(Get Answer) – Employee benefits in strategic human resource management Employee benefits in strategic human resource managementQuestion 1Most organizations are focusing on improving their functionality by taking a strategic approach in managing organizational affairs (Torrington, Hall and Taylor, 2007). One of the means of enhancing the performance of organizations through strategic position is the focus on ensuring that employee gets their benefits. Proper implementation of employee benefits by organizational managers has been found to be one of the means through which the strategic objectives of organizations are achieved. There exist many benefits that can be awarded to organizational employees thence adding value to strategic human resource management initiatives. Benefits differ depending on the criteria or the manner in which the benefit schemes are designed and implemented by organizations. Employee benefits can be categorized into two main groups. These are direct, structured and non-structured benefits. Structured benefits are those benefits that are clearly defined within constitutions and labor modalities of organizations. They often include salaries and other benefit schemes for organizations employees like the heath scheme, saving scheme and risk benefits among others. Non-structured benefits have become more common in strategic management practices. They include many benefit systems that are tailor-made by organizations in order to motivate employees thence enhancing firm performance. Non-structured benefits are often termed as rewards aimed at pacing up performance standards of employees in organizations.Benefit systems behind non-structured benefits are coined by organizational managers in collaboration with organizational employees. Third parties like governments and labor unions are often left out of such employee benefit systems. They are more informal yet very critical in dictating attitudes and focus of employees on discharging their duties. They include gifts, recognition and appreciation of organizational employees, promotion and offering changes for training and advancement of organizational employees among many other benefits. Benefits can hardly be de-linked from strategic goals and objectives of organizations. Strategic human resource management seeks to link organizational activities and objectives to organizational outcomes. The aim for strategic human resource management is to incorporate human resource management practices to the performance of organizations. Benefits and rewards are components of performance management which in turn falls under the strategic management practices (Dulebohn, Molloy, Pichler and Murray, 2009). Objectives of human resource management in organizations center of improving employee input. Employee input is critical in organizational performance. All kinds of benefits are considered to improve the morale of employees thence upping their performance. With benefit schemes in place, organizations easily achieve their performance goals and objectives (Kumar, 2011).Question 2Research in the field of human resource management has been focusing on how to improve the delivery of employees. Benefits have continued to come out as the best tools through which the performance of organizational employees (Armstrong and Armstrong, 2010). A survey of most of the fortune companies in the world attunes to this. The performance of top ranked companies in the world is linked to benefit schemed that are entailed in benefits systems of these organizations (Smith, 2000b). Many other organizations are crafting and restructuring their benefits systems as a way of achieving of reaching their performance goals and objectives. Restructuring of benefit systems is not an easy exercise for organizations. It is a challenging activity in the present management where organizations continue to face pressure to minimize costs (Philip, 2004).It is undisputed that benefits increase the ability of organizations to attain their strategic goals. The costs of compensation are, however, higher which end up impeding organizations from implementing benefit programs. Organizations that implement many benefit programs end up spending lots of financial resources. This can bar the attainment of many other performance objectives of organizations. Benefits have to be discharged relative to other programs so as to achieve organizational objectives. Linking employee benefits to organizational performance and organizational outcomes can only be done by taking a critical look at individual benefit schemes (Reilly, New York University and New York University Annual Conference on Labor, 2010).
