Introduction
Human Resources (HR) management is a crucial aspect of leading a business as success depends on how people cooperate and apply their skills to achieve goals. For broad, global, or digital projects, HR generalists for different units effectively maintain employees’ performance. However, such a strategy is expensive, and the decision to move towards a centralized method for executing HR might be a solution to optimize a project’s expenses. Dessler defines strategic HR management as “formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors the company needs to achieve its strategic aims” (76). The changes in managing HR are challenging because they affect all employees and require the implementation of new communication, retention, and development approaches. This paper aims to identify the project’s management power types, discuss their outcomes, challenges, solutions, and outline the communication execution.
Project Management Power Types
Human Resources representatives are involved in a project’s decision-making process related to the employees’ interconnection, performance, and talents’ execution. Consequently, the types of management power for the HR-based projects are related to influencing people’s motivation and self-perception as part of a team (Gill et al. 305). For the HR services’ centralization program, the primary category of influence is legitimacy. This type of management power distributes authority among several leaders and avoids problems with misunderstandings that can influence employees during the project implementation.
The legitimate power type implementation is beneficial for the project management because it provides authority in decision-making for the responsible persons. Gill et al. claim that HR managers work more effectively when “their perspective gains legitimacy and relevance within the broader environment” (309). Specifically, switching to the centralized HR from the localized might cause misleading behavior cases that would affect the company’s performance. Exercising legitimacy as the project management power would prevent confusion in identifying the responsibilities and initially give enough authority to persons in charge.
Another influence type relevant to HR project management is rewarding to impact motivation. This kind of power is applicable for the Human Resources’ managers and the employees under their administration. Rewards can be utilized as an encouragement to offer optimization solutions for managing costs of HR centralization. Besides, selecting leaders for the new segment from the local units is rewarding and reveals the company’s opportunity (Gill et al. 309). The project management team can also utilize rewards for decreasing the inconvenience for the employees on whom the centralization would impact rather severely.
The rewarding power viewed from the project management perspective is beneficial for updating the delivering HR services process because it addresses individuals’ needs in recognition and motivation. For instance, receiving different rewards can help emphasize what is expected from the new HR unit’s leaders and generate a well-structured hierarchy by which the workforce could evaluate their capabilities. Moreover, rewarding is essential for the management process to encourage employees’ skills improvement and achieve a company or project’s goals (Dessler 124). For example, HR managers can implement the KPI-based structure for all units and explore how the most talented workers exponentially increase overall effectiveness.
Project Management Outcomes and Issues
Project management is a complicated process of exercising human talents, various strategies, and resolving inevitable issues. Firstly, misleading assumptions on the strategic stage might seriously disrupt the plans’ realization. For example, financial calculation errors might result in budgeting issues, or inadequate risks’ evaluation might cause unexpected obstacles for implementing a project (Keegan et al. 127). In establishing a centralized model for delivering HR services, the mistake might occur in the wrong choice for the new unit’s leader. The issues caused by the strategic errors must be addressed before they occur (Keegan et al. 125). Project managers can prevent them by discussing each possible risk or inviting independent experts to give the side opinion regarding the strategy.
Secondly, the outcome of project management is its influence on the overall company’s performance. Indeed, even a well-executed plan might damage the business, while the emergency strategy, which had never been risk-evaluated, might lead to growth. To address that outcome, the team must apply their experience and knowledge of the company’s strengths and weaknesses (Dessler 203). The HR segment-based decisions must also be relevant to the industry’s trends and the most suitable management approaches.
Moreover, project management requires continuous communication between different units, resulting in the issues like a misunderstanding. The team can address the problem on the task distribution stage by establishing an open dialogue with each responsible person (Gill et al. 313). Lastly, the outcome of managing projects is the demand in changing the habitual algorithms such as work schedules or the performance metrics. To reach an optimal decision, a project portfolio with planning can be created and presented to all units that might be affected (Keegan et al. 131). The leaders need to develop schedules and implementation models to verify on the strategic stage.
Challenges of Managing Virtual and Global Project Teams
The modern business world develops rapidly due to technological progress, allowing companies to expand globally and make them operate online. Although such updates are beneficial, they emerge the project management challenges, especially from the teams’ leading perspective. For instance, communication issues might arise in the global project teams due to the tasks’ misinterpretation or failure to address the cultural implications of certain employees. The members with different backgrounds might perceive the necessity of following some rules, criticism, or a project’s demands in an unexpected manner (Dessler 459). Another challenge that threatens the virtual project management performance is the lack of engagement and risk for the participants to lose motivation faster (Dessler 477). Remote connections eliminate the corporate culture, therefore an employee might lose the essence of collaborative work and support, which is crucial for their performance. Moreover, both challenges mentioned above are relevant to HR-based project management. In the case of implementing the centralized HR sector, the team, if it works remotely or globally, might face challenges in talent evaluation while selecting the leaders or make the members experience a lack of feedback and a decrease in motivation.
Strategies to Deal with The Challenges
The challenges faced by the projects’ managers are being continuously studied, and some strategies to deal with them were successfully implemented in global companies. The primary strategy is to create a glossary that addresses all critical terms used in the project and adapts to foreign languages if the team is international (Keegan et al. 126). The risk of misunderstanding and underperformance will significantly decrease if every team member knows the exact meaning of the phrases.
Furthermore, the approach of identifying the company and project’s mission and values is another way to avoid challenges. The understanding of the business’s impact on the world is helpful for the employees of different backgrounds in reacting to misleading situations. Lastly, the rewarding type of power can become a strategy to avoid losing motivation for the virtual project team management. Dessler states that “when it comes to employee engagement, both material and nonmaterial rewards seem essential” (380). The options to support the team members’ motivation might also offer group gatherings or other entertainment to have together.
Plan for The Project’s Communication Management
Moving to a centralized model of delivering HR services requires the team to communicate frequently and effectively during the strategy creation and implementation stages. The primary purpose of meetings, video calls, and emails would be to delegate responsibilities, set up performance assessment benchmarks, and address the possible issues (Dessler 3). The communicational methods would be mixed as the live conversations are the same important as the written ones. The most comfortable strategy in leading the process is to set obligatory Monday meetings where the emerging challenges would be addressed, and the week of working on the project would be planned. Team leaders also need to communicate with business units’ representatives once a week while implementing the project to avoid issues. The meetings’ timing might be limited by an hour, yet other conversations might depend on the discussed task.
Conclusion
The type of power to implement to a project management strategy depends on the goals a team wants to achieve by implementing it. To replace the local units’ HR managers with a more centralized model of delivering HR services, legitimacy and reward can be utilized to improve the results. The project management outcomes such as misleading assumptions on the strategic stage, influence on the overall company’s performance, communicational issues, and intervention into the habitual algorithms must be considered in any project’s appliance. Besides, global and virtual teams might face challenges caused by their cultural and experience diversity, communicational obstacles, and lack of the corporate culture. These problems can be solved by implementing and actively supporting the company’s values, identifying and interpreting the key terms of a project, and create a rewarding program for the team. The communication planning for project management must include frequent live, online, and written interactions to make leaders always be up to date, address emerging issues, and maintain the team’s high performance.
References
Dessler, Gary. Human Resource Management. Pearson, 2020.
Gill, Carol, et al. “Using Theory on Authentic Leadership to Build a Strong Human Resource Management System.” Human Resource Management Review, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 304-318. n.d. Web.
Keegan, Anne, Claudia Ringhofer, and Martina Huemann. “Human Resource Management and Project-Based Organizing: Fertile Ground, Missed Opportunities and Prospects for Closer Connections.” International Journal of Project Management, vol. 36, no. 1, 2018, pp. 121-133. Web.