HRM In Vietnamese Businesses

Every organization cannot be flourished without an efficient human resource even if it has modern facilities or abundant capital. As a result, human resource management plays an important role in the success of organizations. Human resource management (HRM) is a complicated and difficult field in terms of managing. It is related to physiology, society, ethics and many other aspects. Therefore, it can be considered as a mixture between the science and art – the art of managing people. Up until now, the definitions for the term human resource management are many, from simply to complex ones. A material from International Institute of development sciences Calcutta citing a view of Ivanchevic and Glucck states that human resource management is an action taken place in organizations that makes the most efficient use of employees in order to reach the goals of the whole organization in general and those of individual in specific. In addition, Scott, Clothier and Spriegel defined human resource management is one of the fields in management activities. Its responsibility is to focus on aspects of operations concerning with the two-side interaction between “management to employees” and among employees as well as with the development of both individual and organization. However, organizational capacity development and management institute (n.d) states that HRM includes all management decisions and activities that affect the relationship between the business and the staff of the enterprise. In addtion, Wendel French (n.d) affirms human resources management is the systematic planning and control of a network of fundamental organisational processes affecting and involving all organisationalmembers. These processes include human resource planning, job and work design, job analysis,staffing, training and development, performance appraisal and review, compensation and reward,employee protection and representation and organisation improvement”.

Overall, human resource management is a process by which organization can possess well qualified employees, exploit and take advantages of their forte in order for the organization’s prosperity and achievement of individual goals.

According to Nguyen (2011), human resource management has four typical roles. The first role is to optimal use of human resources of the organization. Secondly, it is HRM’s duty to construct new labor qualities and to ensure that organizations develop constantly and continuously. Thirdly, human resource management’s contributions are to promote the effort and mobilize the creativity of individuals and strengthen collective power in organization. Finally, human resource management helps business adapt to the environmental change. However, in the book name “Quan tri nhan su”, Nguyen (2002) clarifies that human resource manage has many functions. Firstly, it has to recruit appropriate employees and appoint them in suitable positions. Secondly, managers are those helping new staffs get used to new jobs and structure of organization. Thirdly, training and improving employees’ skills are next two responsibilities of the management. Besides, they should strengthen the working coordination and good relationships among staffs. Additionally, their tasks also are developing potential abilities of the labor forces and ensuring

Challenges towards human resource management in Vietnamese businesses

The management of human resources is always considered as an important part of any group and enterprise because it has a crucial impact on the survival and development of the organizations. The management has been planned specifically on various theories, however, when going into practice, the management of human resources has to face many challenges. In fact, there are many ways to classify challenges depending on each individual. However, in this paper, challenges are divided into 3 main groups relating to external, organizational and individual elements.

In terms of external factor, globalization, scientific and technical progress and environment are three classical factors affecting human resource management in Vietnam. Nowadays, many companies or enterprises want to become flourished by seeking opportunities in global market ( Snell et. All, 1998). It means that multinational companies and corporations between countries or join-stock companies come into exist. This is also true for many cases in Vietnam, taking PVN, FPT and Vinamilk as typical examples of multinational corporations of Vietnam and KFC, Lotteria, Coca-cola and Pepsi as examples of multinational enterprises having headquarters in Vietnam. As a result of this global trend, management of human resources gets into troubles because of the geographical distance and the culture is various across nations’ boundaries as well as continents. Vietnamese managers may not know about the staffs in other countries as much as those in Vietnam. Therefore, it takes them long time to understand the customs and working styles of employees in counterpart countries. In contrast, because of the different in culture between Western and Eastern countries, foreigner managers also find it difficult to apply managing plan from Western countries in Vietnam. In summary, managing human resources in transnational organizations provides potential opportunities for managers, it also remarks a huge leap in the complexity (Snell et. all, 1998). Besides, service sectors in Vietnam are developing significantly, so new jobs will be created. Human resource management system, as a result, has to perform more effectively than before in order to discover employees who are active in a day-to-day changing market. Additionally, HRM’s task is also to retrain people whose skills are inappropriate to the service sector.

Scientific and technological progress is the second factor affecting the management of people in Vietnam. Along with this trend, new science and modern technology have created challenges for organizations. For the survival and development, organizations have to catch up with and invest in modern facilities. Therefore, the managers should be refined in choosing employees who are capable of adapting to the changes in science and technology as well as retraining their work force because jobs change and some unnecessary skilled should be dismissed and replaced by new appropriate ones (Ha, n.d). The change in science means that the number of labors should be reduced, but the capacity of the company has to remain or even if get higher. This puts manager into a hard situation in which he or she has to choose between cutting down the size of labor force and rotating employees. Last but not least, the environment is the last external factor mentioned in this paper. As our society flourishes, the environmental issues are attracting more and more attention. The management of human resource becomes more complicated due to the complexity of the environment. Vietnam is a developing countries, therefore, the industry is concentrated the most. Accordingly, industrial enterprise has negative impacts on the environment namely the pollution. So, enterprises will have to upgrade and invest in environment-friendly facilities which always require special skills to operate. The human resource management finds it difficult to rotate labors or have an appropriate work force equipped with new skills and knowledge in a short time because the process of recruiting new employees or retraining available staffs will take a lot of time. The impact of environment element in some ways is similar to that of scientific and technological progress because both factors challenge the management of human resource with the ability to rotate or retrain the employees in order to adapt to the change in new modern equipment.

In today’s society, like many affairs that other countries have to face, Vietnamese organizations and enterprises not only compete in products but also in personnel, confirmed Ha (n.d). Hence, managers have to intervene in time in order to retain their most valuable employees, or their work force may be attracted by their rivals. To avoid this fact from happening, the management of human resource should make reasonable personnel policies, provide encouragement and rewards and create a comfortable and sticking working environment for all of the organization’s members. Thereby, it can be easily realized that competition between organizations is also one of the factors challenging the human resource management in Vietnam.

Regarding the challenge relating to individual, productivity, brain drain are two typical elements examined. Firstly, it is widely acknowledged that Vietnam is a country that has abundant work force; however, their skills are not high enough. To prove for this idea, author Nhat Minh (2010) quotes an evaluation from Professor Michael Porter (*) that productivities in the Vietnam work force are still quite low. Owing to this fact, the management responsibility is to recruit outstanding people in the labor force that used to be considered as a low yield labor market.

Conclusion

Human Resources is a precious resource in any organizations and businesses. Although businesses have abundant capital or modern equipment, they cannot develop prosperously without having skilled human resources. Human resource is the priority in organizations, so in order to survive and flourish, there is no better way than managing that force effectively. Nowadays, the management of human resource still has to face many difficulties because it is still quite a new filed

Nguyen T. H. G., 2011,

http://dlib.ptit.edu.vn/bitstream/123456789/550/1/Tom%20tat%20Luan%20van%20-%20Nguyen%20Thi%20Thanh%20Giang%2025-6.pdf/