Human Resource Management Essay: Attraction & Retention in Hospitals

Question

Task: There are two choices (will be announced) for Essay 3 – for example, the ‘X’ sector, or the ‘Y’ sector.
You will write an essay on the key challenges in attracting and retaining a workforce in your selected sector.

Your essay will draw on at least five themes from Week 1 to Week 11 of this unit, being
those most relevant to your selected industry sector. Your essay will draw on the academic literature (including the articles from ‘Reviewing the Literature’ you developed for Assessment 2), and develop an argument applying that literature to your selected sector.

You must cite at least ten (10) relevant peer reviewed journal articles, and 3 chapters from the Nankervis et al. (2019) textbook. You cancite other academic references such as books, conference papers, and book chapters but these will NOT be counted as part of the 10 journal articles.

Answer

Introduction
Human Resource Management is an important aspect for any organization. The concept of HRM explored in this Human Resource Management Essay is based on managing employees or organization staffs. The responsibility of a Human Resource Manager is basically divided into three different categories, such as employee compensation, staffing and designing work. The basic objective of HRM is to maximize the productivity of the employees (Rüzgar&Ülgen, 2017). The modern HRM is supported by several overriding principles. As per the experts, employees are the main drivers of an organization, without them a company is never be able to operate its business (Holland, 2019). Therefore, as discussed in the Human Resource Management Essay it is important to manage these employees properly so they can contribute their best in order to maximize the organization’s productivity (Schuler& Jackson, 2014). The core idea of this Human Resource Management Essay is about explaining main challenges of attracting and retaining employees within the Hospital Sector. Attracting and retaining employees are two of the most critical activities within the context of HRM.

Human Resource Management Essay Body
Theme 1 of Human Resource Management Essay: HR Policy and Planning Issues
The disadvantages and issues in the healthcare sector (hospitals) associated with the HR reforms are unavoidable. In most of the cases, the healthcare institutions’ are focused on addressing most of these deficiencies and assuring effectiveness and efficiency of resource. They basically focus on structuring the health system receptive through the reinforcement of the financial system. Along with that the hospitals also promotes the participation of domestic and public-private partnership (Bhatand Maheshwari, 2005). Apart from this it has been found in this Human Resource Management Essay that the policies regarding employee recruitment in hospitals are very poor. Most of the hospitals in developing countries recruit medium and lower skilled ground level staffs, who are responsible for making direct interaction with the patients. In almost every hospitals the benefits and employee compensation policies are very poor, due to which the job seekers are not seem very interested in ground level jobs in hospitals. On the other hand, the salary structure or the policies related to the salary of the health workers in developing countries like India is not that attractive (Singhania, 2016). In Australia there is no such transparency in the wage structure of the healthcare workers. This particular element mentioned herein Human Resource Management Essay is causing significant hindrance for the job seekers who are seeking for ground level healthcare jobs in the hospitals. Salary/wage has significant impact in terms of attracting and retaining employees in any kind of organization. Due to this lower wages and non-transparent salary structure, the job seekers do not get a detailed insight regarding the value of their contribution towards the hospital. This particular element hugely makes the job seekers demotivated towards applying for the job.

Another significant risk illustrated in this Human Resource Management Essay for the healthcare professionals is ineffective workplace safety policies. There are so many hospitals which do not have sufficient workplace safety policies for the ground level hospital workers (Katsuro, Gadzirayi, Taruwona&Mupararano, 2010). The hospital workers thoroughly stay exposed to several kinds of risks, for example risks related to several infectious diseases, physical injuries etc. Mostlyin the hospitals the ground level workers do have sufficient protection from their respective administration. This particular issue is very critical because without proper security, the ground level hospital workers cannot work productively and due to this the productivity of the hospitals suffers (Haslinda, Saharudin, Roslan, & Mohamed, 2016). Absence of effective protection strategies from workplace hazards is a serious challenge to all kinds of hospitals and healthcare institutions in terms of attracting and retaining healthcare workers.

Theme 2 of Human Resource Management Essay:Human Resource Planning Issues
Not only in the Australian hospital sector, but poor human resource planning is a huge problem in the global hospital sector as well. The poor HR planning has significant negative impact on the hospital sector. It can have multiple impacts on the industry. One of the major impacts of ineffective HR planning discussed within this Human Resource Management Essay is demotivated hospital workers (Khumalo, 2019). When a hospital worker is not motivated, he/she is never able to contribute his/her maximum effort for the job. Motivation is a huge factor in order to attract and retain employees in any type of organization, where the hospital industry is also not an exception. Having a poor HR system leads to a poor team building in the hospitals. In the hospital sector, team work plays a significant role, and due to the poor human resource planning, a team cannot work properly to provide quality services to the patients (Chandrakumar, et al., 2015).

Employee recruitment mismatch is another critical issue that appears due to poor human resources planning. Employee-job mismatch significantly refers to the hospitals that recruit random, sometimes unskilled people in order to fulfill their ground level job vacancies. This mismatch can create a major gap between the ability of the employees and the job requirements (Kulkarni, Lengnick-Hall, & Martinez, 2015). This huge gap identified in the case of Human Resource Management Essay may demoralize the staffs drastically within the hospital when they cannot contribute their efforts effectively for the allocated responsibilities. Due to such drawbacks, workers do not want to stay/continue for long in their respective organizations/hospitals, and the retention rate decreases. When the job requirements and the skills of an employee do not match with each other it can cause noticeable negative impact on the net productivity of the hospital.

The third main drawback of poor human resource planning outlined in the Human Resource Management Essay is dissatisfied customers. The poor human resource planning can establish alarming issues through unhappy customers. There are so many hospitals operating within this industry, so if a hospital is not doing well, there are significant chances the users will prefer some other hospitals over that one. Customer satisfaction is the ultimate result a hospital should pursue. When a hospital is not be able to satisfy its customers, they usually give negative review to the company, and when the job seekers see these negative reviews they also feel disinterested about applying for the job in that hospital. This again createsbad impact in attracting job seekers for the hospitals. Poor HR planning will result to so many negative consequences, involving labor scarcities, dissatisfied consumers. Poor engagement of talent will cause a negative image of the hospital, because the organization will need to investhuge amount of money in re-hiring, training and so on.

Theme 3: failed Performance Review Programs
In most of the hospitals, apoorly written job description is another significant issue that can cause constraints in attracting and retaining hospital workers which leads to failed performance review programs. The organizations which have strong human resource management systems usually use job analysis and in-depth job description in order to guide their whole recruitment and selection process (Ahmad, et al., 2019). So the hospitals which do not have a proper description are not able to guide their human resource management process, which in turn results in no demand of the available jobs. Poor job description involves ineffectively written duties and responsibilities. When a job duty is written in blunt way, the job seekers also do not eagerly apply for the job. Without a clear job description the job applicants do not have the clear understanding of whether the requirements and attributes of the jobs are properly aligned with the skills and knowledge of the job seekers. Therefore, as presented in this Human Resource Management Essay, in order to attract maximum number of job seekers hospitals should write all the job duties and responsibilities clearly in their job description.

In this Human Resource Management Essay, a job description plays an important role in terms developing the employees’ evaluation tools. The job description aims to deliver feedback or a certain idea to the employees regarding how good or bad they are performing their respective duties and responsibilities (Ahmad, et al., 2019). Without a good job description, the managers of the hospitals are unable to judge their employees performance along with the job requirements, which results in the inability to deliver feedbacks to the employees. Herein Human Resource Management Essay, due to this the managers cannot identify where the hospital staffs are lacking expertise and based on that they are also not able to take effective actions. So, a poor job description makes it very difficult for a hospital staff to understand what exactly the managers are expecting and for a manager to deliver an effective and accurate appraisal to the workers.

Employee and career development is another unseendisadvantagethat occurs due to the poor job description. Job description provides significant understanding on the areas where the hospital workers need to upgrade their skills and capabilities. The career development of an employee basically is the responsibility of an organization, so here hospitals. Employee development refers to making an employee more skilled, knowledgeable and upgraded as per the industry requirements. Without an effective job description, it is very difficult for the hospitals to know in which way the training and development strategies should be implemented. Similarly, career development is an ongoingprocessof encouraginghospital workers to achieve new skills and improve their own careers for better future opportunities. Again, without good and effective job descriptions, not only the ground level hospital workers but other employees also, don't have clear goals to achieve in training and development (Ashraf, 2017).

Theme 4 of Human Resource Management Essay: Talent Attraction issues
In order to attract suitable employees, organizational branding plays an important role any type of organizations, including hospitals. In this branding process, most of the organizations fail and unable to attract most suitable employees, which creates issues linked with including and retaining employees. Within the context of branding provided in this section of Human Resource Management Essay, brand identity is an essential element. Brand identity basically illustrates how an organization wants to be identified in front of the job seekers as well as consumers (Wilden, Gudergan, & Lings, 2010). Now, there are differences between establishing brand identity for the customers and for the job seekers, but both of them are inter-related. It is very important for a hospital or any organization, to make and establish its identity in such a way so that it can attract maximum and most suitable job seekers to fulfill their vacant positions.

It is evident in the Human Resource Management Essay that brand image is another important element in the context of organizational branding. The brand image is basically the reflection of how an organization showcases/frames itself. To be specific the brand image specifies whether the organization has a positive reputation in the market or not. Now, promoting the brand image effectively before the job seekers is a critical job and this is where most of the hospitals fail (Agrawal&Swaroop, 2009). A poor promotion of brand image does not really attract suitable and highly skilled employees which results in recruitment of unskilled workers in the hospitals, and as a result both the productivity and employee retention rate fall.

So, the findings obtained in this section of Human Resource Management Essay signify that the employer brand plays a significant role in order to attract and retain the potential of most suitable workers. In order to include potential workers, hospitals should properly reflect their brand image as well as brand identity before the job seekers. Transparent brand image allows the job seekers to have a clear idea about if he/she joins the organization/office, how the people around will react based on the brand image. On the other hand, an effective promotion of the brand identity will allow the job seekers to have a clear idea about what exactly the hospital does, what are the operations, how they treat with patients and employees etc.

Theme 5 of Human Resource Management Essay: Absenteeism
In this theme of Human Resource Management Essay, absenteeism is a huge issue in hospitals, and it usually results due to poor training and development strategies. Training and development plays an important role in HRM. The core purpose of training and development is making the employees capable enough and productive (Ahmad, 2013). Now different organizations have different training and development strategies. Training and development has significant impact (both positive and negative) on employee attraction and retention. In the healthcare sector, most of the hospitals have training and development issues, due to which their productivity is hampered. In most of the hospitals, the authorities do not arrange proper structure for training the newly hired, ground level healthcare workers. This has enormous negative impact on their productivity.

When a hospital does not have regular training and development sessions for the workers, they do not get vast opportunities to improve their skills as per the requirement of the surrounding industry (Ahmad, 2013). Most of the times, this reason identified in the Human Resource Management Essay causes dissuades the workers, and they lose interest towards providing their complete effort for their respective duties. Regular training and development sessions allow the workers to have better career opportunities in future, because as a worker becomes more skilled and knowledgeable in his/her respective field the importance/value of that worker significantly increases to other organizations, and they try to hire him/her with higher salary offers.

In certain areas where the capabilities fall short of what ahospital may require, training and development sessionsare required to improve the quality of talent available and also to attract and retain new talents as well. This can be performedat timestoincreasea hospital’s appeal as an employer. In many countries, the occasions to learn new skills and have access to progressive education are a higher appealing factor for job seekers. The potential of specialized development is particularly attractive to inactive job seekers who are currently employed by a corporation that might not suggest the same training and development occasions (Ahmad, 2013). So, in order to attract most suitable workers towards the available jobs in hospitals, they should arrange frequent training and development programs, and along with that they should also promote these activities when they provide job advertisements in different job sites like LinkedIn. Providing thorough training to the ground level workers will help them to understand their work well, and due to which they will be able to provide premium quality services to the customers, which will automatically improve the reputation of the brand/hospital.

Summary
By summarizing all the information mentioned in the above section of Human Resource Management Essay, it can be stated that employee retention and attraction is a major part of Human Resource Management and in this subject alone, most of the organizations including hospitals face the highest number of challenges. Employees are basically the key drivers of an organization, and when it comes to hospitals, the requirement of staffs is huge at the ground level, because here the workers need to deal with the patients in person. Considering the overall scenario, the Human Resource Management Essay has extracted five different themes related to the challenges, hospitals face in attracting and retaining employees.

The first theme depicted within this Human Resource Management Essay is about the poor HR policies, most hospitals pursue and due to which, how they suffer from lack of skilled recruits. Most of the hospitals in the international platform do not have proper recruitment policies, workplace security policies and some other important HR policies which lead to lowmotivationof the job seekers. The second theme is about the poor Human Resource planning. Due to poor Human Resource planning, the managers are not able to judge their workers’ performance well and as a result they are unable to provide the accurate employee benefits and compensation. The third theme is about poor job description which leads to lower understanding of the jobs or responsibilities that the workers need to perform. The fourth theme is about the importance of organizational branding and the major issues, hospitals face in this particular area. The last one is related to the insufficient training and development programs for the ground level hospital workers.

Conclusion
From the discussion on Human Resource Management Essay it can be stated that employee attraction and retention is a major aspect under Human Resource Management. Not only for the hospitals, but for all kinds of organizations it is important to have proper strategies for attracting and retaining talents otherwise these organizations will not be able to survive for long.

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