HR Management in Multinational Companies-Free-Samples for Students

Question: Identifythreekey trends and challenges for International HRM. Analyse how thesethreetrends and challenges impact upon, and affect the HRM practices for an MNC. Answer: Human Resource Management in Multinational Companies Globalization and increased change in technology within the business environment has brought forth the alteration in the role of human resource management (Kaur, 2014). Businesses have grown from being managed within a central environment or country to global management. This is because of the establishment of many multinational corporations (MNC), in different countries from the motherland. Initially, human resource management had a responsibility of bringing people and the organization together so that each goal is achieved (Kaur, 2014). This implies that both the goals of the company and those of the employee have to be met. With the increased change in the market environment where there are high levels of competition both globally and locally, the role of human resource management has to alter in order to fit the changed business scope. Human resource management has to evolve and become strategic partners, employees advocates and a change mentor within an organization (Bratton G old, 2012). The human resource professions must be business driven and be able to carry the goals and burdens of the organization. Trends and challenges facing human resource management are the other cause of the transformation in their roles (Bratton Gold, 2012). With increasing the change in the trends and especially with the international human resource management, human resource professional needs to adjust and work effectively to deliver the set goals. The demand of business in the present world is evolving with different trends and challenges coming forth, hence human resource professionals need to change and adjust to this changes as to have high performance within the organizations (Bratton Gold, 2012). They should target to enhance talent development within the workers. The human resource professional has to be coaches, mentors, councilors, succession planners to help motivate organization members and their loyalty (Reiche, Mendenhall Stahl, 2016). In this paper, we are going to discuss on the various trends and challenges that affect the international human resource management in Multinational Corporations and the impact these trends and challenges have to the human resource professional practices. There are various trends and challenges that an international human resource management professional undergo, they include a drastic change in technology, education, mobility where the workers have to relocate and adjust to the new environment, workplace diversity, talent management and the inability to retain employees (Chan, 2017). This paper gives a detailed discussion of the three major challenges that international human resource managers will have especially in the multinational cooperation companies. The three main challenges are workplace or workforce diversity, talent management and employee retention. Workplace Diversity The diversity of workplace has become a common trend and challenge to human resource management, especially the international human resource management. Diversity can be defined in reference to the fact that it acknowledges the reality in which people differ on different characteristics, visible or invisible (Chan, 2017). The different characteristics that are used in defining workforce diversity are the age, gender, marital status, disability, social status, sexual orientation, religion, personality, ethnicity and culture (Chan, 2017). All these characteristics define the diversity in the workforce; the human resource has to manage these diversities for efficient productivity. Failure for any human resource to manage diversity may be the root cause for the failure of the company. Diversity at workplace involves the incorporation or the coexistence of people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds to a company (Barak, 2016). The different cultural characters include but not limited to age, gender, colour, physical disability and many others (Barak, 2016). With the increasing growth in business from being domestic, to multi-domestic, and finally to multinationals, diversity at workplace becomes crucial and important to facilitate achieving the companies goals. Human resource management has the responsibility of ensuring that this diverse workforce within the company gets an equal potential of exercising their abilities. Workplace diversity has been a great challenge to most of the human resource managers especially the international human resource managers as they are not able to understand the cross-cultural differences that exist between the home country and the host country (Barak, 2016). Workplace diversity challenges refer to the fact that the future success of the organization depends on how well the human resource will manage the diversity (Canas Sondak, 2013). When diversity is well managed by turning it into a strategic organizational asset, the success of the company will be sure. This refers to the ability of the human resource to welcome the diverse talents, innovative ideas and perspectives into the work (Canas Sondak, 2013). With this, it will be easy for the organization to meet the market expectations and respond to the business opportunities in a more creative manner. Management of diversity will assist the company not lose the talents to their competitors. In the management of the multinational corporations, embracing the cultural diversity is very much important as it will help in the development of the company and its future goals (Knippenberg, Ginkel Homan, 2013). Since workplace diversity as already indicated, is very important in the success of the organization, every human resource professional has to develop strategies of help in the management of these diversities. There are various strategies that can be employed to facilitate management of workplace diversity. Human resource should employ the strategy of diversity training (Knippenberg, Ginkel Homan, 2013).This entails training each profession on the importance of diversity and how diversity can be used to facilitate the success of the company. This will help to shape the diversity policies in the organization. Human resource should also embrace diversity in the leadership positions which will help to create visibility in the workplace (Chrobot-Mason, Ruderman Nishii, 2013). Openness within the company will be of great importance as far as the management of diversity is concerned. Every employee should be given equal opportunities to express their views and concerns about the companys goals (Chrobot-Mason, Ruderman Nishii, 2013).Human resource personnel should take diversity as the main challenge and work towards managing the diversity. Talent Management Talent management is of great importance to the multinational cooperation than domestic businesses. This is because of the increased diversity of the workforce. Just like any other business strategies, talent management strategy is very instrumental in the recruitment, training, retaining and attraction of highly skilled workers to the company (Vaiman, Scullions Collings, 2012). Talent management started in the 1990s and has since then be embraced by different companies to ensure success in their business (Vaiman, Scullions Collings, 2012). The development of talent management was very important especially in maintaining workers, who are the most important organizations assets. Companies that implement talent management develop various strategies that help them in the realization of the worker's skills, ability, and talents. These strategies include but not limited to managing and defining competitive salaries, training and development opportunities, attracting and recruiting of qu alified candidates and performance management processes retention programmes. Talent management which is also referred to as human capital management is the process of recruiting, managing, assessing, developing, and maintaining workers within an organization (Stahl et al., 2013). It is very instrumental as it helps the company be able to recruit competent personnel. It makes companies be strategic and deliberate on how they source, attract, select, develop, retain and promote employees. The competency of a worker is settled at by use of organizational core competencies. With the help of talent management, the company is also able to conduct performance management where the performance of an individual worker can be monitored (Stahl, 2012).Many human resource personnel is facing the challenge of embracing talent management in fear of getting new workers with inadequate skills, inability to retain key talents and the fear that attracting new talent will be a threat to competitiveness. This makes most them shy away from talent management. The critical factor about talent management is the effect that it has to the company when it is not properly implemented. There are various critical aspects that arise due to poor talent management from the human resource manager. These aspects include failure of a business, increased the cost of hiring and replacing an employee once found incompetent, cost of failing to attract and retain employees and the general cost encountered by the organizationwhen there is a vacant position (Vaiman, Scullions Collings, 2012). This is very critical aspects of talent management and has to be addressed by proper recruitment of employees (talent management). Retention of Employees Retention of employees is another great challenge that international human resource managers face. It is the ability of an organization to retain its employees. This is a difficult task that most of the organizations have failed to accomplish. Research done on the satisfactory level of employees in an organizationindicates that majority of the employees plan to look for a new job within the six months of employment, others are passionately already looking for the job (James Mathews, 2012). This possesses a great challenge to the management. In multinational cooperation, there is an increase in workforce diversity, making the expectations and the motivations of the employees to evolve too. It is the responsibility of the human resource managers to identify and understand his motivations and expectations of the workers so as to what is most valued by the workers. Understanding employees expectations and motivations will be important as far as the retention of the employee is concerned . The challenges faced by organizations due to inability to retain employees are very detrimental. The main challenge resulting from the failure of the organization to retain employees is the creation of leadership vacuum (James Mathews, 2012). High employee turnover rates prevent the organization from training the most achievers to assume the mentoring positions. The best performers are lost to the competitors together with their skills and abilities, leaving a great loss to the company. There are different ways in which the human resource will ensure retaining the employees. Among these,we have: motivating employees, increase in employees benefits, incentives and branding of employees (Bryant Allen, 2013). Branding of employees involves combining of both employees in the organization and those sourced outside the organization. Impact of the Trend and Challenges to the Human Resource Practices for MNC With the increased change in business environments, where business has gone global, trends and challenges affecting human resource management are also increasing. These trends and challenges are able to affect the entire human resource management practices. Multinational corporations have different human resource practices which include selection and recruitments of staff, compensation and reward systems, performance appraisals, training and development and repatriation needs (Ferner, Edwards Tempel, 2012). This section analyses how trend and challenges mentioned earlier impacts these practices. Selection and recruitment of employees Selection and recruitment of employee is an important aspect of human resource management. It is critical in that when a right person is selected for the position his performance will boost companys general performance (Thite, Budhwar Wilkiston, 2013). Recruitment of the right person for the position also prevents the extra expenses encored due to frequent training to the employee. MNC should advertise their recruitment openly and allow workforce diversity by taking in employees with different cultural diversities (Thite, Budhwar Wilkiston, 2013). It is a critical practice that should be done carefully to avoid great losses to the organization. Workplace diversity is seen to impact the practice of selection and recruitment of the employees. People of different cultures have to be employed in order to facilitate the blending of ideas in the organization (Thite, Budhwar Wilkiston, 2013). Initially, human resource had to employ internally where there were minimal chances of an external employee to be absorbed. The benefits of workplace diversity have made it possible for the blending of employees. Talent management has also impacted in the selection and recruitment in that those candidates with the qualified skills and who are able to meet the required goals are selected. Talent management offers different qualities required for recruiting a worker (Thite, Budhwar Wilkiston, 2013) Compensation and Reward Systems Human resource management has a responsibility of compensating every worker and rewarding them too for work well done. The top achievers should be rewarded and given incentives to boost their morale (Gupta Shaw, 2014).Workplace diversity and talent management have a moderate effect on the compensation and rewarding policy of the company. Depending on the worker's talents and skills together with the originality and culture of the workers, the compensation policy will be affected. Every country has its own compensation culture, this allows the resource manager to work within the culture available in the host country. Employees with high marketable talents will reflect high compensation from the organization as compared to those with less productive talents. Organisations should also reward their employees and review their compensation more often just to help in retaining the employees in the organization (Gupta Shaw, 2014). Training and Development Every organization has a responsibility of training and developing employees. This is very important in ensuring the company fits in the competitive market. When employees are trained, their skills are improved and thus increasing their productivity levels (Tahir et al., 2014). Companies that invest in training workers will have an advantage as the workers will be updated on the current skills required. Workplace diversity, talent management and retention of employees as trends have impacted on this practice. With employees from diverse groups, the human resource has to offer training in order to ensure the culture and purpose of the organizationare well understood (Tahir et al., 2014).Training and development have also been used as a way of retaining employees within the organization since it makes employees loyal and committed to the organization. The inability of most companies to retain employees has made it possible for the establishment of training and development sessions for the employees. Job Security This is the best motivation that any employee deserves. In todays world, most of the employees are fired and hired at the companys own interest. This makes it difficult for the employees to have job satisfaction. When job security is assured to the employees, there is an increased performance as employees will be motivated (Kooij et al., 2013).Workplace diversity impacts a lot in this practice as it makes human resource managers able to provide job security before winning a great talent into the organization. There will be no or little workplace diversity when there is job insecurity in the organization (Kooij et al., 2013). Talent management and employee retention have also affected this practice. The entire process of talent management involves job security, this is because workers look for a better place where they can be satisfied and when there is job insecurity in a company, it becomes difficult to win skilled workers (Kooij et al., 2013). Human resource should ensure there is job security before hiring and training as this is what will attract talents. Retention of the employee as a challenge has made most of the organization to offer job security, this helps to retain workers who have a potential of being mentors and the top achievers (Kooij et al., 2013). Conclusion Change in business environments has made it possible for the establishment of multinational corporations. Human resource managers of multinational corporations have a greater responsibility which is not limited to administrative purposes of reviewing compensations and rewards. There has been a great change in the role of the human resource especially the international human resource. The change in the role of human resource management has been attributed to trends and challenges associated with the management. These trends and challenges include workplace diversity, retention of employees and talent management. 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