The globalization of business:
Global village: A concept in which telecommunication and transportation technologies have essentially reduced time and distance effects to produce a single worldwide community.
Multinational Corporations (MNCs): Corporations with significant operations in more than one country.
Ensure employees with appropriate mix of knowledge, skills, and cultural adaptability are available to handle global assignments.
Human resource managers need to understand societal issues that might affect operations in another country.
HR managers need to:
Understand the laws, values, morals, customs, political and economic systems of different countries.
Find ways to build teams and reduce conflict.
Workforce diversity: The varied personnel characteristics that make the workforce heterogeneous.
Melting pot versus Salad bowl.
The challenge: Accommodate to diverse groups of people by addressing different lifestyles, family needs, and work styles. In other words, they are recognizing and celebrating differences.
Technology: Any equipment, tools, or operating methods, designed to make work more efficient.
Technological advances integrate technology into a process of changing input into output.
Technology has enhanced the production process as well as better servicing to the customers. It also led to the provision of better and more useful information.
Technology has changed the way human resource managers work.
They can disseminate information more quickly.
Members can do their work any place, any time in decentralized work sites.
Managers can better facilitate human resources plans, make decisions faster, more clearly define jobs, and strengthen communications with both the external community and employees.
It affected recruiting, employee selection, training and development, ethics and employee rights, motivating knowledge workers, paying employees market value, communications, decentralized work sites, skill levels, and the legal concerns.
Downsizing: An activity in an organization aimed at creating greater efficiency by eliminating certain jobs.
Outsourcing: Sending work “outside” the organization to be done by individuals not employed full time with the organization.
Contingent workforce: The part-time, temporary, and contract workers used by organizations to fill peak staffing needs or perform work not done by core employees.
Human resource managers must make sure that contingent workers do not perceive themselves as a second-class workers.
Human resource managers must motivate the entire workforce -full-time and temporary employees- and to build their commitment to doing good work.
HR managers confront HRM issues as having these “virtual” employees available when needed, providing scheduling options that meet their needs, and making decisions about whether benefits will be offered to the contingent workforce.
3. Understanding Cultural Environments
The globalization of business:
Global village: A concept in which telecommunication and transportation technologies have essentially reduced
time and distance effects to produce a single worldwide community.
Multinational Corporations (MNCs): Corporations with significant operations in more than one country.
Ensure employees with appropriate mix of knowledge, skills, and cultural adaptability are available to
handle global assignments.
Human resource managers need to understand societal issues that might affect operations in another
country.
HR managers need to:
Understand the laws, values, morals, customs, political and economic systems of different countries.
Find ways to build teams and reduce conflict.
4. Workforce Diversity
Workforce diversity: The varied personnel characteristics that make the
workforce heterogeneous.
Melting pot versus Salad bowl.
The challenge: Accommodate to diverse groups of people by addressing
different lifestyles, family needs, and work styles. In other words, they are
recognizing and celebrating differences.
5. The Changing World of Technology
Technology: Any equipment, tools, or operating methods, designed to make work more efficient.
Technological advances integrate technology into a process of changing input into output.
Technology has enhanced the production process as well as better servicing to the customers. It also led to the
provision of better and more useful information.
Technology has changed the way human resource managers work.
They can disseminate information more quickly.
Members can do their work any place, any time in decentralized work sites.
Managers can better facilitate human resources plans, make decisions faster, more clearly define jobs, and strengthen
communications with both the external community and employees.
It affected recruiting, employee selection, training and development, ethics and employee rights, motivating knowledge
workers, paying employees market value, communications, decentralized work sites, skill levels, and the legal concerns.
6. The Labor Supply
Downsizing: An activity in an organization aimed at creating greater efficiency by eliminating certain jobs.
Outsourcing: Sending work “outside” the organization to be done by individuals not employed full time with the organization.
Contingent workforce: The part-time, temporary, and contract workers used by organizations to fill peak staffing needs or perform
work not done by core employees.
Human resource managers must make sure that contingent workers do not perceive themselves as a second-class workers.
Human resource managers must motivate the entire workforce -full-time and temporary employees- and to build their commitment
to doing good work.
HR managers confront HRM issues as having these “virtual” employees available when needed, providing scheduling options that
meet their needs, and making decisions about whether benefits will be offered to the contingent workforce.
7. Continuous Improvement Programs
Quality management: Organizational commitment to continuous process of
improvement that expands the definition of customer to include everyone involved in
the organization.
Continuous improvement: Organizational commitment to constantly improving the
quality of products or services (the Japanese term is kaizen).
Work process engineering: Radical and quantum change in an organization.
HRM must prepare individuals to change and help affected ones to overcome barriers
to change.
HRM must train employees in these new processes and help them attain new skill
levels that may be associated with the “new, improved” operations.
8. Employee Involvement
This includes delegation, participative management, work teams,
goal setting, employer training, and empowering of employees.
Useful employee involvement requires demonstrated leadership,
as well as supportive management.
Additionally, employees need training.
Workers need to understand new job designs processes.
9. A Look at Ethics
Ethics: A set of rules or principles that defines right and wrong conduct.
Right and wrong behavior is difficult to determine.
A code of ethics: A formal document that states an organization’s primary values
and the ethical rules it expects organizational members to follow.
