8 HR Management Challenges in Higher Education

Higher education institutions consistently plan on boosting their student enrollment rates, providing quality education, and achieving their student outcome objectives. To make those plans successful, they have to face several human resource (HR) management challenges. These challenges can slow the process of achieving their ultimate goals, but overcoming them pays off in the long run. College and universities that can manage HR management challenges well enough will see many opportunities for growth and expansion, which enables them to offer the best possible education to the masses. In this blog, we will tackle about eight of the most notable HR management challenges that higher education institutions encounter.

8 HR Management Challenges in Higher Education

What Is HR Management?

First, let’s discuss briefly what HR management is all about. HR management refers to the process of managing people who are part of an organization and contributing to its success. Countless methodologies and strategies can be adapted to in the HR management process. Observing standard HR management practices can help companies and organizations gain a business advantage in many aspects.

Finding and Hiring the Best Educators

The long and hard process of delivering quality education and accomplishing student outcomes starts with recruiting faculty staff members that are among the best in the education industry. Finding and hiring excellent educators is a difficult challenge for college/university employers. They need to exhaust their resources and spend money on utilizing media platforms for employee recruitment, such as social media and job posting sites. College/university employers may also need to adapt marketing strategies if they want to attract top tier educators, including those from other cities, towns, and states who might be willing to relocate. Excellent educators will help a higher education institution reach new heights in many ways possible.

Employee Retention

Aside from student retention strategies to keep students from transferring or dropping off, institutions also have employee retention strategies. It’s the responsibility of an institution’s HR managers to retain employees, especially deans and professors. They retain their employees by keeping them satisfied with their jobs. Paying employees a decent wage, providing compensation, and granting their requests is among the most basic approaches in satisfying employees. Employee satisfaction is crucial for employee retention. Other than that, educators who are satisfied with how their employers are treating them can boost their morale and improve faculty performance gradually.

Use of Technology and Automation

The use of advanced technology and automation tools has been embraced over the last years by the majority of the top higher education institutions around the world. They use them for data analytics, report gathering, enrollment process, etc. Institutions that haven’t integrated advanced technology and automation tools into their operations could be left behind. In that case, the HR management staff of those institutions will soon face major challenges in using technology and automation. For one, the cost of advanced tools are expensive, and it takes time to train staff members in operating them, but it pays off in the end. Technology and automation tools help colleges and universities optimize the efficiency of their operations; therefore, enabling them to provide a better education quality to their students.

Budget Challenges

One of the major hurdles every college/university HR personnel must overcome is budget challenges. Budget challenges are hurdles every HR personnel encounters in any type of organization. University budgets cover a checklist of expenditures that must be allocated with money as equitable as possible. Probably the most significant difficulty in budgeting is the presence of labor costs, specifically the employee compensation. How so? Well, according to a study in LuminaFoundation.org, 60% to 70% of the total spending of universities and colleges are employee compensations. Those numbers are big, considering the fact that there are other essential expenses colleges and universities should cover, and those expenses aren’t cheap as well.

Leadership Development and Succession Planning

At a certain point, the current administrators and deans of a college or university will step down from their positions for retirement. The best people to take the positions they will vacate are none other than the educators under their supervision. For that reason, college/university HR managers will have to exhaust their efforts in making plans for leadership development and succession and, in other words, creating a pathway for promotion. With the presence of leadership development and succession planning, college/university employers will not need to hire externally to fill in vacated high-ranking positions.

Organizational Strategy

Organizational strategy refers to the series of action plans that an organization must execute to accomplish ultimate goals and objectives. Since higher education institutions are organizations with a mission and vision, their HR managers are faced with the challenge of formulating organizational strategies. The strategies they have to create are seemingly more extensive compared to those from corporate companies. Corporate companies focus their strategies on a business standpoint, whereas colleges and universities must focus their strategies both on a business standpoint and educational standpoint. Colleges and universities must weigh in business and educational factors if they’re to achieve their goals.

Diversity and Inclusion

Nowadays, diversity and inclusion are widely embraced by various sectors of our global society, including higher education institutions. In that case, college/university HR management teams must promote a campus environment that’s inviting for people from different cultural demographics and nationalities—this concerns both the students and educators. HR personnel, including the campus administrators, have to prevent racial issues and clash of religious beliefs within the school premises by implementing certain policies. If such incidents arise, that puts a higher education institution in hot water.

Globalization of Higher Education

Globalization of higher education is one of the trends of today being embraced by the majority of establishments in the education industry. It opens endless doors of new-found knowledge for the students enrolling in higher education. And, because of globalization, college/university HR managers face the task of reinforcing their faculty team with educators who are experts of globalized fields of studies. Other than that, they also need to restructure the organizational build of their institution into one that can cater and deliver globalized education.

Whatever dilemmas the HR management teams of colleges and universities manage, they’re doing so with the mindset of maintaining and improving the quality of education they offer. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, overcoming challenges pays off in the long run. Higher education institutions will see a bright future if their respective HR management personnel make sound, practical, and equitable decisions.

More in University