Challenges:

The literal context of word Challenge is:

An invitation to compete with or take part in any argument.
In routine life, challenge is actually considered in terms of checking ones determination. If one
is strongly committed to his/her work, he will gladly accept the challenge.
Concept of Challenges in context of Human Resource Management:
Human Resource Management is actually concerned with the detection of eminent workforce
and then appoints this valuable asset on the most appropriate positions in the organizations to get
the assigned task accomplished successfully. But the manager or the leader has to face many
hurdles in pavement of appointing the workforce and then letting this workforce meet the
challenges and go through them successfully instead of becoming a victim of these particulars.
Human Resource Challenges:
Almost all sectors whether they are related to business field or not, have to face some sort of
challenges and these challenges may hinder their potential to do a particular task. Now it depends
upon the workforce that how they deal with these challenges. Either they become victim of the
hurdles or face them boldly and compel them to be used as opportunities to explore the world.
Following are some of common challenges faced by Human Resource Managers:

Workplace Diversity.
Aligning technology best practices to global management strategy.

Adopting a Bottom-Line Oriented Approach

Ensuring Employee Competence

Managing Change
HR as a unique source of competitive advantage:
Flexibility:

Corporate Social Responsibility:

Conversion of challenges into opportunities:

Irrespective of the particular sector of life, in which one is dealing, everybody has to face
the challenges and rest is up to us that how we deal with them! Whether we let them
dominate over us to render them recessive over our efforts and zeal to accomplish tasks
successfully.

HR managers are facing many challenges in present business scenario like Globalization
workforce diversity, technological advances and changes in political and legal
environment, change in information technology etc. All these challenges increase the
pressure on HR managers to attract, retain and nurture talented employee. HR
Professionals cant ignore these challenges rather they ought to be line to design and
execute innovative mechanisms of developing skills and competencies of human
resources to prepare them to not only accept the emerging challenges but also convert
them into opportunities.
1. WORKPLACE DIVERSITY:
According to Thomas (1992), Workplace diversity has following dimensions:
Age, Racial diversity, gender, ethnicity, geographical locations, religious beliefs, parental status
and work experience.
To pave the path of success for any organization, it is necessary that its workforce should be
properly managed. It is the cardinal responsibility of HR manager to manage the diverse body of
human talent and extract innovative ideas from their creative mentalities and render those ideas
practically applicable to enhance efficiency of the organization. This is the way, workforce could
be considered as valuable asset for any organization.
But in organizations, like multinational companies, their managers may face the problem to deal
the workers who have diversified origin as their way of living as well as doing work,their beliefs,
thoughts and perspective of exposure to the world vary greatly. So if HR manager cannot comply
the expectations of all of these employees, and fail to provide them desired working
environment, they may switch from the organization and in this case, we will be giving our asset
and competitive advantage to our competitors.
But this challenge can prove to be one of eminent opportunity for benefit maximization if
creative ideas and diversified skills of the employees having different attributes are appropriately
managed. It is on the part of HR manager that how he turns his diversified employees into one of
most effective and valuable asset by tying whole workforce into one unit irrespective of their
personal, racial and likewise differences.

2. ALIGHNING TECHNOLOGY BEST PRACTICES TO GLOBAL

MANAGEMENT STRATEGY:
Technology is advancing world-wide with the passage of time, so to cope up with the
accelerating rate of advancement, everyone should have to readily adapt these moderations and
technological modifications as well as its appropriate understanding and usage is cardinal aspect
for generating benefits.
Every innovation or advancement in technology is itself a challenge for the workforce as well as
an opportunity. A Challenge, in the context that, already existing workforce is used to
accomplish assigned tasks in a predefined way but with the advent of any new practice,

employees have to change their working programs. It may be a challenge for them to cope up
with the innovations and to deviate from the usual way of doing work.
Now it is the responsibility of Human Resource manager to lead his employees efficiently and to
enable them to face the situations that seem as difficulties for them because they do not have that
much information about the technology and to have competitive advantage, they have to adapt
every new technique as well.
To keep the entity in the stream of progress, HR manager should train the employees and give
them complete information about how to do work in advanced workplace. As the employees
themselves are hardworking and the training activities comply with their self-assertion towards
work, that collectively, will change the challenge of advancement in technologies into
opportunity as the workforce has adapted new ways of accomplishing tasks.
3. Adopting a Bottom-Line Oriented Approach
Another major challenge facing human resources is to integrate its functional activities with the
companys strategic goals. This entails taking a bottom-line oriented approach while making
decisions or framing policy. While such a stance does not pose problems for most functional
areas such as quality control or finance, the interests of the employees very often run at crosspurposes with the interests of the organization in terms of profitability.
Human resource departments face the difficult task of walking a tightrope trying to affect tradeoffs between genuine employee concerns and the commercial imperatives of the organization.
For instance, while employees remain accustomed to pay for performance, the new reality is to
compensate employees to the extent of value they add to the organization in terms of
profitability, regardless of their level of performance. Similarly, while that latest trend is towards
contract or performance based tenures, employees prefer a more stable plan and are accustomed
to time-based tenure with many benefits.
The key role of human resources in overcoming such challenge includes:

Devising and implementing various motivational approaches, heralding a shift from

performance-oriented pay to results-oriented remuneration or gain-sharing.
Changing employee mindset from a process-oriented approach to a customer-oriented
approach. Initiatives such as Total Quality Management and the like play a major role in this
regard.

4. Ensuring Employee Competence

The traditional approach to equipping employees to fulfill organizational requirements entailed
training and developmental interventions. The scope of training and development has undergone
much change in recent times noted for high labor mobility. Human resources departments need
to balance the cost of training with the reality of such employees quitting before the organization
realizes the investment from the training intervention. Organizations also give increasing
preference to talent management over training.
The dimensions of HR challenges in this regard include:

understanding the employees innate skills and competencies and providing employees
with opportunities to apply these skills for the benefit of the organization
skill enhancement of the workforce to promote adaptability, resilience, and agility
adopting a market driven approach

5. Managing Change
Change is the only constant in todays business environment, forcing organizations to keep pace
with such changes constantly and rapidly to exploit new opportunities. Change takes the shape of
organizational restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, right sizing, implementing outsourcing,
providing telecommuting opportunities for employees, and the like. Focused change intervention
increases productivity, improves organizational communications, improves process efficiency,
improve quality, and raises employee morale.
The challenges related to change for human resource management include:

helping employees overcome resistance to change by convincing them about the bigger
picture
provide leadership for the change processes
ensuring stability of systems and processes during the change process
Equipping employees to deal with the changed realities.

6. HR as a unique source of competitive advantage:

Recent theoretical work in business strategy has given a boost to the importance of HR in
generating continual competitive advantage. According to the resource-based vievir of
the firm (e.g., Barney, 1986, 1991, 1995), firms can develop sustained competitive
advantage only by creating value in a way that is rare and difficult for competitors to
replicate. Although traditional sources of competitive advantage such as natural
resources, technology, economies of scale, and so forth, create value, the resource-based
argument is that these sources are increasingly easy to imitate, especially in comparison
to a complex social structure such as an employment system. If that is SO, human
resource strategies may be an especially important source of sustained competitive
advantage (Lado& Wilson, 1994; Pfeffer, 1994; Wright & McMahan, 1992).

7. Flexibility:
As increase in trends of globalization and diversity, organizations are forced to be more flexible
and adaptable. Many of the private sector organizations are working internationally or globally
and so they have to embrace diversity in their workforce and to cope up with these challenges,
the HR department of the organization needs to be more flexible and develop a wider range of
skills and strategies. One of the most important factors of workplace changes that increased
organizational flexibility is the workforce diversity. As diversity increases, it tends to increase
organizational flexibility. Private sector organizations have shown Flexibility in their structure,

policies, strategies and work pattern etc. in many ways like they allow their workers to do work
in varying arrangements including flexible timing and payment schedules etc. Some of the
private sector organization now treats their workers as independent consultants rather than
traditional employees hence allowing them to work through telecommuting etc.
So this shows that with changing trends private sector is changing its structure from traditional
one to a more flexible and cooperative one. This strategy will help the organization to flourish,
and will aid to create such an image of organization, that provides its employees with all sort of
independence and flexibility on the job and off the job. It has been noticed that
employees/workers, in the currently passing era are looking for such organizations where they
can perform their tasks without any boundaries and structural hindrances.

8. Corporate Social Responsibility:

Corporate Social Responsibility refers to a business practice that involves participating in
initiatives that provides benefit to the society. HR managers play a very important role in overall
development of the societies they are not only responsible for creating jobs and growth, instead,
government as well as private sector organizations owe responsibility for wellbeing of society
and their prosperity. Nowadays, due to advancement in communication channels and
globalization, local and international enterprises are paying great attention to CSR of companies.
Public and non-profit organizations had this competitive edge on private sector that they paid
more attention towards CSR but now private companies are more socially aware, responsible and
embedded in organizational culture. To be more responsible socially helps private sector
organizations in attracting and recruiting more competent and high quality candidates as
graduates are now showing interest in CSR of the organization along with compensation and
other benefits provided by it.
So for the purpose of being more socially aware and responsible HR department or the
organization should develop a CSR department to implement CSR policies and plans more
effectively. One of the corporate social responsibilities that the private sector should adopt is
Ethical Labor Practices.
It involves the practices of treating employees fairly and ethically and it is especially important
for the organizations that are operating internationally. This will also help organization in having
more skilled, responsible and socially aware human resource.
By treating employees fairly and ethically, companies can also demonstrate their corporate social
responsibility. This is especially true of business that operates in international locations with
labor laws that differ from those in the United States.

Conclusion:
As it is the first and foremost task of HR to build strong and effective organizational structure so
for this purpose organization hires skilled employees who adequately bring their capabilities into
practical utilization. It is said that it is the human asset not the fixed asset that will make the difference
for successful organization. HR management is the one who have the capacity to face the challenges

and convert those challenges into opportunities by encouraging and motivating workforce to
compete and survive in an open environment.

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Baird, L., &Meshoulam, I. (1988). Managing two fits of strategic human resource management.
Academy of Management review, 13(1), 116-128.
Encyclopedia of Business, 2. e. (n.d.). Refrence for Business. Retrieved from Refrence for
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Mapes, T. (2013). linkedin.com. Retrieved from linkedin.com.
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