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Challenges Facing Human Resource Management in Small Businesses

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Human resource management is among the most popular jobs in the world. It has its distinctively

evident advantages. Despite all this, challenges are ranging from small issues to bigger ones that small

businesses face in the human resource management department. Such issues include legal and regulatory

compliance, finding the right employees, retaining talent, conflicts between managers and employees

among others as explained in the essay.

Legal and regulatory compliance entails not complying with the federal state and local

employment laws. This can be acknowledged to the constantly changing laws, which are becoming more

complex (Ritzer, 2020). A solution to this is that business owners should periodically check the

Employment Law Guide for any changes in the laws. Another issue is finding the right employee

especially taking into fact that employee recruitment requires time and money, something small

businesses do not have. A way to prevent this is establishing criteria to employ workers, setting up

requirements that we see will best fit the role. Retaining talent is also an issue that small businesses face.

This is because talented employees are often on-demand hence keeping them is even harder than finding

them (Cooper et al, 2011). This however can be managed by offering a competitive salary, which is then

accompanied by an attractive package that gives out benefits. Another problem faced is the conflict

between managers and employees (Bartam, 2009). According to Gregory Besner, recognizing that

managers influence a person’s experience at work is important, as unsupportiveness would lead to

conflicts. An approach to take to solve this issue is to have the managers undergo management training so

that they can develop leadership skills that would then mean minimized conflicts.

Human resource management is an important part of small businesses as it plays a major role in

ensuring the smooth running of the business. Establishing the problems facing it and coming up with

methods to solve the problems is therefore key.

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References

Bartram, T., Stanton, P., & Thomas, K. (2009). Good morning Vietnam: new challenges for

HRM. Management Research News.

Cooper, C. L., & Burke, R. J. (Eds.). (2011). Human resource management in small business: Achieving

peak performance. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Patel, P. C., & Cardon, M. S. (2010). Adopting HRM practices and their effectiveness in small firms

facing product‐market competition. Human Resource Management: Published in Cooperation

with the School of Business Administration, The University of Michigan and in alliance with the

Society of Human Resources Management, 49(2), 265-290.