HRM Evolves with Technological Innovation: Current Practices - Essay Sample

Introduction

Human resource management (HRM) is the process involving all interactions and relations between employees and their employers. It includes activities such as recruiting, selecting, appraising performance, imparting training and development, motivating, proving benefits to employees, among others. Historically, HRM-related activities have been evolving with changes such as technological innovation evident in society (Sparrow et al., 2016). Consequently, the current practices used in HRM will not remain permanently in the future. Based on the speed and nature of ongoing economic and technological innovation, many areas of HRM are expected to experience significant changes in the future. Areas such as employee evaluation, performance management, professional talent handling procedures, training need identification to have the potential of recording substantial changes. Human resources management is a critical business activity that as the potential of experiencing far-reaching future trends in most of its areas.

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Future Trends in Areas of HRM

Performance Management

Performance management in HRM is among the areas that are likely to experience changes soon. The most likely trend is the change in the nature and characteristics of the leadership in HRM. With the millennials currently forming the majority of the workforce, it is only a matter of time before they assume a leadership position in many organizations. According to research initiated by Mark Emmons and Millennial Branding, 7% of millennials want to be executives, 47% to be managers, and 15% to plan to be business owners by 2020 (Sparrow et al., 2016). The millennials presence in the workforce has other significant impacts on the entire performance management in HRM. On overage, millennials work in a company for two years before leaving, meaning that there will be an increased job-hopping. Another trend in the future of performance management is the increased use of freelancers and remote working employees (Iordanoglou, 2018). The advanced technological innovation, such as teleconferencing, 3D design, and digitalization, makes it possible for people to perform highly technical and complicated tasks away business offices.

The expected job-hopping is likely to happen because young employees are more interested in job satisfaction and personal development than the old generation. As a result, employee happiness will be a critical characteristic to measure by using happiness KPI. Lastly, the business environment is increasingly moving towards honest and transparent leadership.

Employee Evaluation

Employee appraisal has been a critical tool to determine the level of performance of an employee in helping the organization meet its goal. In the past, performance evaluation was conducted at the end of the year. The majority of the employees are dissatisfied with the current annual appraisal system. Instead, they need and want frequent feedback. The positive correlation between timely, accurate feedback and a higher level of motivation among employees is making it necessary for managers to adopt continuous feedback (Sparrow et al., 2016). The younger workforce appreciates receiving suggestions and comments from the superiors as often as weekly or daily instead of annually. This feature sets the trend for the coaching approach to performance appraisal, where the managers identify the problems in employees' performance, address the expectations, and provide a recommendation on how to solve the issue (Bhargavan, 2020). This practice changes evaluation to become additional training. Frequent assessment through coaching enables the firm to identify employees who do not perform to the firm's expectations sooner and help them improve their performance before the end of the year. Because of the benefits of frequent feedback, annual employee evaluation will decline or end altogether and be replaced by internal social networking that allows coaching.

Training Needs Identification

Training needs identification is a process of establishing areas where employees' needs or lack knowledge, skills, and abilities required them to perform their jobs effectively. The demands of the organization and the needs of the individual employee are critical in identifying training needs. One of the future trends in training needs identification is the individualization of the training process. Since each employee has specific and different training needs, it essential to ensure that the needs of each worker are addressed. As a result, the one-size-fits-all approach to identifying training needs will become obsolete in the future. Employees have more choices in their learning strategy in the new individual training identification approach (Bose & Dey, 2018). Instead of using human resources to identify employee-training needs, adaptive content technologies that use artificial intelligence will be adopted because of their ability to identify personal needs and provide training based on those requirements. Lastly, soft skills training needs continue to gain popularity over technical skills.

Training Management and Continuous Learning

Continuous employee development is the most critical role of learning and development managers. The current increase in the popularity of online platforms in training and continuous learning is likely to be adopted as the first approach. In the future, many organizations will take content platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix for experiential learning (Bhargavan, 2020). Such experiential learning is critical for enabling just-in-time and on-the-job learning.

In the past, training was meant to give employees knowledge and skills that enable them to perform their duty. Additional training opportunities were reserved for top executive members. The strategy is, however, changing with companies intending to attract and retain top talent to invest in their workforce's learning. In the future, organizations must equip their employees with widespread knowledge and soft and hard skills to enable them to be innovative (Iordanoglou, 2018). Besides, training managers will have to provide training reinforcement. Training reinforcement will allow employees to retain content learned. Organizational managers will also incorporate the use of chatbots and gamification in training to facilitate a deeper understanding and application of skills and knowledge. For example, virtual and augmented reality, such as those used in pilot training, will expand to other industries.

Leadership Development

Leadership is a critical aspect of all business organizations that are continuously experiencing challenges associated with changes in the business environment. As a result, companies need to adopt effective leadership development strategies to survive in the current competitive business world (Bhargavan, 2020). As a result, leadership development faces several future trends. The rise and development of globalization make it necessary for the organization to create a more diverse leadership by investing in diversity and inclusion (Mura et al., 2017). Diverse leadership promotes innovation and creativity. As a result, in the future, organizations are more likely to adopt, employ, and support the development of diverse diversity in terms of every element, ranging from age, professions, gender, culture, and even nationality for them to be effective. Besides, the use of hierarchical organizational structures to meet the company's goals is quickly declining (Cascio, 2019). The new leadership development system, which encourages the authenticity of leaders, is becoming a new trend that will continue to mature in the future. Lastly, the future of leadership development involves the promotion of cultivating culture among leaders (Mura et al., 2017). The era where leaders dictated all the events without consulting subordinates or against their wish is quickly declining. Instead, it is replaced by a culture where leaders make employees feel safe, valued, comfortable, and supported to improve employee retention, innovation, high performance, and engagement.

Professional Talent Handling Procedures

Professional talent handling procedures are the processes involving all practices of identifying, hiring and incorporating new employees to the workforce. The most important future trends in talent handling will be in the recruiting process. As the importance of identifying the best employee continue to rise, many organization will opt to use professional recruiters to recruit potential employees (Mura et al., 2017). As a result, in the future, many organizations will outsource the process of advertising, interviewing, selecting, and hiring potential talents.

Employee Localization

Localization is the process of transitioning a worker on working on terms and conditions associated with international assignments to local employment terms that have not connected to the home country (Bose & Dey, 2018). The increase in globalization and the change in economic trends are forcing organizations to send their best workers to foreign countries. As the countries continue to change their national policies to attract foreigners, many employees are more likely to apply for localization than using international terms (Iordanoglou, 2018). Besides, the increased education in many countries allows making it easy for a company to hire an employer from a foreign country than sending local employees abroad.

Outcomes of Good HR Practices

Employees are the most critical resources in any business organization. The types of employees determine the success or failure of firms to achieve their organizational goals. As a result, the organization must adopt good HR practices trends in the future for them to survive the current and future competitive business environment. Some of the outcomes of adopting the above HR practices include reduced employee turnover. In the business environment, technology has increased employment opportunities for many people. As a result, employees tend to change their jobs more frequently, denying their firms a chance to reap from their knowledge and skills (Bose & Dey, 2018). However, good HR management practices attract and retain the most talented employees who are critical in helping their firms achieve their organizational goals. The success of any organization largely depends on its ability to adopt effective human resources strategies.

Conclusion

Human resource management is a critical business activity involving the handling of employees because of the interactions that arise between them and their employers. The economic and technological changes in many business environments are ushering in new and potential future trends in the sector. Future trends in HRM practices affect areas such as performance management, employee evaluation, and leadership development, among others. The benefit of adopting future trends is reduced employee turnover, thus enabling the firm to attract and retain the best workforce in their industry.

References

Bhargavan, M. S. (2020). Talent acquisition current/new trends in recruitment training and development: A qualitative study. Studies in Indian Place Names, 40(74), 1698-1708. https://archives.tpnsindia.org/index.php/sipn/article/view/8854

Bose, I., & Dey, S. (2018). A critical discourse on the workforce localization in the globalized era: some reflections. Journal of Management and Public Policy, 10(1), 17-24. http://www.indianjournals.com/ijor.aspx?target=ijor:jmpp1&volume=10&issue=1&article=002

Cascio, W. F. (2019). Training trends: Macro, micro, and policy issues. Human Resource ManagementReview, 29(2), 284-297.