Human resource management is a buzzword today, and it is gaining momentum because it’s necessary for the success of an organization as a business and employer. In the past, companies focused more on revenue, competition, and economic instability.
However, human resource management is more important today to keep skilled workers and talent, which is necessary for competitive advantage. Human resource management problems and solutions revolve around people because they are the most critical asset for a company and have the power to influence its growth and sustainability.
HRM involves several responsibilities, from workforce recruitment to continual training and development and legal compliance. There are numerous challenges of HRM in India that expand over three domains.
These can be environmental such as the economy and legal compliances, organizational life restructuring, competition, and management change, and individuals that can include work ethics, growth, and empowerment. This article highlights some major human resource management problems and solutions you must know as a manager.
Table of Contents
Eight human resource management problems and solutions
1. Compliance with laws and regulations
The countries are amending Labour laws to be more employee-friendly. This is becoming a challenge for organizations, especially small and medium enterprises, as they need more resources to keep pace with such regulatory changes.
This is because smaller companies don’t usually have focused departments for HR that can update the company employment policies by changing laws. Failure to comply with laws and regulations can make your organization liable for a lawsuit.
The compliance laws and regulations are not only related to hiring practices but are also associated with staff benefits, payments, overtime, and other aspects of employment. Understanding these acts and legislation can be difficult for managers because the correct interpretation is necessary for adherence.
An easy solution to this HRM problem is to hire statutory compliance agencies. It saves time, and you receive expert opinions and consultation on all the policies and guidelines that are a must for your industry. This convenience comes at a cost, but it’s a small price to pay compared to the risks of non-compliance and the threat to your brand image.
2. Health and safety of staff
Similar to laws and regulations, it is human resources’ responsibility to ensure the workers’ health and safety within the company. The challenge is creating and enforcing health and safety processes within the organization.
Your organization must have employee training programs to help them understand the health and safety measures necessary for the role. In an industry such as mining, manufacturing, or construction, tracking workplace injuries or safety violations becomes a challenge due to the extensive work area.
The solution is to create a designated health and safety committee within your organization. If you are a small or medium-scale enterprise, you can assign a single person to that role. You must provide tools and training to the workers so that they understand local health and safety laws.
You must empower them to change, upgrade or even shut down operations in case of an accident or injury. For any company, the health and safety of the workers should be a top priority.
3. Building leadership within the team
When you’re too focused on creating resources and training tools for the staff, it is easy to overlook the need for grooming leaders within the workforce. A common misconception that hinders the growth and success of organizations is that leaders do not need to learn more; even if they do, it can be achieved through self-learning.
Leaders are essential in influencing the organizational structure and deciding staff satisfaction. You will face frequent employer and employee conflicts if you lack leadership grooming. Such disagreements result in an unhealthy work environment, adversely affecting the morale and productivity of your workers.
The solution lies in creating a learning and development strategy targeting employees at all levels within the organizational chart. It is essential that leaders are trained, mentored, and guided by mentors within the management. You can also create human resource management challenges and solution PDFs and share them with prospective leaders.
While future leaders can learn technical aspects independently, soft skills like having difficult conversations, conducting meetings, and providing developmental feedback require experience, mentoring, and exposure. You mustn’t lose leaders to organizational growth and provide them with an environment to grow in their roles.
4. Attracting and retaining top talents
Competition is one of the essential factors that must be kept into consideration when planning HR strategies. It is even more pressing for small and medium companies because hiring and retaining skilled workers is difficult when they compete with big names and brands.
Recruitment is challenging, but retention is only possible if you are providing staff with the correct benefits, opportunities, exposure, and a positive work environment. Attracting and retaining top talent is one of the most significant challenges of HRM in India.
The solution is to create a strong employer brand to attract top talent into your organization. Employees can do background checks on the company and understand their employer’s value easily by connecting with other workers from the same company through social media.
Having a strong positive brand presence on these platforms works in your favor. An easy way to show prospective staff you care is by being active in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). These activities are a privilege for your organization to give back to society and act as the emotional platform for employee and employer bonding.
Furthermore, the onboarding process at the company should be smooth, and new workers should have a leisurely experience working in the new work environment.
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5. Providing compensation and benefits to staff
The competition in the corporate world makes it difficult for organizations to keep up with the compensation and benefits offered. Large companies can provide significant compensation and benefits to the workers, but it is a challenge for HRM at small and medium enterprises to keep up with the offering.
This makes recruitment and retention extremely difficult. The increased cost of hiring also includes taxes, human capital investments, and training charges. Such an item of expenditure can be a threat to your company’s progress and success. If you cannot offer high compensation like your competition, you can still be a strong contender by offering attractive benefits.
You can offer variable and performance-based components to the staff. This will encourage them to perform better. Also, you can start substantial reward and recognition programs to attract performance. Also, organizations can choose to increase healthcare costs to offer family benefits to the workers.
Smaller organizations can offer flexible benefits such as extended vacation time, flexible timings, well-being programs, and transportation benefits.
6. Adding diversity in the workplace
Having diversity in the workforce is a boon for any organization. Bringing people from diverse cultures and ethnicities enhances your organization’s problem-solving capability and innovation. However, for human resource management, this also brings challenges related to diversity in age, gender, nationality, culture, etc.
It is a great challenge to cater to the unique requirements of the workers dependent on their age, gender, or ethnicity. As a manager, maintaining employee engagement while fostering effective communication when workers from different backgrounds work together is difficult because employee disagreements are much more frequent.
To resolve conflicts arising due to diversity, human resource management must make arrangements to sensitize all staff to respect and show compassion towards the culture of other people they are working with. You can make culture orientation part of the onboarding process within your company.
Your organization’s values and work culture should prioritize respecting each other’s culture and beliefs. Teambuilding activities help align employees with integrating different cultures and backgrounds. You can set a standard of behavior within the workplace so workers are aware of what is expected from their conduct and behavior. It’s essential to have a company culture that is welcoming and comfortable.
7. Creating a value-oriented company culture
The company culture is critical to dealing with human resource management problems and solutions in the long run. The modern workforce expects to work for a company that has healthy work culture. They emphasized proper work/life balance over salary and benefits.
If you need to create a value-oriented company culture, you risk losing a skilled workforce to the competition. The most effective way to create a value-oriented work environment is to empower your workers through recognition, incentives, and power. You benefit your employer brand by allowing workers to grow by encouraging them to adhere to the company’s values.
This is one of India’s most significant challenges in human resource management. Still, you can easily deal with it by encouraging staff to work on what interests them apart from the responsibilities mentioned in their job description.
8. Monitoring productivity and performance of staff
Productivity and performance within the company are shared responsibilities between human resource management and managers. As a manager, you are ultimately responsible for your team’s performance. However, if your team is not performing or its productivity is low, it is the HRM’s responsibility to make tough decisions regarding your team.
In such a scenario, several human resource management problems arise. They have to decide how to monitor the performance and productivity levels of the workers to ensure that business operation is at an optimum level. Identifying the root cause of low performance requires cross-functionally verifying the reasons with managers and workers.
It can be challenging to report human resource issues to the executive team for strategic decisions without proper monitoring of the productivity and performance of the workers. To monitor productivity and performance, key indicators need to be monitored so that you have two ensure that you don’t come too strong, making workers feel uncomfortable due to continuous monitoring.
The potential solutions include using HR platforms to integrate performance management, goal management, and performance tracking. You must study the teams achieving their goals to understand what they’re doing right and then incorporate those findings for other groups.
Also, you must keep the lines of communication open for all the managers to report any issues or challenges they face before things get worse. Truein is an employee time and attendance tracking software. HRM can use this cloud-based, hardware-less solution to track the attendance and availability of the workers within the organization.
It offers several features, such as leave and attendance management, overtime monitoring, shift scheduling, and easy payroll integration. There are over 70+ customizable policies that companies can directly modify and use. It helps boost productivity as it allows for accurate management over time and distributes workload while minimizing burnout.
Schedule a free demo today and see how Truein can help you to automate your daily human resource management tasks.
Conclusion
The human resource management problems and solutions we have listed are the most commonly faced challenges. These solutions will help you manage India’s most frequently encountered HRM challenges.
