Professional Documents
Culture Documents
HRM
ELENA CHITOIU & KETING ZHOU
CONTENTS
The objectives of the chapter
The labour market
Tighter labour markets
Managing a diverse team
Competitive pressures
Flexibility
Cost Control
Evaluating the HR contribution
Regulation
Skills
Welfare to work
Carbon emissions
Waste
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ACTIVITY
Why do you think that people, on average,
choose to have fewer children than they did
a generation ago? Can anything be done to
reverse the trend? To what extent should
governments see it as their role to
encourage more births?
66 in 2024,
67 in 2034
and 68 in 2044.
COMPETITIVE PRESSURES
The most likely future scenario is one in which
most organisations in countries will continue to
face greater levels of competition than is
currently the case.
The trend towards greater levels of competition
has three principal causes:
Flexibility
Cost control
Evaluating the HR contribution
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FLEXIBILITY
Competition leads to increased volatility and unpredictability in
an organizations trading environment (the greater the
competition the more fleet of foot the organisation must be).
Changes have to be made more quickly and more regularly;
Organisation should be in a position to deploy people
opportunistically so that there are sufficient people with the right
qualifications in a position to:
provide a new service,
develop a new product
or meet increased demand for new lines.
Flexibility is more likely to move forward in the HRM agenda in
the decades ahead.
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COST CONTROL
The need to reduce expenditure and to keep a lid
on costs is another cause for increased competitive
intensity; which means:
Less money is available for pay rises or enhanced
benefit packages.
An organisations ability to buy its way out of a
skills shortage is severely limited.
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COST CONTROL
Greater focus being placed on relational rewards,
creating jobs which are as rewarding as possible in
the widest sense of the word, but which are less costly.
REGULATION
The very substantial increase in the extent of
employment legislation.
It is reasonable to characterise this increase as
comprising a regulatory revolution:
great transformation in the amount of regulation
the employment relationship has become subject
and its day-to-day impact on management
practice
However, there is no question that the existing body
of employment law will be further adjusted.
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SKILLS
The government in the UK has set itself a demanding set of targets for the
coming decades years as far as raising skills levels is concerned, and
include the following:
95% of adults to be functionally literate and numerate (currently 85% and
79% respectively);
Over 90% of adults to have gained a level 2 qualification (currently 69%);
2 million more people with level 3 qualification;
500,000 people to be in apprenticeships;
40% of adults to have degree-level qualifications (now 29%);
Much of the policy is focused on schools and colleges. E.g. it includes the
aim to make full-time education until the age of 18 universal.
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WELFARE TO WORK
Another recent government White Paper sets objectives
for reducing the proportion of people of working age who
live off state benefits of one kind or another and
encouraging them into employment.
Primarily concerned with welfare reform and with ways of
reducing the number of economically inactive people:
There are over 3 million people in the UK of working
age who have been on benefit for over a year;
There are 3 million households, with 1.7 million
children, in which no one is working;
In total, a quarter of adults of working age are not
currently working.
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WELFARE TO WORK
More specific aims include:
use a combination of incentives and disincentives aimed
at increasing the participation rate to 70%.
a reduction of million in the number of people claiming
incapacity benefit.
a reduction of a 300,000 in the number of single parents
who are working.
an increase of a million in the number of over-fifties who
are working.
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CARBON EMISSIONS
The need to reduce carbon emissions in order to
stem global warming is now firmly established as a
government priority.
Using economic models, Sir Nicholas Stern argues
that the GDP will decline by 5% a year as a result of
damage done to the economy by climate change,
but that temperature rises can be limited and many
of the costs of dealing with climate-induced
disruption avoided if just 1% of current annual world
GDP each year was to be invested in reducing
greenhouse gas emissions.
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CARBON EMISSIONS
Stern suggests there are three areas where it has to be taken
action:
Carbon pricing tax, fines for those who do not comply with
stricter regulations;
Public funding of research aimed at the development and
deployment of low carbon technologies;
Public investment in measures which educate the public
about ways of greening their lifestyles and which remove
barriers that prevent people from living in a more energyefficient way.
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WASTE
We are a very wasteful society, mans treatment
of the planet being likened by some
commentators to a bird which fouls its own nest.
In the industrialised countries we throw away into
our dustbins around 500 kg of waste per person
per year.
The industrial processes are hugely wasteful as
well. For every car that is manufactured, 15
tonnes of solid waste are produced.
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WASTE
There are three ways in which waste is disposed of:
Landfill;
Incineration;
Recycling small minority of the total.
The government has set targets to achieve in switching to
incineration and recycling:
Encouraging households to sort items for recycling before
throwing rubbish away
Reducing the amount of waste produced in the first place
Efficiency savings in the methods/processes used to
collect and dispose of waste.
These measures try to change individuals and organisations
behaviour.
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