Lexi Childs
The activity of human resource management is very important in the management of organizational activities. This is because all the activities in an organization are managed and controlled by human activities. With the advancement of technology and passage of time, the role of human resources management has become more strategic. The article mainly focuses on the functions of human resource management in the 21st Century. It aims at finding out the advantages of human resource management, functions of human resource managers and factors influencing human resource management. In the articles, there are emerging trends, challenges facing the human resource management and other related relevant practices.
Human resource management entails activities such as recruiting, managing and instructing people on how best to work in a given organization. It also deals with issues such as wellness among organization, safety, employees motivations through incentives, training, and organizational development.
Through human resource management, the following activities can be done efficiently and effectively. Recruiting employees, this is an activity done by an HM manager who does the work of employing new workers in an organization. Recruiting should be done after considering the capability of the employees and those that have qualified for a given work needs to be recruited through the objective interview.
Human resource management also helps in compensating the employees in case a contract is being terminated or in case employees are being laid off.  Compensation can be done by giving money or through a golden handshake.
Safety in the workplace. Human resource manager also ensures there is safety in the workplace by adhering strictly to the occupational safety and health practices. These regulations when implemented can minimize the risks and hazards in the workplace and ensure safety.
The motivation of employees. Employees can be motivated to work harder through activities such as the provision of incentives which would encourage them to worker harder. This would in turn help to active the organization’s goals and objectives.
Human resource department also ensures that there are wellness and benefits among the employees. This is achieved through honesty and accountability. All these can be implemented through giving employees commissions whenever necessary, promotion and increment in salaries.
In the 21st century, there are new ways of human resource management such as outsourcing services. This has made the companies of nowadays to be more adaptive to changes such as technological advancement and changes in the market patterns such as advertisement mechanisms etc.
Most of the companies today are customers centered in the sense they aim fully to satisfy their customers’ needs. Therefore, there are new departments in the human resource management called customer care department whose work is to attend to adapt to the grievances channeled by the customers. This improves the customers’ loyalty to a company.
Human resource department of the 21st century helps to keep workers motivated which would improve the success of that company.
The following are some of the challenges of human resource management in the 21st century.
Selection of the best employees who best suit and qualify for the job. Most of the people in the 21st century are aware and informed on the current trends of most companies and thus it becomes very difficult for a human resource manager to choose the best-talented people who are suitable for the job.
It is very difficult to come up with a decision. This is because; the human resource department is made up of people from different diverse cultural and ethnic origin. These people come with different views with are difficult to form one solid idea for an organization.
Adoption of new rules and policies to govern the organization activities. It is very difficult to come up with new rules and regulations which would govern the employees and to make them suitable and unique as compared to other organizations.  Implementation of these rules would not sound relevant to other employees. For example, rules governing the occupational health and safety rules.
Upholding business ethic and values. This needs to happen considering the changing workplace ethic and competition among the competitors. Workplace ethic would also make the management of employees easy and possible since ethic would accept their diversity and opinions.