The benefits and effects of the Human Resources management cannot be underestimated. Recently, Human Resources management has become the central issue of every organization in general, and each employer in particular. The organization’s human resources are the key elements of a strategic management, as HR play an important role in all strategic decisions. HR managers inquire for strategic position of their human resource department with the aim to solve the problem of motivation and management, as well as to increase the performance of company.
The significance of human potential increases proportionately to the current economic trends. These trends appear in the business environment, because the human capital represents important qualitative factors of benefits of the changes. Consequently, Human Resources Management must aim at attaining the competitiveness of the organization in the branch of human resource by means of providing constant training and educational programs for individual development of employees. It has been proven that one of the supporting principals, which can contribute to the fulfillment of the employee policy in the usage of technology in human resource. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be defined as the techniques associated with internet, media communication and utilization of PCs, which allow organization to improve their core competencies, organizational structures, relevant markets on a global scale and internal processes.
Technology is spreading throughout every segment of the economy and has both positive and negative implications for almost every company. The competitive advantage of technology became a widely accepted concept in the late 20th century. Computer technology had been associated with the creation of new products and services. The ability to improve management decisions has also been demonstrated.
For example, computer applications designed to inventory all the parts used for specific production settings enabled managers to minimize purchasing, inventory, and design costs, consequently, reducing time needed to meet production and distribution targets. Such computer application systems could propel an organization into a competitive market environment by redefining the industry standard of low cost with high quality products. In human resource management, technology can be used to develop competitive products and services, but nowadays, technology is used to improve HRM decisions with proper information. For the future organization that I would work for, I would urge the management to invest in computer applications to manage payroll systems, employee records, compensation, and benefits administration. For example, I would advocate for installation of employee pension management system in my organization that will automatically maintain and run pension records eliminating several workloads associated with manual calculations, which will help to minimize pension administration costs by increasing the accuracy of pension payout estimates.
The company can use computer applications; this will enable it to self insure its employees and better control health benefit costs through claims monitoring applications. The firm’s investment in computer systems to store and process human resource data will improve its accuracy and timeliness. Innovative human resource technology has led managers to be more inquisitive about the organization employee head count, skills inventory, turnover, performance ratings that affect their business objectives. The firm’s finance and HR managers may mutually develop a computer app that will show how sale units and decisions about hiring, job analysis, recruiting, and training will affect sales revenue and the estimated profits.
Through the applications of this computer systems application, the managers can effectively hire and train sales forces to optimize the organization mission and objectives. The examples mentioned above show that technology an improve HR operational, administrative, and operational decisions. Types of computer applications and the decisions they support Information technology encompasses software, hardware, and peripherals, which provide HR management with a gigantic capacity to record, communicate, store and manipulate information across all organization branches, with access to many users. This essay is focused on the importance of technology that will improve HR ability to access and present information. Such computer applications exist for all types of computers, mainframes and personal computers network.
The technological advancements that can be observed in human resource include: online recruiting, human resource information systems (HRIS), employee portals, and e-learning.Human Resource Information systems enhance human management efficiency by merging the employee records into the organization’s structured database. The system may include multiple employee data, which may be categorized into the need, absentee events, employee’s personal details, past performance reviews, payroll services, and employee’s benefits. Therefore, the firm’s HR can use HRIS as the primary information contact point in various areas. In the field of recruitment, the system has a wide range of positive impacts.
There is a range of HRIS solutions available for attendance, performance management, payroll management, and employee’s benefits that have positive feedback on the employee’s motivation. The application of employee’s self-service and computerized performance measurement has assisted HR managers to devote more time in such strategic issues as workforce management, and compensation and staffing planning. HR employee’s portal has been a positive feature in cutting down the workload of HR managers and providing better services to the organization’s employees. The interesting part in HR employee’s portal is that it gives each employee a single sign in identity to access all the services of the organizations and, in addition, it connects the employees throughout the organizations branches. For example, the organization can use the portal to give access to his employees depending on their job categories and units, access to payroll, reward statements, and travel planning, stock option, compensating planning, and expenses reimbursement. The HR can customize the portal to meet the varied employee’s demands, for example, language, location, roles, and so forth.
Recent innovations in the social networking have revolved the role of HR in staffing. The current application of LinkedIn is the most recent information tool that plays an important role in social media which is available for HR managers. The HR can display job opportunities on this websites or networks for a potential hiring. The application has various advantages, for instance, it is very economical way of advertising for job openings, reaching out for wider broad of candidates, speeding up recruitment process, and accessing the candidates’ resumes and curricula vitae. Apart from recruiting, social networking have also other added advantage to the organization, such as keeping in contact with the alumni employees, retirees, and ex-employees and those employees serving long term leaves. Effective communication is one advantage that the HR managers can have.
For instance, they can open the organization tweeter account and submit updates that the employees who may be connected to that account can have updates on the current trends that is happening, this is efficient in that the HR managers would have to send each employee emails on every change that happens in the organization. The employees can post their feedback, because the site supports such methodology and the HR managers can use the feedback for better decision making. The company’s brands can be advertised and maintained thoroughh the social sites, as they give reputation to the product. Thus, the firm’s products will be able to reach a wide market and enhance customers’ relation.
With the introduction of social networking, the field of training and development has greatly been changed by the introduction of social networking. The employee training and the development programmes have been implementing with the help of social networking such as Udutu Teach, which is a Facebook and Yammer’s application. With the use of these platforms, customer doubts can also be resolved through updates on Facebook, Twitter, and also video broadcasting on YouTube. In the area of Training & Development, M-learning (Mobile learning), and E-learning provide exceptional opportunities to the employees to increase their awareness levels. For example, in E-learning, the employees have the right of entry to the training material online.
The most important advantage of this kind of training is that the employee can learn at their convenient time. Now, mobile learning is a form of internet learning that is accessible using mobile devices. It majorly deals with the feature of mobility; it provides the employees with such opportunities to gain knowledge of from such a device anytime and anywhere that is accessibility. It also has the advantage of providing knowledge prospects to all the employees equally. Therefore, the information and learning materials provided needs to be precise and significant to keep the interest of the employees to keep on learning.
It is also a great step for employers and employees, because they can do their jobs and learn at the same time. Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) has seen a vast demand in recent years in positioning of the organizations looking forward to decrease the amount of their expenditure on technology. Software is a service, which helps the employers provide the best delivery service with lower costs and fewer resources utilization. They can provide clarification for Shared Services, including a Human Resource Knowledge base, on rewards and boarding. Recent study has shown that companies have shown greater reliance in SaaS across the human resource Management applications, largely because SaaS eliminates the issues related to up grading and updating of the software’s.
Therefore, I would advocate for the organization to emulate such technology trends. With the help of Technology in HR, a work, which was earlier accomplished by few people, can be done by an individual, which will save the costs. Although technology has its advantages, it is important to consider that there are numerous disadvantages concerning the use of the technology. If the company highly depends on technology, most likely it will substitute human capital, which may result in loss of potential employees. In addition, human resource has a center of attention on people and interaction.
The organization need to maintain the complex balance between human aspect and technology. It is also significant to use certain metrics to measure the return on investments of HR technology, because technology gets outdated very rapidly and if not calculated and estimated, it may result in extra costs on updating the technology. Globalization brings the necessity to think how technology can contribute to fulfillment of organizational strategy in the framework of Human Resources management in order to drive the organization towards competitiveness and to reach excellence in the market. Information technology sustains reaching the human resource goals reasonably. The defined plan of implementation of human resource information system can significantly support human resource strategy in the organization to attain distinct major performance indicators. The human resource technology should chiefly contain what has to be accomplished it means how technological tools can support the performance indicators and what kind of HR processes and technology tools should sustain.
