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Global Competition Is Transforming The Human Resources

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Global competition is transforming the Human Resources (HR) profession: efficient administrators and organisational professions are now required to take on new functions as strategic partners within corporate management. As strategic partners, HR professionals are now becoming increasingly involved in corporate decision-making and bring their workforce expertise to develop corporate strategy in a way that will maximise the best human resources available (Fitzpatrick 2000; Guthridge et al. 2008; Lawler and Boudreau 2009). This is where the transformed role of the HR professional becomes vital. Businesses are in increasingly intense competition with each other to acquire and retain the best talent. In such a marketplace, the strategic …show more content…

2008). Although these are roles that require specific training and skills, the entire HR function can be taken over by dispersing the individual roles to existing staff from other departments, as well as unit managers. It is because the traditional HR roles can be outsourced from an HR department, HR professionals need to adapt (Schuler 1990; Lawler and Mohrman 2003; Guthridge et al. 2008).
The transformation is also about the bottom line. HR, as with every unit in a corporation, must play a role in driving efficiencies and improving the corporation 's balance sheet. So, in order for an HR department to avoid being made redundant, it must find a way to bring efficiencies to the corporations. Apart from cutting HR departments and removing those direct costs from the budget, the best way to bring efficiency to the HR function is to find innovative ways to bring cost savings to the company by re-directing the workforce. The transformative challenge for HR managers is to find those cost savings without just cutting salaries. The general answer comes from aligning HR’s function with the strategic goals of the business (Schuler 1990; Lawler and Mohrman 2003).
Strategic planning, making well-informed decisions about the means by which the goals of the business are met, is one of the core functions of upper management. The ways in which HR can be involved with management in strategic decision-making is

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