Introduction
Strategic human resource management is one of the most crucial elements of organizational success. Organizational leaders should ensure that human resource strategies used in managing their workforce tag along with their corporate culture. One of the main goals of human resource management is the retention of qualified, skilled, and experienced employees. It is important to ensure that top-performing employees remain in an organization’s workforce for the sake of achieving various objectives. The best strategy for determining the need to retain certain employees is performance appraisal.
It helps to identify the value of an employee to an organization and the need to improve employee capacity through training. However, human resource management can be challenging when a need to cut down the workforce presents itself. Downsizing is never easy for an organization because it can have detrimental effects if not handled in a professional manner. For the case of Xerox, the outcome of downsizing was positive because of strategic decision-making.
Challenges faced by HR
Human resource managers face many challenges that come along with reducing the size of the workforce. The first challenge involves addressing the need to maintain work morale for surviving employees. It is important for organizational leaders to apply effective strategies to maintain the morale of surviving employees. Departures within the workforce can lead to remnants suffering from shock, anger, bitterness, and a general feeling of being demoralized. Organizational leaders can deal with this challenge by taking into account all the needs, fears, and concerns of these employees as a way to make them feel secure and part of the organizational culture.
Another challenge faced by human resource managers is the need to maintain an organization’s productivity and profitability. Downsizing in an organization presents a new challenge to organizational leaders with regard to ensuring that performance and productivity remain constant. Every decision made concerning an organization’s workforce aims at improving overall performance and better employee welfare. This becomes a concern when downsizing happens because the workload remains the same or probably increases. Organizational leaders can deal with this challenge by hiring temporary or part-time employees who can help whenever the workload is too much for ordinary workers. Alternatively, employees can be given extra hours and responsibilities for additional pay.
The third challenge involves the need for organizations to retain their most skilled, qualified, and experienced employees. One effect of cutting down the workforce in an organization is that surviving employees often disengage from the organization’s values, goals, and objectives. These employees quickly lose their trust in the organizations ability to meet their career goals and thus can easily think of changing workplaces. Therefore, it is important to ensure that organizational leaders do their best to reaffirm their plans to employees by improving their welfare. Maybe, they can improve the work environment to suit their ambitions, as well as revise their remuneration and benefits packages.
Key human resource management areas
In the case of Xerox, a number of key human resource management areas helped in turning around the performance of the organization. These areas include technology, employee retention, and human resource development, among others. The reason why these areas played such a crucial role was that there was an urgent need to invest in the workforce. A well taken care of the workforce often delivers results. Investing in modern technology helped Xerox to boost the ability of its workforce to carry out their duties in a diligent manner. Employee retention was important in reducing the cost of operation brought about by recruitment and selection of new employees. Training and development of human resources within an organization is important because it helps to improve the capacity of employees in meeting organizational goals.
