human resource function is that business is assured to get the best practices in human resources management field to be implemented in its organization. It requires a balanced team with in-house managers and external members to design and develop the implementation plan. Since the resource recruitment, training and development and performance management are outsourced, company can strongly focus on developing the sound business strategy and its core competency. Banham (2003) has emphasized on HRM outsourcing being the future of human resource management in larger organizations. It can very well be used to manage the HR practices and employment policy implementation in the company which has substantially large workforce and has presence in various countries. Outsourcing the human resource management has its own set of disadvantages as well. Since the company is hiring the external agency to perform its own people management function, external agency needs to give time to understand the company culture and basic sets of practices (Bondarouk & Ruel, 2009). It may happen that external agencies with certain set of

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practices in mind, start implementing them in organization without even considering the factors specific to the company. This may lead to chaos as the people who are reluctant to change need to be addressed and assured about the good things that change is going to bring. Klaas, Mcclendon and Gainey (1999) mention that giving human resource management to external agencies will involve additional cost and this transactional cost should be defined on certain return on investment parameter by the company. Since the cost involved is to reduce the operational bottlenecks and increase the competitive advantage of the company, it has to be compared with other intangible factors like employee job satisfaction, individual aspiration and commitment to the organization (Quinn & Hilmer, 1995).

E-HRM Process

As the innovations are happening around the world in the field of mobility and cloud, the modus operandi of doing the routine work is changing. Lots of large organizations are encouraging the BYOD (Bring your own device to work) and work from home culture. In the globalized world, team members sitting in the various countries around the world are no surprise. The practice of achieving the task by global team is becoming the norm. When the organization has a team of employees from different countries, it is imperative that the human resources team has a global approach to the resource management practices and the same policies are implemented throughout all its offices. Internationalization has been one of the biggest factors for outsourcing the HRM practices to external agencies (Galanaki & Papalexandris, 2007). Technology and internet has been one of the main contributors to erase boundaries around the world and the same should be explored and applied to understand the employee aspirations and management (Hendrickson, 2003). Hence, e-HRM, that aims to manage and improve productivity and efficiency of the organization with the help of technology, has been instrumental in transforming the organization.

Every organization has certain business mission and goal. It employs people to achieve that goal. We also know that every individual has a goal and if that is aligned with the organizational goal, maximum productivity and output can be achieved. If there is a conflict between the

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individual and organizational goal, then it leads to delay and unproductive activities in the organization. Hence, it is important that individual and organizational goals are aligned to achieve maximum growth for the organization. Parry & Tyson (2011) has emphasized that the management, before implementing the e-HRM, should decide and freeze certain desired goal that organization should achieve with the help of e-HRM. The purpose of the e-HRM is nothing but functions and activities performed by the HR management; this should be executed with the help of e-HRM in more generic way. It will ensure that company is saving on cost, increasing the internal communication with its employees who are organization’s internal customers and whose satisfaction is of paramount importance. And while doing so, company is able to achieve its organizational goal.

Answer to the question, that whether e-HRM can enable or hinder the process of human resource management, depends upon three factors. First is the maturity of the organization and its employee towards accepting the technology and change. Second is the execution plan and transparent communication to employee about the change that will be happening in organization with respect to e-HRM. And the third is the effectiveness of training and development session conducted for employees to get comfortable with the e-HRM. These three things ensure that initial apprehensions by the employees about accepting the e-HRM practices are taken care of. Every change is necessary to be implemented and difficult to accept in the initial phase. Adopting e-HRM does lead to company becoming highly competitive and innovative (Strohmeier, 2007). The reason is that e-HRM provides seamless communication amongst its employees and their superiors (Olivas-Lujan, Ramirez & Zapata-Cantu, 2007). Hence, innovation and best practices implemented in one part of the organization reach the other section at the blink of an eye and help organization to assess the pros and cons of particular policy at much greater speed.

Impact of e-HRM on employees

Impact of going ahead with the e-HRM on employees will be transformational. As the employees will be aware of the new HR policies and practices, the moment they are announced

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and will be able to contribute and provide feedback as well as opinion to it. This will in turn contribute towards refining these policies that will help organization become a better place. It is important for the organization that receives the 360 degree feedback for each of its employees (Hazucha, Hezlett & Schneider, 1993), and receiving such feedback with the help of e-HRM becomes extremely easy. The organization hierarchy is maintained in the e-HRM and every individual can receive feedback from as well as provide feedback to its immediate superior and its subordinates. This helps them in developing the perspective of how their superior and their subordinate see them as individuals. Earlier practice of performance appraisal did not consider the feedback of individual from its subordinates. Only the feedbacks of immediate superiors were considered for promotion and progression of individual. Also, earlier, human resource management was always used for the day to day operations and activities, but e-HRM can be strategic business partner that will help achieve the greater efficiency in the organization with greater job satisfaction by employees. The purpose of e-HRM is not only to become a paperless organization but also to improve upon the service, delivery, employee empowerment, increase the new mediums of communication, deliver results with greater performance and bring out the change that gives the competitive advantage to the company (Ruël, 2012). Every business is into the business because it creates value for its customers and that include internal as well as external customers. The value creation process is a three level process where at the first level value is created at the personal level. Every employee is empowered with improved modes of communication and clarity of knowledge and the individual aspiration of goals and means to achieve goals are clear. Second level of value creation is at organization level, where value is created for organization in terms of a standardized process of human resource management, increased operational efficiency and effectiveness of human resource policies, training and development of all employees. These improvements help in generating skills set and increases the competitive advantage of the company. Third level of value creation is at the society level, where the company, by adopting an e-HRM practice, is creating a new ecosystem to manage human resources and evolve new practices that will be used, explored and evolved by other organizations in future.

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We can conclude that e-HRM practice has greater benefits for large organizations in terms of value creation; increasing the employee awareness and helping the organization grow at a faster rate than ever.

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Part-B: Workforce Development Strategy

We live in the world that is constantly changing and so does the people around us. This change pushes businesses and organizations to change themselves and serve the new need of the new world. Workforce development, which is one of the important strategies of the human resource management, plays an instrumental role in developing the new skills of the labor force. It can serve the requirement of today as well as be prepared for the potential requirement that will arise tomorrow. This essay attempts to develop a workforce development strategy for the nursing staff of a large public hospital. The aim here is to address the strategy based on career management skills, coaching and mentoring system, conflict management skills and employee health and wellbeing. As mentioned earlier, workforce development strategy is about developing the employees with the new skills and developing a skill set of certain kind that will add value for the organization in future; it is part of the change management. The difficulty with the change management is to measure the change (Cronbach & Furby, 1970). Should it be number of skilled workforce developed or the effectiveness of each of the employee with the new skill? In current case, we try to formulate a strategy that will focus on the four areas mentioned above.

Before formulating a workforce development strategy, we need to understand the organization and its practices. Large public hospital is not a profit making organization but a public service organization and hence the focus is to develop a workforce that can serve the patient better at the same time margin of error should be minimum as health and wellbeing of every patient is of paramount importance. Since the cases of emergency care can come any time, hospital has to run for 24 hours a day to serve its patient. The work ethic of punctuality is very important as slight delay can cause severe damage. As we are focusing on the health and wellbeing of patients, we also have to keep in mind that the nursing staff also has career aspirations and personal life. Hence, workforce development strategy has to keep in mind the individual goals and aspiration of nursing staff as well as the organizational goal of large public hospital and

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make sure that its workforce is aligned with latest innovation happening in the healthcare industry.

Career management skills

Every individual working as a nursing staff has certain aspirations and needs to be shown the career hierarchy to display the individual growth that is possible. Hence, the career management plays an instrumental role in motivating and engaging the employees. With the arrival of e-HRM, especially in large organizations, it has become evident that employees need to have feeling of attachment with the company. The feeling of belongingness plays an important role as it is easy to get aloof in the large organization. Large public hospitals have various departments for various kinds of tests and treatments. Employees from various departments need to find the line of sight between their individual performance and the performance of their respective department.

Galagan (2012) mention that new career paths and skills for the employees can bring the extra motivation to learn, grow and contribute to the organization. Hence, human resource management team needs to understand the same and set prior goals for the individual nursing staff for the new skills to be learned that will add to the individual skill set as well as be helpful to achieve the organizational goal. Individual career aspirations should be discussed half yearly and accordingly the training plan and growth opportunities should be highlighted. Every individual has personal ambition, social need and financial goals. Crepeau et al. (1992) mention that the idea behind the career management should be to try to satisfy the personal ambition of the individual with sound career planning that ensures the sustainability and provide social security. With renewed skills, persons add value to the organization and hence can fulfill his/her financial goals. Hence, the Nursing staff that receives the basic education from the universities needs to be recruited with the specific career that will be provided by the hospital. It can be the individual patient care or the family care or for the communities.

Once they are recruited and trained in particular skills under the observation of physicians, they should constantly communicate with resource management team about the day-to-day

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activities and the future goals that they can contribute to the hospitals. Although, individual performance is based on the care, sensitivity and the maturity that the nurse shows towards the patient, it is equally important that nurses who are exceptionally good are given higher position to train and mentor other nurses. Career management of nursing staff is continuous process and it should be evolved and modified while going ahead based on the feedback received.

Coaching and mentoring system

Once the career management graph of the individual as well the team has been identified, the next important step is the coaching and mentoring of the individuals. The open and informative coaching and mentoring system plays an instrumental role in ensuring that career management of the individual employee is going as per the plan. Taie (2011) has mentioned that coaching can be used to motivate as well as enhance the performance of the employees. It plays important role because with right set of coaching and mentoring, the productivity improves and there is less rework so that more can be achieved in lesser time. With e-HRM, every individual will have its own account and accessibility in the system. After the career management discussion with the human resource manager is completed, the individual goal and skills to be acquired are maintained in the system. Hence, every nursing staff can look up in the system and identify the training that needs to be taken and the resources available for the same. Resource can include the training materials (word documents, videos, interactive messages) as well as the actual trainers who give the class room training periodically. Nursing staff will have to look and identify the training that he/she will be attending based on the availability of trainer as well as his/her schedule. Training should be followed by the evaluation test that can show the effectiveness of the training. Training can be an internship under the physician for certain kind of patients. The feedback of the same can be received from the patient about the quality of service and care provided. E-HRM system identifies and provides the list of mentors and frequently faced problems which a nurse can always go through in case of doubt or dilemma. The coaching and mentoring system is for everyone in the hospital and; if there are certain new technology and instruments which none of the individual in the organization is aware of, then external trainer can be called upon by the request. The coaching and mentoring is not restricted

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to the external training but it can happen on the job as well (Binotti, 2011). Coaching and mentoring system is an investment that a hospital does to develop the skill set and it needs to be utilized in the best possible way. With technology taking leapfrog steps, ipad and tablets have become very common in every organization and large public hospitals are no exceptions. Hence, virtual training and mentoring has become quite easy and turning out to be effective way of mentoring.

Conflict management skills

Conflicts occur when there is difference of opinion between the individuals or it can be a cognitive conflict for an individual about which approach to take. Chiravuri, Derek & Ramamurthy (2011) mention that cognitive conflicts and consensus generation in the team during knowledge capturing play an important role when the things move forward. Every conflict generated has its pros and cons. Pros are that it gives us moment to think about the various aspect of approach being pursued while at the same time cons are that it halts the thing moving forward and in moment of urgency it can turn out to be very fatal. As a management theory, we cannot have all the information all the time; hence as a part of conflict management skills, the staff should be trained on taking the informed decision with whatever options they have. Choi (2013) mentions that conflict management has influence on the individual job satisfaction as well the performance on the job. It is important to take a decision and move things forward rather than not taking a decision and increasing the risk of things getting worst. Roche and Teague (2012) suggests that as a part of conflict management skills development, nursing staff should be made aware of various options they can pursue to resolve the conflict. It can be taking advice from the senior staff, if not available then it can be by the consensus among the available staff, or it can be using the historical data available of the similar patients. Public healthcare is not like manufacturing industry where the process and problem occurrence can be predefined. Every day the nurses may come across new cases or symptoms that they have never heard off or have come across. This needs to be dealt with care and sensitivity to ensure that symptoms are not the root cause of bigger problem. Here it may raise personal conflict to treat the symptom with regular medication or to dig deeper to find the actual root cause. It is always better to be certain than sorry. Hence the nursing staff should be trained to

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ensure that there are no internal as well external conflicts. With e-HRM, conflict management can be solved by creating a knowledge base data, where every individual nurse can put up his or her leanings on the new case he/she came across and kind of action taken as well whether the desired results obtained or not.

Employee health and well being

Employee health and wellbeing is of utmost importance to build a sustainable workforce and increase employee retention. For the large organizations, to track the health and wellbeing of all the employees, technology plays an instrumental role. Ruël (2012) mentions that e-HRM helps in creating the value for the organization by bringing all the information of its employees in one place which was not possible earlier without technology. The necessary precautions that nurses need to take while visiting the critically ill patient should be clearly stated and briefed upon. Since with e-HRM, every individual has a profile and the patient the nurse will be visiting is displayed; it also displays the patient history and what kind of care a nurse should take while taking care of the patient. This will give confidence to the nurse that all the necessary steps are taken and the health of nurse will not be affected by visiting critically ill patients. Apart from the individual precautions, hospital should have a policy of performing periodic complete health checkup of every employee working in the hospital. Also, since disease can travel in any form, it is important that nursing staff do not catch that and if they do so, it is detected well within time to transmit further. Also, it should be clearly communicated to the nurses that it is their duty to constantly monitor their own health and report any abnormal symptoms. Also, the support staff and superiors have to ensure that their team is in best of condition. Hospital has to treat its nurses as an asset to the organization and their wellbeing and sound health will add to greater productivity and better service to the patient. Technology can do such marvelous thing that no human being can imagine (Huang & Martin-Taylor, 2013). It has become self-serving and with e-HRM, health information of every individual can be monitored and recorded. Any abnormality found can be directly messaged to immediate superior and concerned person. Nursing staff going through the personal health problems can inform the superior via mail and

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then superior can decide and inform whether nurse can perform his duties with current illness or not.

References

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