Essay: HRM In Ace Educare Pvt. Ltd.: Challenges & Recommendations.

Describe the roles of human resource management and analyse current challenges faced by human resource management in your organisation or a selected organisation based on your reading. Provide recommendations on how human resource management can better handle these challenges.

Importance of People as a Resource

Quintessential resource of any organization is People. According to Armstrong & Taylor (2014), without people, human organizations cannot exist. Management of this resource is at the very core of Human Resource Management. The connotation of ‘human resource’ encompasses all the people and skills, efforts, capabilities of all the people in an organization. Human Resource Management is also perceptibly a bunch of policies, practices and rules which create a dynamic, well-organized work force targeted toward achieving the organization’s goal. And these policies, practices affect human resource of an organization.

This particular project takes into consideration the Ace Educare firm which has been confronted with various HRM challenges. In addition to analyzing the issues of the enterprise, the report tends to provide it with several recommendations to solve the problems as well. On the other hand, the project also discusses the administration of human resource, its roles, functions, divisions and importance among the business industry of the world.

As stated by Beardwell & Thompson (2014), human resource management refers to management specific activities performed by a body of well-formed specialist staff keeping and maintaining function of the whole organization through its human resource, i.e. employees.  It is vital that a Human Resource Management department in any company or organization is clear about its goal and efficiently manages this vital resource. The head of this management stuff is a manager who is responsible for establishing and implementing strategies for the human resource of the organization. His department is responsible for giving guidance and assistance to both management and employees of the organization. In practice Human Resource department of any company or organization is responsible for selecting, hiring, training, guiding, enabling, inducting, orientating, evaluating, promoting and laying off employees and also consolidating and compensating pay packages of the employees. It is of prime importance that a Human Resource Management system or department also takes care of employee relation in an organization (Sparrow, Brewster & Chung, 2016). Keeping organization’s goal, activity and growth in mind a human resource management recruits people with specific talent, skills and knowledge.

As per Kehoe & Wright (2013), a good human resource management takes care in recruiting employees who will at their best of abilities perform and deliver their respective jobs for which they are being recruited but the job of Human resource department does not end there. It has more responsibilities than only recruiting employees and coming up with salary and benefits for the employee. One of human resource department’s important jobs is taking care of its employee and looks after those employees in such a way that the organization functions in proper fashion and benefits both employee and organization, such as performance grading, staff relations, staff grievance and many more. In the words of Reiche, Mendenhall & Stahl, (2016), human resource management is not bound to a few specific jobs or activities but there are activities which are common to all organization and these activities are practiced and performed by the human resource management staffs to manage the human resource – people of its organization. According to Gatewood, Field & Barrick (2015), the various functions of HRM in a business firm are the following:

1. Human Resource Planning
2. Design of the Organization and Job
3. Selection and Staffing
4. Training and Development
5. Organizational Development
6. Compensation and Benefits
7. Employee Assistance
8. Union/Labor Relations
9. Personnel Research and Information System.

Introduction to Ace Educare

As opined by Marchington et al., (2016), human Resource has specific objectives and its primary objective is to ensure the availability of competent and willing workforce to an organization. Other objectives include (i) selecting and obtaining the right number and types of employees through tests and interviews to fulfill its strategic and operational goals, (ii) helping to create an environment in which employees are encouraged to develop and utilize their skills to the fullest and to employ the skills and abilities of the workforce efficiently, (iii) maintaining performance standards and increase productivity through effective job design, (iv) helping to maintain and establish a harmonious employer/employee relationship, (v) planning, creating and maintaining safety measures and healthy work environment, (vi) maintaining full compliance with the legal issues and rights such as human rights, employment equity, occupational health and safety, employment standards, and labor relations legislation, (vii) creating and developing programs such as recreational activities and programs, to meet the economic, psychological, and social needs of the employees and helping the organization to retain the productive employees, (viii) increasing the employees satisfaction and helping self-actualization of each individual employee according to each individual need and desire, (ix) maintaining the quality of work life, (x) communicate HR policies to all employees and (xi) maintaining ethical polices, behavior and professional attitude in the organization (Storey, 2014). The above mentioned objectives have four broad aspects viz. functional, personnel, organizational and societal and achieving these objectives human resource management.

According to Purce (2014), everything is subject to change in this universe and so are organizations. In other words no organization is immune to change, be it Amazon or Google or Goldman sachs or World Bank. And keeping with the change HRM everywhere has to keep pace with it. Not only change is inevitable but is also highly desirable to organizations. Every organization desires change toward a healthy growth and expansion. Facing change is unavoidable to HRM and that’s why it must equip and organize itself in such a fashion so that it can keep the organization going and functioning to its full potential and capabilities (Jackson, Schuler & Jiang, 2014). It’s hard to keep those strategic and activity balls of human resource management of an organization in the air and keep them rotating in a circular fashion. Neither they can take their eyes off any individual employee nor can they afford to lose focus on the organizational goal and growth at the macro level. According to Budhwar & Debrah, (2013), this balancing ball act is everywhere to be seen now.

Role and Functions of Human Resource Management

One such example is Ace Educare Pvt. Ltd. which has been in training and education business from mid-90’s. This organization has seen many a changes over the decades and has kept steadily on the line of growth in terms of business expansion and business turn over. Ace Educare provides training in computer technology and I.T technologies (Aswathappa, 2013). Catering to the needs of every prospective client, starting from college graduates to big and small organizations in need of a good I.T services and professionals, Ace Educare has been providing training and knowledge in this domain for past 16 years. It started with ten employees who were mostly engineers and the first breed of computer and software professionals of the early 90’s. Their courses were well designed and imparted by competent professionals with sufficient industry experiences under their belt. As per Brewster et al., (2016), two main resources of Ace Educare are technology knowledge and skill it can impart and the trainer/educator of that technology. It can be easily seen that basic resource of Ace Educare actually boils down to the knowledgeable professionals and they are the most valuable resources, because through these professionals Ace Educare can provide training and education. In order to maintain its growth and expansion Ace Educare has to keep pace with the fast changing scenario in the technology education business and keep up-to-date with new knowledge in computing and information technology field (Renwick, Redman & Maguire, 2013).

As Ace Educare is in business of education and training of Information and Computing technology it is now face to face with the challenge of rapid technology change the field is undergoing. Many new programming languages have been invented boosting software development to a new phase and taking complex computing to a new dizzy height and new computing devices have their ubiquitous presence in our modern lives. Computing technology has been advancing virtually in leaps and bounds. As stated by Alfes et al., (2013), advancement in computing technology has caused a paradigm shift. All pervading internet has also thrown new opportunities and fresh new challenge for business’ everywhere and Ace Educare can’t afford to fall behind and lose ground. Ace Educare has to rise up to these new challenges and in addition to fulfilling these demands of the hour Ace Educare has to retain its valuable employees and client base acquired over the years and also to seize new market segment for its expansion and growth (Anderson, 2013). Now to meet these demands Ace Educare needs to change or reshape its policy and come up with new strategy and planning to develop its business. Only having well planned strategy will not help surpassing the current challenge it also needs to be implemented. As this organization is heavily dependent on its human resources, the management of Ace Educare has a very significant and huge role to play (Bamberger, Biron & Meshoulam, 2014).

Objectives of Human Resource Management

Analyzing Ace Educare’s problem it can be seen that Ace Educare has problems relating to its knowledge base which it requires to keep up-to-date to continue its business and its professional trainers. Ace Educare needs to

1. Recruit new professional trainer for new courses
2. Upgrade its course materials.
3. Create new course materials for the new courses
4. Upgrade lab facilities for new subjects to be trained, e.g. Andriod App development.
5. Expand its business to new segments.

Now it can be clearly seen that Ace Educare needs to learn all the new technology to expand its business and catch more clients and in order to be able to do that it has to have it core resources upgraded or changed or augmented.  It is this core human resource that Ace Educare has to focus on. In this ever changing global technology market place one has to keep its human resource up and running, that it to say, functioning. In order to develop its current position and also solve the negatively affecting problems, the following is suggested to the management of the organization:

1. Recruiting new professionals having knowledge in new software technology and programming languages.
2. Train existing trainers to upgrade their knowledge on new computing technologies.
3. Recruiting new course coordinators.
4. Recruiting new course designers having teaching and education background.
5. Recruiting HR staffs with experience.
6. Recruiting digital marketing personnel.
7. Devising new employee policies for the company.
8. Coming up with policies for employee benefits and new salary structure.
9. Helping organization to come up with marketing strategy.
10. Restructuring jobs and roles and execution strategy inside the organization.
11. Planning the devising employee motivational training.
12. Refurbishing company’s website and upgrading other web centric business activity technologies.
13. Recruiting web designers having knowledge of java script and CSS.
14. Recruiting marketing professionals having background in technology business.

It can be seen that by targeting these objectives and planning to manage resources human resource management of Ace Educare can face the challenge it is currently facing. In this modern era HR functions like a vital organ in a human body. It is like heart which keeps on pumping blood to keep a human alive and running (Marler & Fisher, 2013). Likewise Ace Educare can recruit new professionals, train them and induct them with organization’s vision and goal and purpose and train its existing professionals to take on new challenges that this organization is facing. With new facilities and professionals it can expand its business by providing training on new technologies to new clients and with new marketing together with existing marketing professionals can also venture into new territory of training and education business. According to Nel et al., (2014), that is how a well-organized and competent HRM of an organization can play a vital role in a business organization in modern era.

In this era of globalization barriers are constantly broken down and organizations all over the globe arereinventing themselves and finding themselves in doing new ways of business and learning new principles and policies to exist and expand (Stredwick, 2013). In this era understanding the effects of globalization can help business organizations to better equip their organizations for the increasingly challenging global business environment and human resource management of an organization here has more important roles than it had in previous era (Snell, Morris & Bohlander, 2015). Responding to this diversity HR managers seek to select and hire employees from equally diverse backgrounds.With this new global workforce human resource management everywhere have to keep themselves equipped with various sort of strategies and tactics to stand up to the challenges it brings. As globalization has its advantages and pitfalls human resource management now more than ever has big challenges to tackle. According to McDermott et al., (2013), HR managers have to take on not only new territory but have to keep themselves knowledgeable in economic, geographical, political, cultural, demographic structure and texture of a region to hire work force from and how to deal with them. HR managers have to adapt in a global workforce culture that combines differing management and work styles, ethics, policies etc. based on individual cultures. Human resource managers have to take on a huge challenge of identifying talents for the organization and recruit them from diverse social conditions and in doing so they have to balance tasks of maintaining organization’s integrity and growth and employee performance (Jones and George, 2015).

Managing Change

One of the big roles human resource management play is societal role where they have to take corporate social responsibilities to deliver to diverse population. Aligning business goals and these responsibilities are tough and expanding business in developing countries and regions where unemployment, uneducated youths, illiteracy, health issues are big problems HR need to have strategies to deal with these (Shields et al., 2015). HR also needs to better equip to address the issues of legality, laws, labour policies of a specific region in order to deal with these problems in the hour of their rise. It is well understood that in this era of globalization human resource management of an organization is of utmost importance and existence of modern business organization without a competent HR department with highly competent managers at the top is unthinkable.

Conclusion

Based on the above project it can be concluded that over the past bygone years human resource management has not developed extraordinarily, but also has successfully made its place among the various business organizations across the world. It is noted that HRM is broad in nature and can be divided into several subsections. In addition to the various roles and functions, the system is regarded as one of the most core elements of firms. Further, in case of Ace Educare it is seen that the company is faced with a few human resource challenges that needs to be solved. In order to solve the negatively affecting issues, the management of the enterprise needs to abide by the provided recommendations. A proper application of HRM theories, control and coordination of practices shall help Ace Educare to regain health and competiveness in the international market.

References

Alfes, K., Shantz, A. D., Truss, C., & Soane, E. C. (2013). The link between perceived human resource management practices, engagement and employee behaviour: a moderated mediation model. The international journal of human resource management, 24(2), 330-351.

Anderson, V. (2013). Research methods in human resource management: investigating a business issue. Kogan Page Publishers.

Armstrong, M., & Taylor, S. (2014). Armstrong's handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers.

Aswathappa, K. (2013). Human resource management: Text and cases. Tata McGraw-Hill Education.

Bamberger, P. A., Biron, M., & Meshoulam, I. (2014). Human resource strategy: Formulation, implementation, and impact. Routledge.

Beardwell, J., & Thompson, A. (2014). Human resource management: a contemporary approach. Pearson Education.

Brewster, C., Houldsworth, E., Sparrow, P., & Vernon, G. (2016). International human resource management. Kogan Page Publishers.

Budhwar, P. S., & Debrah, Y. A. (Eds.). (2013). Human resource management in developing countries. Routledge.

Gatewood, R., Feild, H. S., & Barrick, M. (2015). Human resource selection. Nelson Education.

Jackson, S. E., Schuler, R. S., & Jiang, K. (2014). An aspirational framework for strategic human resource management. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 1-56.

Jones, G. and George, J., 2015. Contemporary management. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Kehoe, R. R., & Wright, P. M. (2013). The impact of high-performance human resource practices on employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Journal of management, 39(2), 366-391.

Marchington, M., Wilkinson, A., Donnelly, R., & Kynighou, A. (2016). Human resource management at work. Kogan Page Publishers.

Marler, J. H., & Fisher, S. L. (2013). An evidence-based review of e-HRM and strategic human resource management. Human Resource Management Review, 23(1), 18-36.

McDermott, A. M., Conway, E., Rousseau, D. M., & Flood, P. C. (2013). Promoting effective psychological contracts through leadership: The missing link between HR strategy and performance. Human Resource Management, 52(2), 289-310.

Nel, P. S., Werner, A., Botha, C., Du Plessies, A., Mey, M., Ngalo, O., ... & Van Hoek, L. (2014). Human resources management. Oxford University Press Southern Africa.

Purce, J. (2014). The impact of corporate strategy on human resource management. New Perspectives on Human Resource Management (Routledge Revivals), 67.

Reiche, B. S., Mendenhall, M. E., & Stahl, G. K. (Eds.). (2016). Readings and cases in international human resource management. Taylor & Francis.

Renwick, D. W., Redman, T., & Maguire, S. (2013). Green human resource management: A review and research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 15(1), 1-14.

Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P., Johns, R., O'Leary, P., Robinson, J. and Plimmer, G., 2015. Managing Employee Performance & Reward: Concepts, Practices, Strategies. Cambridge University Press.

Snell, S. A., Morris, S. S., & Bohlander, G. W. (2015). Managing human resources. Nelson Education.

Sparrow, P., Brewster, C., & Chung, C. (2016). Globalizing human resource management. Routledge.

Storey, J. (2014). New Perspectives on Human Resource Management (Routledge Revivals). Routledge.

Stredwick, J. (2013). An introduction to human resource management. Routledge.