The Impact of Occupational Health and Safety Issues on Human Resource Management in Contemporary Organizations

1.0 Introduction

With the development and globalization of world economy, the competition between organizations is becoming fiercer and more and more industrial pollution and production hazards are constantly threatening the health and safety of organization and its employees. Therefore, it is very important to fully recognize occupational health and safety management for organization increasing its productivity and enhancing its competitiveness. The essence of organization’s competition is the competition of "talent" and human is the core and most important one in various production factors. Retaining "talent" is the most key question in Human resource management, which is responsible for the balance of goals and needs between organizations and employees and take charge of nearly all decisions that are related to people. In this essay it will be detailed the discussion on the impact of some current occupational health and safety issues, such as job stress, on human resource management.

2. The functions and goal of Human Resource Management

Human resources management refers to a series of human resources policies and relevant management activities implemented in the guidance of economics and human-centered thought to meet with organization’s needs for current and future development and ensure the achievement of organization’s goals and the maximization of employees’ development through the effective utilization of relevant human resources inside and outside of the organization by recruitment, selection, training, payment and other forms of management (Langbert, 2002). It is the whole process of predicting organization’s needs of human resources and making a human resources demand planning, recruiting and selecting personnel and implementing effective organization, performance assessment, remuneration payment, effective incentives and combining the needs between organizations and individuals to carry out effective development for realizing the optimal organizational performance. Its functions include the formulation of organizational human resource strategy, the recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, wage and salary administration, retaining employees, employee relationship management, employee safety and health management and so on. The goal of human resource management is to maximize the organizational productivity by optimizing its employees’ work effectiveness and at the same time to improve employees’ work life. Therefore, human resource management is a tool used to make full use of human resources, to promote employee development and employee satisfaction (Patrickson & Hartmann, 2001).

3. The aims and benefits of Occupational Health and Safety Management

As known to all, there are always such-and-such potential hazards in people's work activities or work environment, which may cause property damage, be harmful to environment, affect human’s health and even cause injury or accident. People call the possibility of one or some danger causing incidents and its possible consequence as risk. The object of contemporary occupational health and safety management is the occupational safety and health risks. These hazards may be chemical, physical, biological, related to human work efficiency and others, the factors of which include personal factor, equipment factor, environmental factor and organizational and management factor.

Occupational health and safety is a series of measures and the corresponding activities adloyee’s income, prevent employee from injury and create less stress from employee, thus employee may obtain more physical and psychological satisfaction. Occupational health and safety management includes accident investigation and recording, work system designing, examination of workplace, training, complete incentives, supervision and employee aids plan.

4. The Impact of Occupational Health and Safety Issues on HRM

The ultimate goal of human resource management is the promotion of the achievement of organizational goal by effective management, which greatly relies on employee satisfaction, because employee satisfaction is a general attitude of employee to his occupation and reflects the problems occurs in organizational management and relates to the increase of productivity and decrease of employee drifting, which directly impact organizational efficiency and the realization of goals (Patrickson & Hartmann,2001). Employee satisfaction is the reflect of attitude and emotion of the degree of satisfaction on all aspects in work when employee compare the actual obtained value with the expected obtained value and it is closely related to the degree of job involvement, organizational commitment and work motivation. It becomes an important tool in organization management. al goals. It greatly impact and promote employee satisfaction and improve employee relationship and influence the function of maintaining employee or the employee drifting management in human resource management.

As above mentioned, there are many factors influencing the hazards of occupational health and safety. All kinds of health and safety management activities can be classified into more specific activities or processes of activity. It is obvious that different activities have different requirements for the employee’s abilities. In order to determine these different requirements, the human resource management in organizations shall make detailed survey and analysis for each job position, and thus specify the contents, requirements, responsibilities and qualification of each position by a series of relevant collection and analysis of job information (Toh & Quinlan, 2009). With the change of environment, requirements of health and safety and employee’s workload, the position analysis and checking in human resource should be updated when necessary. Simultaneously, the human resource management should provide necessary and updated training for employee to keep the occupational health and safety.

can improve employee performance and human resource management, and even the realization of organizational goals.

5. Conclusion

In summary, the ultimate goal of occupational health and safety is to improve the quality of employee’s career life and promote the realization of organizational goals and the development of economy. It is the important functions of human resource management, and directly relates to other functions of human resource management, such as recruitment and selection, training and development, employee performance and payment management. Different occupational health and safety issues will impact various functions of human resource management and requires them to make effort to create health and safe workplace for employees and thus to promote employee development and employee satisfaction and maximize the efficiency and productivity to realize the organizational goals.

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