Business Issues and the Contexts of Human Resources
Key Forces Which Shape HR Agenda
The innovations in business strategy, especially in the race to find new sources of growth, have created new pressures to refocus human resources work, roles, and priorities. Human resource practices play a significant role in creating a close alignment with strategies, insights, and solutions to support business performance, business ethics, and accountability. Thus, today’s business environment demands a focused human resources agenda, which has to develop a practical approach to guiding the allocation of people and investment in order to achieve the organisation’s strategic goals. Hence, an HR agenda, which contributes to the achievement of the business goals, is affected by numerous forces, which include models of the HR function, HR strategies, insights and solutions to support business performance, business ethics, and accountability.
HR function model has a direct influence on the policy, culture, compensation, benefits, employee relations, and motivation. Saudi Marco is the largest oil-producing company in the world. It currently employs 60,000 people and has a complex HR function model, which requires significant employee engagement. A 1,500 person HR team is organised around several departments responsible for executing HR functions. Due to the complexity of the HR model the company had to develop effective strategic workforce planning and development practices to maintain a steady flow of talent in the company (Nalbantian, Haig R., and Philip M. Tenenbaum, 14). Encompassing the company’s full-time workforce, the planning model forecasts talent needs, anticipates gaps and identifies effective strategies to close those gaps.
Hence, the company’s strategy is based on talent development, which defines the practices and policies implemented by the HR function. Saudi Aramco tries to ensure that it has a strong pipeline of internal leaders by following a four-step plan: identification, assessment, development, and selection.
Insights aimed to support business performance present another key factor that affects HR agenda. Saudi’s workforce planning process is recognized as one of the most sophisticated, far-reaching, and reliable models (Nalbantian, Haig R., and Philip M. Tenenbaum, 14). Saudi Aramco deploys sophisticated workforce metrics and analytics to optimize the return on HR investments and quickly adjust the investments to changing business needs. These insights have helped Saudi Aramco to develop such HR practices, which help to manage the company’s workforce in a time of surging demand and address such key gaps and concerns as prospective retirement bulge and talent pipeline.
Ethical and cultural issues present an integral dimension of the human resource management. Approximately 86% of company’s workers are Saudi nationals, which also affects the HR agenda significantly. The company’s HR agenda includes practices that aim to address the stereotypes regarding an ethnic and gender division of labour. Over the past few years, recruitment of females has increased by 20% (Changeboard.com). By training women to enter and compete in workforce, and removing barriers to fairness and productivity, the company builds stronger leadership teams and provides different approaches to problem-solving. Thus, the HR practices and approaches are strongly affected by numerous factors. Saudi Marco has considered …
