WORKFORCE DIVERSITY: BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN THE 21st CENTURY

According to Onday (2016), Workforce diversity is a major concern for most of the businesses today since organizations need to understand and go through the workforce diversity effectively because of globalization requires more attention and interaction among people from diverse cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds in the 21^st century.

According to Saxenaa (2014) , Workforce diversity can be identified as the similarities and differences between employees in terms of physical capabilities and disabilities, race, religion, age, social backgrounds, gender, and sexual orientation. As she explained further, no two humans are alike and people are different not only in above psychological characteristics but also in their perspectives and prejudices and in current scenario, employing diversified workforce is necessary for every organization but to manage such diversified workforce is also becoming a big challenge for management.

According to Esen (2005 ), under the umbrella of diversity practices, currently organizations are employing approaches of understanding and relationship-building which encourage the voice of all employees to be heard and involved with achieving a competitive advantage by learning the perspectives of diverse employee groups are adding value and creativity to organizations’ strategic direction.

Companies always need to have a look for the ways to becoming comprehensive while holding diversity because it has the potential to yield the greater competitive advantages as well as the work productivity (SHRM 1995). Stephen Butler, chairperson of the Business-Higher Education Forum, strongly trust that diversity is an invaluable competitive asset (Robinson, 2002) and Black Enterprise(2001) highlighted that managing diversity in the current global context is a key factor of effective people management in a workplace.

According to Devoe (1999), many challenges can be identified in managing diverse work population since it is more than simply acknowledging differences in people. Also he says that it involves in recognizing the value of differences, combating discrimination and upholding the inclusiveness resulting managers to be challenged with losses in personnel and work throughput due to prejudice and discrimination, as well as complaints and legal actions against the organization.

Negative attitudes and behaviors also can be hurdles to organizational diversity because they can damage working relationships and hurt morale and work productivity. (Esty et al. 1995).

AT&T company which is an American telephone and telegraph company strongly believes that their success begins with their employees with a diverse in their business, as well as customers, investors and communities .Also company believes that with a diverse in workforce, they can have a better understand on the different needs of their customers and can deliver products and services which enable them to gain more businesses (Anon,2015).

References

Anon., 2015. Impact of Organizational Culture on Employee Performance and Productivity: A Case Study of Telecommunication Sector in Bangladesh. International Journal of Business and Management, 8(2), pp.63-78.

Black Enterprise. 2001. “Managing a multicultural workforce.” Black Enterprise Magazine (July).

Devoe, D. 1999.Managing a changing workforce: Achieving outstanding service with today’s employees. Davie, FL: Workplace Trends Publishing.

Esen, E., 2005. 2005 Workplace Diversity Practices , s.l.: Society for Human Resource Management.

Esty, K., R. Griffin, and M. Schorr-Hirsh. 1995. Workplace diversity. A manager’s guide to solving problems and turning diversity into a competitive advantage. Avon, MA: Adams Media Corporation.

Onday, O., 2016. Global Workforce Diversity Management and the Challange of managing diversity. Global Journal of Human Resource Management , Volume Volume 4.

Robinson, K-S. 2002. “U.S. must focus on diversity or face decline in competitiveness.” The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). 1995. “SHRM survey explores the best in diversity practices. Fortune 500 firms outpace the competition with greater commitment to diversity.” The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). ( http://www.shrm.org) (Accessed on 25^th June 2018)

Saxenaa, A., 2014. Workforce Diversity: A Key to Improve Productivity Ankita. Institute of Management Studies Annual Research Conference .

INFLUENCE OF TRADE UNION IN EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIP TODAY

A trade union is an organization consist of workers who have joined together to achieve their goals in different areas such as wages and working conditions as well as negotiates contracts and conditions with employers while keeping employee satisfaction highly and protecting the workers from unsafe or unfair working conditions. Also these organization are formed together by labor, workers or employees with the aim of achieving their demands for better conditions at a working atmosphere while the Fundamental purpose of a Trade unions is to protect the interests of their employees.­­­

Deakin & Morris (2012) defined Trade Unions as the groups of people who collate the interests of their employees against the organization that may seek opportunities to achieve the interests of the employees. CIPD (2017) described trade unions as independent collective bodies which are representing the interests of workers. Further they identified that the literature on trade unions as so extensive. Freeman & Medoff (1984) says that independent trade unions are the most effective vehicle for employee voice, as a source of guidance to challenge the unilateral power of management control.

Kaine (2014) says that Unions often mobilize members to take collective actions over individual grievances. He has taken transport industry of London Underground as an example where such mobilizing occurs, which extend individual grievance into more expansive collective action of the sector or whole workforce.

According to the CIPD view point, Actions taken by union stewards to influence work and employment relationships is very important in the current context. According their analysis, 43% of union stewards spend the majority of their time on collective issues, rather than individual issues, with 21% spending equal time on both. But this varies between and within countries. According to Marsden (2013), when comparing the UK and France, he confirmed that strong links between workplace representatives and unions are tend to aggregate individual voice in the UK (CIPD, 2017).

According to Armstrong.M (2009),Trade unions have two unique roles which can be identified as to secure through collective bargaining, improved terms and conditions for their members, as well as to provide protection, support and advice to their members as individual employees. Also as many researches shows an additional role which means  providing legal, financial and other services to their members, has come to the industry more recently.

As stated by Julia.H (2017), Trade Unions can be identified in two basic ways. 

1.      Craft unions- Which represent workers who have the same skill under same profession.

(Ex. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America and the National Football League Players’ Association

2.      Industrial unions – Which represent workers who are employed in the same industry with specific skills or profession.

(Ex. The Transport Workers Union and the United Steelworkers of America)

References

Armstrong. M (2009), 11^th ed , A hand Book of Human Resource Management Practice 
Kogan Page, UK.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2017 November. Power dynamics in work and employment relationships: the capacity for employee influence, United Kingdom: The Broadway London.

Deakin, S. F. & Gillian S. Morris, 2012. Labour Law. In: r. 6, ed. s.l.:Hart Publishing.

FREEMAN, R.B. and MEDOFF, J. (1984) What do unions do? New York: Basic Books.

Hofmann, J., 2017. Trade union research: for what purpose?, s.l. Österreich Z Soziol.

KAINE, S. (2014) Union voice -Handbook of research on employee voice. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp170–187.

HOW LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT BECOMING MORE RESPONSIVE IN TODAY’S WORLD

As many researches described, Learning and Development (L&D) can be identified as an organizational process and various terms such as “training and development”, “employee development” and “human resource development” had been established to describe the field Learning and Development.

Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) in 2015, had produced a set of professional standards for identifying the purpose of L&D as an organizational process as well as to describe its importance regarding to the business.

CIPD (2012) defined L&D as a critical organizational process of developing people by connecting with L&D processes, operations and relationships which leads to enhance the organizational effectiveness and sustainability for the business as well as to heightened the personal competence, better adaptability and employability towards the individuals.

Challenges for L&D in organizations from today’s Perspective

According to the survey conducted by CIPD in 2015 among the private and public sector organizations with more than 800 CEOs, Human Resource directors and the managers, were able to found that there are broad and far- reaching L&D challenges of reorganizations occurred today and the survey indicated that 40 % of these initiatives fail to attain their objectives in implementing a L&D culture in the organization (CIPD, 2015). 

Considering the modern organizations, many researches highlighted the challenges facing when implementing L&D practices through the organizations. According to Harrison.R (2009) , L&D has an ethical dimension which means a great concern to the organization. As he stated external forces such as media, globalization, stakeholders, legislation, talent war and environmental concerns are forcing the organizations to consider the diversity and impartiality along with the economic accountability as the bottom line for the L&D practices.

Various L&D interventions such as appraisal, career management and development, coaching, mentoring, e- learning, peer group learning were identified from many studies. According CIPD (2015), coaching is the most popular method of L&D. According to the 10^th annual survey of CIPD, 71 % of the employers in UK use coaching in their respective organizations while identifying coaching as an effective L&D tool. From that survey, it is identified that 79% of the organizations implemented coaching for their employees for the purpose of personal development and for handling the issue of poor performance.

According to the Association of Talent Development data collection it is identified that organizations invested 34.1 hours per person on L&D in 2016. According to their research, the most important thing is to considering and maximizing the return in training investment. From that research they highlighted their recommendations to support organizational L&D strategy as to develop the required technical skills for today & develop leadership capacity at all Levels of the organization. (Forbes, 2018).

References

Chartered Institute of Personnel and development, 2015. Learning and development Annual Survey Report. The Chartered Institute Of Personnel and Development, London.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and development, 2012. Learning and talent development- Annual Survey Report. The Chartered Institute Of Personnel and Development, London.

Forbes, 2018. Six Learning And Development Trends To Embrace For Maximum ROI. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/04/13/six-learning-and-development-trends-to-embrace-for-maximum-roi
[Accessed 20 June 2018].

Harrison.R (2009) Learning and Development, 5th edn, London, CIPD

TALENT MANAGEMENT IN 21ST CENTURY

Many researchers have provided various definitions under the term “Talent Management” from different perspectives.

Stephenson & Pandit (2008) as well as several researchers reveled that having the right number of people at the right place at the right time with the right skill sets and the levels of motivation are fundamental factors of talent management process. CIPD defines Talent Management as deployment, development, organized attraction and retention of the demanded as well as high potential employees within the organization, who will be considered as a valuable resource for the organizational development. Further CIPD says that by managing talent in strategically, organizations are being able to build a high performance within the workplace by adding values to their branding agenda, and contribute to diversity management. Because of these reasons they says that HR professionals widely consider on Talent Management process which is to be among their key significance at all the time (CIPD, 2009). Also Lewis and Heckman (2006), stated that the talent management involves with all Human Resource Management processes with an exact importance on the attraction, development and retention of the talents.

In the modern business environment Organizations used to have the best talent in order to succeed in the hyper-competitive and increasingly complex global economy resulting the understand of need to hire, develop, and retain the talented people within the organization awaring that they must manage talent as a critical resource to achieve the best as well as potential outcomes always (Wellin, et al., 2014).

Talent management starts with the business strategy within an organization in terms of the future demand for talented people. From this companies aims to develop and maintain a pool of talented people through the talent pipeline, which consists the processes of resourcing, career planning and talent development that maintain the flow of talent needed by the organization.

Creating talented people is one of the fundamental pillars of American Express. And therefore, the company has put in a lot of effort to identify the competencies for developing their staff members. But, before they get into that, they take a look at how good people are spotted in the first place (Kalra & Vijay Nair, 2004).

As discussed by Ready and Conger (2007), HSBC has created a system called talent pools that track and manage the careers of employees. The employees in these pools are initially selected for new assignments within the line of business as well as over time are given for the positions that cross boundaries in order to demonstrate that they have the potential to reach a senior management role. Then they can be placed in the group talent pool, which means that they have the potential to reach the senior executive level in three to five years and top management in the longer term. 

References

Chartered Institute of Personnel and development, 2009. Learning and development. The Chartered Institute Of Personnel and Development, London.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and development, 2009. Talent management: Strategy, policy, Practice. Chartered Institute of Personnel and development, London.

Kalra, V. & Vijay Nair (2004). Developing People Managers at American Express. [Online]
Available at: https://www.peoplematters.in/article
[Accessed 04th June 2018].

Lewis, R.E. and R.J. Heckman, 2006. Talent management: A critical review. Human Resource Management review, 16: 139-154.

Ready, D A and Conger, J A (2007) Make your company a talent factory, Harvard Business Review, June, pp 68–77.

Stephenson, E. and Pandit, A. (2008). How companies act on global trends: A McKinsey global survey (Boston: McKinsey).

Wellin, R. S., Audrey B. Smith & Scott Erke, 2014. Nine best practices for effective talent management, s.l.: Development Dimensions International.