Convenience

collective
bargaining
The process of
agreeing on a
satisfactory labor
contract between
management and a
union
grievance
procedure
The means by which
a labor contract is
enforced
248
Part 3:
Organizing
Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
www.MyEbookNiche.eCrater.com

---

NEW CHALLENGES IN THE CHANGING WORKPLACE
As we have seen throughout this chapter, human resource managers face several ongoing
challenges in their efforts to keep their organizations staffed with effective workforces. To
complicate matters, new challenges arise as the economic and social environments of
business change. We conclude this chapter with a look at two of the most important
HRM issues facing business today.
Managing Knowledge Workers
Employees traditionally added value to organizations because of what they did or
because of their experience. In the “information age,” however, many employees add
value because of what they know.
46
The Nature of Knowledge Work
These employees are usually called
knowledge
workers
, and the skill with which they are managed is a major factor in determining
which firms will be successful in the future. Knowledge workers, including computer
scientists, engineers, and physical scientists, provide special challenges for the HR man-
ager. They tend to work in high-technology firms and are usually experts in some
abstract knowledge base. They often like to work independently and tend to identify
more strongly with their profession than with any organization—even to the extent of
defining performance in terms recognized by other members of their profession.
As the importance of information-driven jobs grows, the need for knowledge work-
ers continues to grow as well. But these employees require extensive and highly special-
ized training, and not every organization is willing to make the human capital
investments necessary to take advantage of these jobs. In fact, even after knowledge
workers are on the job, retraining and training updates are critical to prevent their
skills from becoming obsolete. It has been suggested, for example, that the “half-life”
of a technical education in engineering is about three years. The failure to update
such skills will not only result in the loss of competitive advantage but also increase
the likelihood that the knowledge worker will go to another firm that is more committed
to updating them.