Chapter 1

7. Explain how good human resource practices can help a firm address strategic challenges such as globalization, competition, and sustainability efforts.

Globalization has become pervasive in the marketplace. It influences the number and kinds of jobs that are available and requires that organizations balance a complicated set of issues related to managing people working under different business conditions in different geographies, cultures, and legal environments. HR strategies and functions must be adjusted to account for these differences. The fast pace of globalization and a number of corporate scandals over the years have led to a new focus on corporate social responsibility (good citizenship) and sustainability (a company's ability to produce a good or service without damaging the environment or depleting a resource). Companies are finding out that having a good reputation for pursuing these efforts can enhance their revenues and improve the caliber of talent they are able to attract. One of HR's leadership roles is to spearhead the development and implementation of corporate citizenship throughout their organizations, especially the fair treatment of workers.

11. Provide examples of the roles and competencies of today's HR managers and their relationship with other managers.

HR managers play a number of important roles when it comes to meeting the challenges their firms face; they are called for strategic planning, advice and ethics counsel, various service activities, policy formulation and implementation, and employee advocacy. To perform these roles effectively, HR managers must have a deep understanding of their firm's operational, financial, and personnel capabilities and work with line managers and executive managers above and below them. HR managers who do and are creative and innovative can help shape a firm's strategies so that the company can respond successfully to changes in the marketplace. Ultimately, managing people is rarely the exclusive responsibility of the HR function; rather, every man-ager's job involves managing people. Consequently, successful companies combine the expertise of HR specialists with the experience of line managers and executives to develop and use the talents of employees to their greatest potential.

5. What defines an organizational culture?

Organizational culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, assumptions, and expectations that permeate an organization.

9. Explain the dual goals HR managers have in terms of increasing productivity and controlling costs.

Organizations can increase their productivity either by reducing their inputs (the cost approach) or by increasing the amount that employees produce by adding more human and/or physical capital to the process. Companies such as Southwest Airlines, Nucor, and the manufacturing and technology firm Danaher achieve low costs in their industries not because they scrimp on employees but because they are the most productive. To maximize productivity and contain costs, organizations must manage the size of their workforce. Some of the techniques used to do so are offshoring, outsourcing, downsizing, furloughing, using part-time employees, and leasing them from professional employment agencies. HR's role is to not only implement these programs but also consider the pros and cons of the programs and how they might affect the company's ability to compete, especially if they lead to the loss of talented staff members.

6. What is the difference between outsourcing, nearshoring, and offshoring?

Outsourcing simply means hiring someone outside the company to perform business processes that were previously done within the firm. Offshoring, also referred to as "global sourcing," involves shifting work to locations abroad. Other companies are nearshoring, which is the practice of bringing jobs closer to domestic countries, and homeshoring, which is the practice of outsourcing work to domestic workers who work out of their homes.

8. Describe how technology can improve how people perform and how they are managed.

Productivity can be defined as "the output gained from a fixed amount of inputs." Technology has tended to reduce the number of jobs that require little skill and to increase the number of jobs that require considerable skill, a shift we refer to as moving from touch labor to knowledge work. This transition is displacing some employees and requiring that others be retrained. In addition, information technology has influenced HRM through human resources information systems (HRIS) that streamline HR processes, make information more readily available to managers and employees, and enable HR departments to focus on the firm's strategies. The Internet and social media are also affecting how employees are hired, work, and are managed.

3. When you worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, what was it called?

Remote work (also known as work from home [WFH] or telecommuting) is a type of flexible working arrangement that allows an employee to work from remote location outside of corporate offices.

10. Discuss how firms can leverage employee differences to their strategic advantage and how educational and cultural changes in the workforce are affecting how human resource managers engage employees.

The workforce is becoming increasingly diverse, and organizations are having to do more to address employee concerns and to maximize the benefit of different kinds of employees. HR managers must keep abreast of the educational abilities of the talent available to their organization. Employee rights, privacy concerns, attitudes toward work, and efforts to balance work and family are becoming more important to workers as the cultural dynam-ics in the labor force shift. Companies are finding that accommodating employees' individual needs as a result of these shifts is a powerful way to attract and retain top-caliber people and improve employee engagement.

1. When a firm is able to quickly make decisions about its competitive environment, it is called what?

This is the essence of human resources management (HRM). HRM involves a wide variety of activities, including analyzing a company's competitive environment and designing jobs and teams so that a firm's strategy can be successfully implemented to beat the competition. This, in turn, requires identifying, recruiting, and selecting the right people for those jobs and teams; training, motivating, and appraising these people; developing competitive compensation policies to retain them; grooming them to lead the organization in the future—and the list goes on.

4. In the past few decades, businesses in New York States have been bringing overseas call centers back to the US. What is this practice called?

This practice is called outsourcing. Outsourcing: Contracting outside the organization to have work done that formerly was performed by internal employees. Offshoring: The business practice of sending jobs to other countries.