Understanding Organizational Change
Michael Kelly
Grantham University

1. What are certain critical HR functions should remain internal to the organization?
HR practitioners must be more than an administrative arm of an organization and be increasingly involved in enabling growth, productivity, and profitability. HR practitioners are compelled to assume business and consulting roles, aside from transactional functions such as compensation and benefits administration or routinary recruitment. Companies also have to focus on employee retention in order to maintain their customer base and ultimately deliver quality service and attain a return on investment (ROI). Further, HR practitioners need to reach out to a more diverse and young workforce with a continually changing value system that affects their work ethic.
Other challenges include acquiring new technologies, which calls for new skills, and adopting to changing social values such as better quality of life in less time, less loyalty to the company, or higher pay for less hours of work. Employees’ need for work-life balance has become more pronounced, challenging HR and management to find appropriate motivators for today’s employees.
All of these challenges will only compel HR practitioners to intensify their search for the right people and to take on new roles to be able to retain them. As knowledge capital becomes one of the critical success factors for corporations, the search for the best and the brightest will become a constant and costly battle, and retaining the best people will be increasingly difficult. This increases the pressure on the HR function to create an environment in which employees continue to flourish and propel companies toward the achievement of their objectives (Abella, 2004).
2. How is instruction used as a performance intervention? Implementing performance interventions is about