Title: The Human Resources Management Consideration on the Turbulent and Unpredictable Environment Facing Many Organizations Today

Date: 16 October 2012

There is no doubt that part of an organizations knowledge resides in the people who form it. I could not agree more on that statement; because an organization is started from a person then it will broaden until form as an organization. Nowadays we can see that there are more than thousands of organizations exist from all around the world. Unfortunately, not all of them are successfully being among of those which are strong enough to face the turbulent and unpredictable environments that are come from internal and the external of the organization. The turbulent or unpredictable environment can be refer as the unexpected situation of the unwanted incidents that are being one of the most popular thread to the organization. Not only that, these threads can give an end to the organization if there is no precaution taken. The precaution should be taken from the beginning when the organization is about to start. This is important to make sure that the organization will be more prepared from all those turbulence and unpredictable environment in future.

But before that, what is means by the turbulent and unpredictable environment to the organization? The turbulent is come from Old French and Latin turbulentus and turba. These words mean the violently agitated or disturbed; tumultuous: turbulent rapids or having a chaotic or restless character or tendency. While the unpredictable means not able to be predicted or something that difficult or impossible to foretell or foresee. While, the environment is referred as the situation and the condition of something. So in generally, we can say that the turbulent and
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the unpredictable environment is crisis situation. Crisis is the situation of a complex system when the system functions poorly, an immediate decision is necessary, but the causes of the dysfunction are not known. Because the dysfunctions are unknown the organization needs to identify all of the causes so that they will survive.

As I said in the first paragraph, we can divide the turbulent and unpredictable environment into two factor, they are internal and external. From the internal, we can see that the employees help the organization a lot to perform the job and task to achieve its own specific goal. However, employees can be as one of the threads to the organization. As we know, employees are human unlike machine, we can repair the broken machine but how we are going to repair the broken human? Human behaviour is unpredictable; this will lead to the entire minor problems in the organization.

As the example of the internal environment, labour turnover can caused much of an alarm to the internal environment if the situation is not handled properly. High turnover in organizations can cause sufferers that cannot be measured such as low morale, decrease in motivation and low employee's commitment towards their job. In long terms, this problem can create communication barrier and gradually it will affect the productivity. Communication problem being one of the complicated problems to handle in an organization, as the example the problems that are related to the communication are misunderstanding, jealousy, prejudice, and so on. Not only that, some of the employees might have their personal problem that might they bring to the workplace. In fact, there are several employees have problems in handling the personal problem. They might have the depression, stress and low motivation. All of

these communication and personal problems may lead them to not perform well in the organization and at the same time will cause the problem to the organization performance.

Next, is the external factor instead of internal, external factor is also one of the factor that will lead to the turbulent and unpredictable situation. In fact, these external factor is hard to expect and totally impossible to resolve. This is because something that come from outside is not beyond our control. The example of external factor is the rival companies. The rival companies or the competitor to the organization may be one of the biggest problem need to be focus on. This is because the rivals will always trying to win the customer and make them away from the organization. This competition starts from the moment the organization is started and will never end until the organization is end. In order to compete, the organization must be prepared and needs to come with the new idea. Somehow, the organization itself must be different from its rivals and must look forward for the any new opportunities waiting for the organization. At the end we can see that external environment is very important for every organization to focus on.

However, who is the one that is responsible in to cope with this entire turbulent and unpredictable environment? Everyone should get involve in order to bring them out from these turbulent and unpredictable environments, such as the managers, executive and even the ordinary office boys. But then, the Human Resources Management is the one who are fully responsible to help the employees get involve to settle the problems. As we already knew, Human Resources Management is the management of an organization's workforce, or human

resources. It is responsible for the attraction, selection, training, assessment, and rewarding of employees, while also control organizational leadership and culture, and ensuring compliance with employment and labour laws. In circumstances where employees desire and are legally authorized to hold a collective bargaining agreement, Human Resources Management will typically also serve as the company's primary link with the employees' representatives. As the Human Resources Management plays most of the important roles in the organization, so it will be a part of it to make sure the organization and the employees know how to help the Human Resources Management to fight with the turbulent and the unpredictable environment toward the organization.

Due to irregular changes and unpredictability in a turbulent environment, the traditional way of planning does not seem to work any longer. This is where the Human Resources Management needs to play its roles and the implications in order to make sure the organization will be invincible from all of the turbulent and the unpredictable environment. New approaches to the external and internal conditions need to develop in order to cope with the environmental turbulence. Human Resources Management can implement the implication by making a strategic planning. This strategic planning includes developing a vision and mission, identifying an organizations external opportunities and threats, determining internal strengths and weaknesses, establishing long-term objectives, generating alternative strategies, and choosing particular strategies to pursue. This strategic planning will give lots of benefits to the organization such as; enhance communication among the employees, deeper and improved understanding between managers and

subordinates, and the greater commitment on their jobs.

However, they are still a lots of the organizations out there are afraid to make the strategic planning for their organization. This is because most of them lack of knowledge of the strategic planning, and there is no training on the strategic planning. Not only that, a few of them also think that, the strategic planning is just a waste of time because they think that there is no marketable product is produced. Time spent on planning is an investment and they are afraid of the failure, or might have some bad experience on it. However they should know that, not every that we do in the world will succeed for at the first trial. The other reason why is because most of the organization assumes to success, however it often fails to reward success but when failure occurs, then the organization may punish its employees.

There are a few steps of strategic planning, first is define the current business. At this phase the Human Resources Management needs to see what the current position of the organization is. Second is the audit. For example, at this stage the organization needs to do the SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis stands for the internal strength and weakness and the external opportunities and threads. After implement the SWOT analysis, the organization should the new direction, by setting the new mission or vision. Forth is the strategic goals. The organization should set the strategic goals in other to achieve the new direction of the organization. Next, the organization needs to formulate the strategies. This is important to helps the organization can achieve the goals in a different ways from its rivals. Sixth step is implementing the goals. At this moment, the organization can implement the entire target within a time frame that has been set. Last but not least, the organization needs to do the evaluation. This step is important to measure how far the strategic

planning can help the organization facing the turbulent and unpredictable environment.

There is also a Strategic Human Resources Management that can be form to consider the implication of the turbulent and unpredictable environment. This Strategic Human Resources Management can be definite as the use of employees to gain or keep a competitive advantage, resulting in greater organizational effectiveness. At this moment, the organization needs its own employees to play the main roles. In addition, the employees must have the core competencies. Core competencies are defined as the unique capabilities of employees in the organization which will create the value and that differentiate the organization from its rivals. This type of employees will be the important asset to the organization, and the rivals for sure wanted to stole from the organization. These core competencies may help the organization be more productive and more competitive.

In order to produce the core competencies, the Strategic Human Resources Management must allow the adaptation of human resource management practices and the knowledge and behaviour of the employees as regards the immediate needs of the organization, which are shown in its organizational strategy. On the other hand, a human resource management system must promote the development of a dynamic organizational capability that generates agile responses to the needs of current organizational strategy. In brief, the Strategic Human Resources

Management must facilitate strategic flexibility with the goal of reaching a dynamic fit and adequately answering the requests of the strategy and the environment. This will help the organization to be ahead of its rival and at the same time, all of the turbulent

and unpredictable environment can be handled in a very short time. Strategic management in general and human resource strategic management in particular are aware of the necessity to know how they can configure human resource management systems and practices, with the aim of developing a competitive advantage for the organization.

From my point of view, I think that the organization must have the strength and a very high commitment to apply all of the strategic planning so that the strategic planning will be successful. The turbulent and unpredictable environment today is a must for the organization to face it. But it is depend to the organization itself on how to take it as the advantages for it to grow and become more protective or it will be down and cannot get out from those turbulent and unpredictable environments. By learning how to make the strategic planning, the organization will be more independent and knows the importance of having the core competencies in the organization at the same time learned that employees is a very valuable asset to the organization to be more competent to the rival organizations.

By identifying the implication of Human Resources Management in facing the turbulent and unpredictable environment, I believe that as a student, I should learn about strategic planning during in study. This is because learning how to implement the strategic planning will help me to in future if I have my own company or even work in an organization, I would know how important I am as a part of the organization to help its achieve the specific goals and be more better than the competitors and rivals.

As the conclusion, we have proposed that organizations employ a strategic approach to crisis management by embodying crisis management processes and planning in the strategy process. In so doing, significant advantages can be obtained in both minimising the possibility of the turbulent and unpredictable environment when such events are linked to controllable operations of the organization and to assess proactively those eventualities that may adversely affect the strategic performance of the organization. So, all those turbulent and the unpredictable actually not only the thread to the organization but it helps the organization to learn how to be protective and ignore all of them at the same time they will be more aware of any incoming turbulence and unpredictable environment towards the organization in future.