Internal and External Influences on HRM Objectives

What are the key human resource objectives?

What are the key human resource objectives?

• Employee engagement and involvement

• Talent development

• Training

• Diversity

• Alignment of values

• Number, skills and location of employees

What are the internal influences on HR objectives?

• Corporate objectives: E.g. an objective of cost reduction is likely to require HR to implement redundancies, job reallocations etc

• Operational strategies: E.g. an introduction of new IT or other systems and processes may require new staff training, fewer staff

• Marketing strategies: E.g. new product development and entry into a new market may require changes to organisational structure and recruitment of new sales return

• Financial strategies: E.g. a decision to reduce costs by outsourcing training would result in changes to training programmes

What are the external influences on HR objectives?

• Market changes: E.g. a loss of market share to a competitor may require a change in management or job losses to improve competitiveness

• Economic changes: E.g. changes in the level of unemployment and the labour market will affect the supply of available people and their pay rates

• Technological changes: E.g. the rapid growth of social networking may require changes to the way the business communicates with employees and customers

• Social changes: E.g. the growing number of single-person households is increasing demand from employees for flexible working options

• Political and legal changes: E.g. legislation on areas such as maximum working time and other employment rights impacts directly on the workforce planning and remuneration

What are the advantages of HRM objectives?

• HR in itself has so many functions within it. You need not restrict yourself to only recruitment but also other areas like training etc.

• It is a general feeling that HRs don’t have the knowledge of business or technical aspects. That is not true … Being an HR you work on analytics and cost and sales and revenue which gives you a holistic picture of your organisation’s business.

• You can also be part of marketing and campaigns. HR and Marketing can create wonder when they work together. Brand building has become inevitable for any organisation.

• When you help employees and when they trust you, there is a sense of achievement and satisfaction that you have made a difference in someone's life!

• You get to meet your clients, talk about the organisation’s culture, plan events, come up with ideas of engagement etc etc which makes it a fun job too.

What are the disadvantages of HRM objectives?

• On the flip side you need to be prepared to take the blame for anything and everything that goes bad.

• Managers will blame the HR, the employees will blame the HR. So they are generally made the scape goats.

• Another flip side is that HRs in many organisations are not involved in major decision making process. Their views opinions are generally discarded. So you tend to feel powerless at times. You are just asked to do what the management says.

• Its a tough task to keep all the stakeholders happy and content. This is one of the challenging tasks of HR. They have to handle all the difficult situations since they interact directly with the employees. In this process some tend to be diplomatic instead of candid thus losing the trust.