Human Resources Management in 21th century Essay

Human Resources Management in 21th century - Essay Example Essentially, the hierarchy of managers, supervisors, and workers characterize the workplace organizationally. The orientations of workers and managers to the particular area delineate the social limits of a workplace. Such a definition need not be limited to manufacturing alone, though. The workplace can also be a department in a bank or university or a school within an education system. What is important is that the work area is discrete, has some technological or production unity which marks it off from other workplaces, and it is recognized as such by workers and managers. Therefore, it is evident that the field of Human Resource Management has evolved into a strategic, technical, and measurement-oriented area in the past few years. Predictably, this field will continue to grow in sophistication and complexity as a reflection of the world in the 21st century concretized by the lessons of encountering multifarious ethical dilemmas in organizations. An organization's core values are manifested by its culture. In the basic ways that business is handled, culture accentuates how decisions are made and how rewards are distributed. Employees learn these ways of doing business through observing co-workers and leaders. If no expectations are established and effectively communicated, employees will "make it up" as they go along when faced with ethical dilemmas. Here, it is revealed that the role of good human resource management practices can be a determinant for building a strong ethical foundation to eventually change a culture that has some of the indicators of a weak ethics system in an organization. With the recent changes going on in employee relations, tackling the workplace requires a new form of public management based on the following building blocks (Barzelay, 2001): Strategy - What is the public value the organization is really trying to create Answering this question forces the managers to figure out their policy goals and exactly what role their agency should play in fulfilling those goals. Workplace design - Like a good roadmap, a sound design helps managers reach its ultimate policy and operational destination. Connecting the network - Technology is the glue that can hold networked company together, allowing employees to share knowledge, business processes, decision making, client information, workflow and other data. Ensuring accountability - Ensuring accountability in a networked arrangement is a matter of getting the following four things right: incentives, measurement, trust, and risk. Human capital transformation - In addition to knowing about planning, budgeting, staffing, and other traditional company duties, networked management requires becoming proficient in a host of other tasks, such as negotiation and mediation. Manufacturing methods in the workplace excited particular interest and, during the 1980s, wide-scale implementations of practices such as just in time production, total quality control and team-based work organizations (Voss and Robinson, 1987). The strong Japanese identity of many of these practices ensured that issues of the feasibility and desirability of the transfer of these