Managing the personnel issues during economic downturns

Gathering material for a country report as part of the International HRM module, it appeared challenging to compare Romania and UK. The current topic is concerned only with the personnel management function, by drawing some conclusions about possible actions that can be undertaken by the personnel specialists in order to help revive the economy and surpass the recession.
For anyone interested in developing the subject and analyse my findings, please leave a comment or send an email.

According to scholars, personnel management broadly refers to and covers everything connected to employment rapports, by managing the relationship between employees and their employers and by supporting the employers in their relation to legal authorities. However, the personnel management function differs from one organisation to another, accounting for industry differences and organisations specifications. Nevertheless, the personnel function is placed at the center of every organisation and represents a very complex and focused activity, established on the grounds of institutional rules. As seen in the literature review, by facing economic downturns during times, organisations were forced to look for fresh solutions in order to survive on the increasingly competitive market. One good example is the UK ‘80s recession, well documented in the personnel management literature. It was the personnel specialists that came up with solutions in order to strengthen the organisation performance, first of all by transferring more personnel responsibilities to line managers.

Even in Romania, which is still going through a transition period, the personnel function is changing continuously, supporting the organisations increasing need to become more and more competitive on a continuously changing and instable market. From the small number of studies performed in Romania, it appears that together with the fall of communism and later on the EU integration, Romania attracted many foreign investors, mostly coming from the west. Together with the investors came the western policies and business models according to which organisations were demanded to function. The transition has been too sudden and personnel specialists struggled in order to adjust their practice and respond to new demands. However, the imposed models often failed to be implemented, simply because several aspects have been ignored, mainly differences in cultural specifics, societal values or economic and political framework.

My opinion is that Romania needs to recover through own means, it needs to implement the lessons learnt and try to retain talented people, young specialists with fresh perspectives and openness to new ways of managing. And the key players in the above mentioned game are the personnel managers through their gained abilities and experience as well as native understanding of our needs.

This is an open topic. So far it has only addressed one general issue of what I consider to be the main problem faced by today’s managers in the personnel field.