Human Resource Management (hrm)

Human Resource Management (HRM) is a challenging field to work with especially in this 21st century market. According to Beardwell et.al., (2007), it is getting more difficult in HR planning as the internal and external labour markets and the forces are likely to affect the supply of HR. The rate of labour changed in the market-place has likely been affected by the economic condition. Both labour shortage and labour surplus will create a big impact to the organization if it is not well managed.

As a HR manager in my current workplace, option to be implemented to overcome labour shortage and labour surplus will be discussed as follows:

Labour shortage is a condition when there are insufficient employees to fill in the position available for employment at any price. To handle labour shortage issue, there are a few options to be considered, for example outsourcing, hiring temporary employee, extended working hour, retrained transfers, turnover reductions and technology innovation.

The implementation of outsourcing can be applied in certain HR functions which are more to a routine work, such as payroll and expenses claiming. By having outsourcing, it will help the organization to save a lot of cost but on the other hand, it will be more rigid as the outsourcing services normally will be per-transaction basis and any additional request or customization might needs longer time frame to get the job done and sometimes it might imposed additional charges.

By hiring temporary employee is another option to counter labour shortage for a short period of time. For example in my organization, we will hire the temporary staff which require minimum of skills to perform a not so complicated task such as store keeper especially during the peak business period or during the yearly stock count cycle. The benefit of hiring temporary employee is we can terminate them whenever the task is completed or the existing permanent staff