Top 6 Human Resource Issues and Its Impact in the Workplace | Digital Asia

The rapid growth of today’s global business can be a challenge for businesses. Human Resource (HR) department plays key role in managing company’s most valuable resource: employees, as well as provide stability that helps the business run well. Highly efficient HR department can create positive difference in the workplace, as they actively take part in establishing company culture and maintaining employee engagement that will affect directly to the productivity and business bottom line.

However, managing a workplace consisting of people with various backgrounds and personalities is not easy. Oftentimes, HR department has to deal with numerous issues that can hamper employees’ performance in the workplace, lower productivity level, and cutback business efficiency in general. In order to prevent this negative effect, understanding HR issues is important for HR professionals. Here are a list of HR challenges and its impact in the workplace:

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• Diversity and discrimination at work

Diversity in the workplace that encompasses age, race, gender, and religion might lead to discriminatory practices or unequal treatments between one employee and another. As a leader, you cannot overlook any intolerance. Ignoring the issue is not a wise move for the company as employees affected by such discrimination might report to the police if the company fails to take necessary actions. When this happen, your company’s image might be tarnished and it will be difficult to hire new people as none want to work in a place that allows discrimination.

Therefore, you should not ignore when your employees come and complain that they experience discrimination at work. Make sure that you take the case seriously and investigate them as employee’s safety should always be number one priority.

According to the study of Vermeeren and friends, HR practices influence employees attitude and behaviour in the workplace that can affect their productivity. The study shows that good HR and organisational management outcomes lead to job satisfaction. You can use absenteeism to measure workers’ productivity and monitor them. So, if their productivity goes down, you can take necessary action to deal with the issue such as holding family gathering or vacation.

• Technology in the workplace

In the era of digitalisation, technology is proven to bring great deal of contributions to the workplace. The use of social media and mobile devices as well as robotics and artificial intelligence will help HR professionals in the process of recruiting, managing, and retaining employees. Unfortunately, many employers tend to underestimate the importance of creating certain policy regarding the use of technology in the workplace and this might lead to uninvited problems in the future such as breach of employee’s privacy. That being said, you should create a set of rules and laws regarding this matter.

With current global talent crunch, finding the right person for the right position can be a big challenge for any hiring manager. Choosing in the limited choices of talents while competing with crowd competitors often result to a condition where you make wrong hires. Owing to one and other reasons, you might end up hiring someone who turns out to be unfit for the position.

To prevent the high cost of wrong hire, HR leaders should come up with practical recruiting strategy by considering these points: what position is available, when should it be filled, what are the requirements of ideal candidates, and what skills the candidates should have.

• Employee training and development

Employees are company’s greatest assets. No wonder, spending money in training and developing the workforce is a good investment that will be paid off. However, training inexperienced employees can take some time, such that it might deter the company from growing rapidly. To minimise such risk, you should improve your hiring strategy to draw only potential talents.

This could be among most common mistakes that HR does. Payroll errors often happen when HR officers fill the payroll information manually that often results to wrong employee payments. If this happens repeatedly, there are chances that your employees will be unhappy and this will affect their morale and productivity as well. Therefore, double check the payroll system will be the best choice an HR can do.

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