by Changed Employee Expectation:
Traditional allurements such as job security, attractive remuneration housing does not attract, retain and motivate today’s workforce. Employees demand empowerment and expect equality of status with the management. Empowerment results in redefining jobs, both from the shop floor as well as the boardrooms. Expectations of equality break up the traditional relationship between employer and employee top to bottom.
Improving Quality and Productivity
Quality is the extent to which the customers or users believe the product or service surpasses their needs and expectations.
For example, a customer who purchases an automobile has a certain expectation, one of which is that the automobile engine will start when it is turned on.
If the engine fails to start, the customer’s expectations will not have been met and the customer will perceive the quality of the car as poor. The key dimensions of quality as follows.
- Performance: Primary rating characteristics of a product such as signal coverage, audio quality, display quality, etc.
- Features: Secondary characteristics, added features, such as calculators, and alarm clock features in handphone
- Conformance: meeting specifications or industry standards, the workmanship of the degree to which a product’s design or operating characteristics match pre-established standards
- Reliability: The probability of a product’s falling within a specified period
- Durability: It is a measure of a product’s life having both economic and technical dimension
- Services: Resolution of problem and complaints, ease of repair
- Response: Human to human interfaces, such as the courtesy of the dealer « Aesthetics: Sensory characteristics such exterior finish
- Reputations: Past performance and other intangibles, such as being ranked first.
Globalization:
Growing internationalization of business has its impact on people management. Managements are required to cope with the problems of unfamiliar laws, languages, practices, competitors, attitudes and management styles, work ethics and more. To face this challenge the management must be flexible and pro-active. Being flexible and pro-active the management can make significant contribution to the company’s growth.
- Internationalization makes managers to increase their competencies.
- Globalization increases the number of managers and professions.
Managing Workforce Diversity
This refers to employing different categories of employees who are heterogeneous in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, relation, community, physically disadvantaged, elderly people, etc.
The primary reason to employ the heterogeneous category of employees is to tap the talents and potentialities, harnessing the innovativeness, obtaining synergetic effect among the divorce workforce.
In general, employees wanted to retain their individual and cultural identity, values and lifestyles even though they are working in the same organization with common rules and regulations.
The major challenge for organizations is to become more accommodating to diverse groups of people by addressing their different lifestyles, family needs, and work styles.
Organizations are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. Organization specialist must learn to live with diverse behaviors. Managers must learn to respect diversity. Diversity if managed positively enhances creativity and innovation in organization as well as ensures better decision–making by providing different perspectives on problems. When not managed, diversity leads to increased turnover, heightened inter-personal conflict and more strained communication.
Stimulating Innovation and Change
Today’s successful organizations must foster innovation and be proficient in the art of change; otherwise, they will become candidates for extinction in due course of time and vanished from their field of business.
Victory will go to those organizations that maintain flexibility, continually improve their quality, and beat the competition to the market place with a constant stream of innovative products and services.
For example, Compaq succeeded by creating more powerful personal computers for the same or less money than EBNM or Apple, and by putting their products to market quicker than the bigger competitors.
The emergence of E-Organisation & E-Commerce
It refers to the business operations involving the electronic mode of transactions. It encompasses presenting products on websites and filling the order.
The vast majority of articles and media attention given to using the Internet in business are directed at online shopping.
In this process, the marketing and selling of goods and services are being carried out over the Internet.
In e-commerce, the following activities are being taken place quite often the tremendous numbers of people who are shopping on the Internet, business houses are setting up websites where they can sell goods, conducting the following transactions such as getting paid and fulfilling orders.
It is a dramatic change in the way a company relates to its customers. At present e-commerce is exploding. Globally, e-commerce spending was increasing at a tremendous rate.
Improving Ethical Behavior
The complexity in business operations is forcing the workforce to face ethical dilemmas, where they are required to define right and wrong conduct to complete their assigned activities.
