Human Resource Management Essay: Roles, Impacts, And Procedures In Transport. (70 Characters)

Discuss about the Human Resource Management in the Transport Sector.

Human resource management is a vital function in the transport sector. Efficiency and administration directly depend on the quality of human resources, therefore the transport sector needs to be built through modernizing and improving human resource management by establishing strong efficiency of individuals and advancing their performance (Bratton & Gold, 2017). In this context, Australia has drawn interest to human resource  management in the transport sector through rehabilitating administration and ensuring transparency, responsibility, and accountability in order to provide high-quality transport services to the public. Jawad & Kramar presents a book about managing human resources in a global context and perspective (Jawad & Kramar, 2017). Jawad & Kramar focuses on the impacts of global human resource management in an industry, the way in which workforce issues are addressed in a global context, and the manner in which human resource management works in multinational companies (Jawad & Kramar, 2017). Boasting of truly a global orientation has made the transport sector a success, reliable, and effective in the world.  The transport sector is among the most crucial industries in the world. Without transport means, people could not travel, connect, and reach others in such a globalized world. The main aim of the essay is explaining the roles, impacts, and the manner in which human resource management works in the transport sector.

Human resource management involves all the activities planned and controlled by an organization to establish and maintain employees’ relationship with the enterprise in order to achieve both company objectives and employees goals/expectations (Brewster, 2017). In the context of the transport sector, HRM entails the process of for staffing the industry and sustaining high transport sector employees’ performance in terms of road construction, aviation management, airbase management, and rail constructions. The practices, systems, and procedures implemented in the public and private transport sector aim at attracting, acquiring, developing, and managing human resources in order to realize the objectives of the industry. In simple terms, human resource management in the transport sector entails managing employment relationship (Brewster, 2017).

Human resource management plays very important roles in the transport sector. The transport sector is a global industry whose roles and impacts benefit almost all other industries in the business world. Without transport, business will not be as usual. The world is connected through globalization where transport plays a major role. Due to this, human resource management departments in both the private and public transport sector have established strong HR policies, practices, and procedures of enhancing the functions of this department in the industry ( Lucas, 2012). The major roles of human resource management in the transport sector are:

Roles of Human Resource Management

The most fundamental role of human resource management in the transport sector is the recruitment of employees. The private and public transport sector ensures that the skills, competencies, knowledge, expertise, and talented people are selected to work in the sector. In particular, certified engineers are offered road construction tenders by the government and other private firms in the transport sector. A deep evaluation of the ability and competency of the potential tender applicants and other employees in such companies is highly encouraged to ensure that projects succeed and that they are completed of the best quality and standard (Lucas, 2012). Engineering project success in the transport sector depends on the quality of human resources management recruited, hired, and selected.

The other human resource function is motivating the recruited employees, and companies/ individuals awarded tender projects in the transport sector. The HR departments of the private and public sector ensure that their employees are rewarded especially those innovative and doing well in their mandates. The HR departments in the transport sector need to evaluate employees’ performance to know those who have exceeded the expected measures in order to compensate and reward them for their actions (Hamel, 2008). Recent global research in the transport industry shows that rewarding of employees for excellent performance is number one incentive for motivating them and ensuring quality completion of engineering projects in a timely manner. The main compensation packages in the global transport sector include holiday offers, awards, end of year bonuses, promotion schemes, overtime payments, and salary increments.

The human resource departments execute the roles of ensuring that the right plans are put in place as a reference point when involving people in the near future. The most important aspect of HR department in the transport sector is planning for the personnel in the organization. The organization needs to ensure that all human resources under its wing are sufficient to complete the project under execution at the right time and of the desired quality (Hutchinson & Purcell, 2010). However, it is the roles of human resource management to ensure that staff members do not exceed the limit since when they exceed, then the organization will be forced to increase the budget. Either, the staff members must not be few either, since if this is the case then the already in place employees will be overworked. In this regard, the HR department ensures a balance of organizational budget, quality project completion, and a more effective workforce for the transport services and operations. Setting daily objectives also helps in streamlining transport activities of an organization and preventing haphazard undertaking of projects and other customer service needs.

Employees Recruitment

Another role of human resource management in the transport sector is attracting and retaining staff in the organization. Transporting people and packages all over the world is big business.  Among the world’s largest transport companies include United Parcel Service, Delta Air Lines, Danish Shipping and others. These companies have established HR departments who value employees’ attraction and retention. Retention of qualified employees enables these companies to offer high-quality services to customers and ensures that skills and expertise are transferred from the old experienced personnel to the newly recruited staff (Jawad & Kramar, 2017). On the other hand, these companies have HR departments who value employees as the most important assets of the company. As result, more new graduates and other job seekers prefer working for them since there are standard HR policies, practices, procedures, and legislation that defend their rights. Such employee attraction and retention practices include promotions, rewards, health policies, leave days, bonuses, and other conducive working conditions. The success of transport sector services and other underway project completion is the HR departments’ ability to attract and retain skilled and knowledgeable employees.

The human resource management (HRM) department in the transport sector helps both the private and private sector firms develop and build a competitive advantage which involves capacity building of the organization so that it offers a unique set of services and projects to customers and the public. In building effective human resources, private firms compete with each other in a “war for talent” so as to win more tenders in the public transport sector. However, this is not a war for hiring talents only but is a game to enhancing the quality provision of services to the business people in the transport means and helping businesses grow and stay committed to project completion in the long run (Ramachandra, 2009). On the same note, all organizational levels work together in order to develop employee's skills. Training and development of employees in the transport sector leads to the innovation of high-quality projects that benefit the customers and other business people in the world. Most successful companies have flexible HR policies when it comes to the training and development of employees.

The transport sector connects people from one location to another through travel, and this contributes to business success in the global environment. Road, air, and sea transport form the industry and contributes on the commercial and domestic shipping and transfer of commodities and people along the global networks (Lansbury, (1998), Kramar, McGraw and R. Schuler, 1997). However, there are various workforce issues that affect the transport sector in the global context.

Improvement of Compensation Packages

Transport and logistics keeps the world economy humming. Without shipping, trucking, transport, and warehousing companies bring new products and raw materials from suppliers to manufacturers and finished products from the producers to the market, the world economy would flounder (Ramachandra, 2009). The transport industry relies on human resources, and yet experiences image problems that hinder effective employees’ recruitment. In addition to the problem associated with overcoming hiring and employees’ skill retention problem in the transport sector, human resource managers in the logistically oriented companies contend with regulatory, training, and employees compensation issues.

Transport and logistics as a career have been a hard sell, particularly in the trucking segment. The Huffington 2013 post cited Georgia Center of Innovation for Logistics statistics that indicated that truckers handle 80 percent of domestic cargo shipments. Today, adult employees view truck driving job to be poor paying whose compensation is far less from meeting their professional and family needs appropriately. In this regard, there is a human resource issue of little compensation to certain jobs in the transport sector which need to be addressed. Shipping, warehouse and trucking companies are failing to attract college graduates for HR managerial positions for they lack awareness of the opportunities offered by logistics (Jiang et al., 2012). Collectively, the HR departments in global transport sector must establish ways of rebranding the transport sector as a career choice and work within personal companies to provide all associated employment packages as well as establishing a culture of employees’ participation in containing the drawbacks that face current candidate perceptions.

Finding the suitable candidate for new jobs that meet sector demand has become a major issue to human resource management in the transport industry. This issue stems from the spread of misinformation through distrust which negatively impacts on employee referrals as a prime hiring tool in the sector. The desire to have qualified drivers and pilots behind the trucks, trains and airplane wheels forces most companies screen applicants for drug consumption, licenses, and other pre-recruitment factors that disqualify their applications (Jawad & Kramar, 2017). However, due to corruption and nepotism; unqualified personnel are hired and this leads to the offering of the undesired services to customers hence tarnishing the image of such companies to the public. Poor internal communication further challenges the effectiveness of employee recruitment and retention in the transport and logistics sector (Doll & Balaban, 2013). Some employees are objected to in-house training and development steps by the HR departments, hence failure in the transport sector. There is need to support strong recruitment and retention practices, policies, and procedures of the HR department by the top management in order to alleviate this challenge. Also, HR regulations governing the qualifications of candidates in all job vacancies should be well spelled and adhered to by all people.

Planning in the Private and Public Sector

Some international transport and logistics companies experience unplanned layoffs of employees and closure of operations. The major contributing factors behind these two are stiff competition in the market, misuse, and mismanagement of resources, lack of compliance with HR laws and budget declines (Foster, 2014). The looming lack of compliance with government requirements in the transport sector leads to accidents and this leads to burning of such services by the concerned companies. The HR departments of such companies are forced to lay off a huge percentage of employees something which leads to operations closure. As a result, the economy is adversely affected whose cascading effects harm the human resource management systems of companies in the global context (Foster, 2014). There is need to address this HR issue in the transport and logistics to prevent economic downturns and disparities in this globalized transport context. The secret to HR success is employee retention and not mass employees’ layoffs.

To address the above-mentioned HR issues in the global transport and logistics sector, the HRM departments of these companies need to work on building high-quality HR practices, policies, and procedures. It is evident that human resource management effectively works well in global transport context for all concerned companies in an attempt to improve performance and employees productivity (Doll & Balaban, 2013). It has been the call for all HR departments operating in the transport sector to the management to support them in sufficient budgets and ensuring that adequate employees are hired in order to boost performance and quality of transport services to the customers. HRM works in the following ways in the global context:

Most international transport and logistics companies recruit employees in reference to Equality and Diversity Act as prescribed in the HR codes. International companies recruit employees from different races, national origins, cultures, languages, skills, and ethnic background. As a result, the transport sector benefits from creativity and innovation of ideas from this diverse workforce. When hiring drivers to transport people and products from one country to another, diversity in terms of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and national origins is enhanced and this boosts service provision (Brewer & Brewer, 2010). Also, when awarding a tender for transport sector projects; diversity is highly enhanced and this ensures the success of projects and their completion in the desired time with minimal budgets to both private and public sector since expertise and skills are highly considered in awarding such contracts.

Attracting and Retaining Staff

In the global context, most HR departments encourage training and development of employees of the new transport sector requirements in order to serve customers with the best standards of quality. Employees working beyond their country of origin borders are highly trained of the global country cultures and business communication language to ensure efficiency and success of projects in the right manner (Arulrajah, Opatha, & Nawaratne, 2015). This makes it very easy for supervisors of projects to communicate their instructions to the employees for they are using a language that is understandable to all. Also, transport sector employees are trained of the rules of the industry which they are required to comply with to limit customer complaints and project failures. Training and development of employees by the transport sector HR companies contribute greatly to their increased morale, productivity, and motivations towards enhancing success in the sector.

Conclusion

Human resource professionals contribute greatly to the success of transport sector roles both domestically and in the global context. People travel from one location to another in this industry. Likewise, commodities are transported through road, air, and shipping transport sector from one part of the world to another and this greatly contributes to economic growth. Without infrastructure, this traveling could not be possible. Other companies are specialized in engineering projects where they construct transport roads, railways, airstrips, and other infrastructure to boost social and economic growth. In this regard, the human resource management plays major roles in the success of the transport sector operations. The major functions of HR departments in the transport sector are recruitment and retention, employee compensation, commitments building, capacity building, and training and development of the workforce among many other functions. Issues of corruption and lack of compliance with government regulations and requirements in the industry adversely affect HR functions in the transport sector. There is need for the top management of private sector companies to prioritize on equality and diversity in the workforce so as to excel in the global market context. Therefore, effective human resource management in the transport sector leads to economic success in the global world.

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