Books

The world of human resources (HR) is undergoing fundamental changes in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote and working at home has changed the traditional office environment while the pandemic has thrown up multiple challenges from crew change formalities to ensuring non-transmission from exported goods. Perhaps now is the time to both revisit HR in the industry as well as plan for the ‘new normal’ HR future. Of course, each industry faces unique human resource management challenges and opportunities and in shipping/logistics these include a global labour market and global unionism, long periods spent at sea, and health and safety issues resulting from a variety of risks.

Editor Jiangang Fei’s Managing Human Resources in the Shipping Industry explores all the key aspects of human resource management in the shipping industry and how they specifically relate to the shipping workforce. Fei also discusses the practices and issues associated with recruitment, training and development, and retention of personnel and knowledge in the shipping industry. In addition, the book addresses the human resource management challenges faced by the industry, including achieving work–life balance, maintaining employee health and wellbeing, managing risk and crisis, and applying knowledge management principles. The authors of each chapter are specialists in their particular sectors. Many are Chinese and Asian academics with a strong understanding of the region’s specific HR requirements.

Edmund Gubbins’s Managing Transport Operations moves from shipping to a more general overview of all forms of transport – rail and road specifically. The strength of the books is its clear, jargon-free language to explain the wide range of skills demanded of transport managers, who must understand the economic, social, political and technical aspects of road, rail, air and sea transport, while, crucially, ensuring that levels of safety and reliability are not compromised. Individual chapters discuss modal characteristics; ownership and organisation; management functions and policy formation; transport marketing; safety regulations; economic regulation; logistics and transport; urban transport and new technology.

Martin Starr’s Global Supply Chain Management for HR is another useful book to have on the shelf for reference. Supply chain management can essentially be defined as the managing all the activities that go into putting commercial products in front of consumers. Global supply chains have a large number of diverse participants that must act in concert, which poses a greater challenge than regional supply chains. Analysis of actual supply chains reveals cascades of materials, cash flows, and information moving between interacting

suppliers, producers, and customers. Bottlenecks in supply chains diminish throughput rates, creating queues of work waiting for service. Unexpected changes in demand levels can distort normal supply chain ordering patterns, resulting in costly oscillations of inventory levels, or the ‘bullwhip’ effect, described by oscillations that shift between out-of-stock and overstock conditions. The reverse supply chain is concerned with the logistics of returning customer purchases to their producers for reclamation or disposal.

None of these books of course deal with the pandemic as yet. But reading them now, in light of Covid, does prompt thoughts of how best to adapt to the new world of global logistics. ●