Contemporary HR and Management Practices - Essay Example

Therefore, it is the firm's workforce that provides the competitive advantage for companies, using its knowledge, commitment, skills and training. This is where the Human Resource Management's inevitable role comes to play. It devises policies that not only aim to improve organizational performance fostering innovation and flexibility, but also to improve employee well being. The human resource management uses mechanisms to build healthy two-way communication; provides healthy compensation, fair treatment and employee securities and career development and growth opportunities for all employees.

Such HR activities deal with areas like employee morale, motivation, and performance; and workforce recruitment, retention, and turnover, which in turn increases various aspects of employee well being. As mentioned in the beginning, the changing scenario of working conditions and increasing competition due to globalization and rising awareness in customers, firms have to take decisions that not always end up in the best interest of the employees. Despite the capable policies of human resources and management in favor of the employees, contemporary HR and management practices do not succeed in meeting the promises of assuring well-being of the employees.

Instead, the de-layering, restructuring and downsizing efforts of the HR and management of the firms are leading to work intensification. Work intensification is the extent to which employees are being forced to work faster and harder than they have been before. Where these decisions and policies cut financial and operational costs substantially, these are having inevitable impact on work intensification. In order to save their jobs and work up to the expectations of the management, employees have to perform more than they ever did before.

The workforce has to get multi skilled in order to perform multiple tasks and give improved productivity. Not just to save jobs and survive in the organization, the workforce has to bear with the work intensification because of the performance related pay systems. The HR and management practices the productivity related compensation, which is originally intended to improve motivation and satisfaction amongst employees. Although such practices alongside add to the intensity of work and tasks and adversely affect the employee well being.

A report specially made by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Job Insecurity and Work Intensification, says that work uncertainty amongst professional workers has become more severe in the 1990s. More than 60 percent of employees assert that the speed of work and the effort they have to put into their jobs has amplified over the past five years. Fright of joblessness is not the only facet of work uncertainty. Although many workers are not unjustifiably anxious about losing their jobs, they are particularly concerned about the loss of esteemed job features, such as their rank and prospect for promotion.

The report concludes that the core reason of work uncertainty and work intensification happens to be the decreased recruitment levels pursued by