High Performance Working Executive Summary HPW systems are crucial to success, yet organizations often struggle to understand how to implement them. Although there is a widespread recognition in the academic literature that strategic alignment of bundles of HPW practices is key, what actually happens within organizations does not always reflect this. Case studies are an obvious means to understand in real-life the adoption of HPW, and explore what influences the beliefs and actions of managers in different circumstances. Case studies also enable us to explore how plans fare in practice and to see the results of the adoption of different practices or systems. They also help us to understand what influences the behavior of managers and Human Resources practitioners, what determines success, what problems are faced and how they are overcome and how the ‘story’ of HPW is told and heard in different contexts. Specifically, this research set out to understand: • How decisions by employers to engage with HPW are made; • How managers and leaders shape and influence practice; • To explore the practices themselves and how they affect the experience of work; • To identify barriers to the take-up of HPW and how they are resolved. The findings strongly suggest that the importance of leaders in making HPW the approach of choice is critical. The willingness and desire of leaders to make a difference, to produce excellence and to do this through people, are the hallmarks of HPW. Human Resources (HR) colleagues and operational managers then help to put these ambitions into practice, a process that can be greatly assisted by a coherent HR strategy. HR functions can help in a range of ways but especially in terms of helping to resolve problems and... ... middle of paper ... ...r the adoption of HPW. The function’s pragmatic approach to creating helpful policy and practice can assist organizations cope with the nuts and bolts of implementation. A number of distinct shifts in beliefs and theories, each of which has potentially deepened the complexity of HPW adoption for organizations. The shift in emphasis from individual practices to systems has been noted as potentially one of the reasons for relatively low adoption (Guest and King, 2004). While this might make sense in theory, many organizations struggle to understand how to implement complete systems. Furthermore, the fact that employee perceptions are so important adds further complexity. Case studies are an obvious means to understand how the adoption of HPW reflects this complexity and a way of exploring what influences the beliefs and actions of managers in different circumstances.
“The Heart of Change,” by John Kotter and Dan S. Cohen can act as a diagram for any organization facing challenges that come with implementing change. In the 21st Century in order to stay competitive with your competitors you have to implement changes, new systems and approaches to keep the organization relevant. With changes there comes errors that a company may encounter, sometimes these errors if not fixed can make the change within the organization impossible. Employees are reluctant and can’t see the views or their leader, and this makes change unsuccessful. That’s where Kotter’s eight step change model can give an organization a guideline and understanding of some of the challenges that they may encounter with change. Comparing Kotter’s
Ramlall, S., Welch, T., Walter, J., & Tomlinson, D. (2009). Strategic HRM at the Mayo Clinic: A case study. Journal of Human Resources Education, 3(3), 13-35. Retrieved from http://business.troy.edu/jhre/Articles/PDF/3-3/31.pdf
Kotter’s steps 5, Enabling Action, and 6, Creating Short-Term Wins contribute to the success of a change effort by enabling all involved parties to make meaningful contributions to an organization’s progress, while seeing timely results that maintain the effort’s momentum (Cohen, 2009). Alaska Airlines successfully implements a sustainable change agent with key performance indicators and measurable metrics to empower employees for broad-based action that allows employees to see how short-term successes within each department turn into long-term growth for the organization. Ben Minicucci manages to integrate universal key metrics that focus on cross-divisional collaboration and alignment to reinforce the actions and interdepartmental communications
A lot of organizations initiate change programs and action plans that vanish after a while but have had, it’s hoped, some impact on performance, even though one cannot be sure. The first challenge when initiating change is to make sure that every employee understands that this business system is not an action plan; it’s a faith that is about what should characterize a really good company, and there are no option to this faith. It is important to put a lot of effort into making everybody understand this (Ahlberg & Nauclér, 2007).
Adoption of new technology is affected by the perception of benefit, compatibility with workflow, ease of use, leadership presence and their support to gain buy in from end-users. In an unsuccessful adoption of new technology there is an underappreciation of the impact for the organization, the number resources required, and leaderships inability to communicate transformational change. In cases where technology adoption was successful staff were engaged early on by leadership as key users (Gagnon et al., 2012).
...enough research on it. Some drawbacks are less employment security, a loss of pay due to the profit-sharing model, and there is evidence of some firms engaging in downsizing and layoffs who have adopted HPW. There is also evidence that implementation of HPW systems in lower-tier service jobs results in negligible differences in any of the above categories. Only in the upper-tier services can more of the benefits of this model be had, which unfortunately leads to potentially greater market segmentation (Krahn, Lowe, Hughes, 2011 p. 267-268).
Explain giving examples how Woolworths should go about HR Planning? Human Resource Planning (HR) is the identification of the future labour requirements needed by a company and how these are going to be met. It is the process by which a company ensures that it has the right number and kind of people, in the right places at the right time, doing the things for which they are economically most useful. It is a method for determining future human resource requirements and developing action plans to meet them. It is defined as a strategy for the requisition, utilization, improvement and retention of an enterprise’s human resources and it encompasses the subject concerned with the developing range of manpower policies, including those for recruitment, deployment, development and retention.
Whether an organization consists of five or 25,000 employees, human resources management is vital to the success of the organization. HR is important to all managers because it provides managers with the resources – the employees – necessary to produce the work for the managers and the organization. Beyond this role, HR is capable of becoming a strong strategic partner when it comes to “establishing the overall direction and objectives of key areas of human resource management in order to ensure that they not only are consistent with but also support the achievement of business goals.” (Massey, 1994, p. 27)
Miller, E. L., Beechler, S., Bhatt, B., & Nath, R. (1986). The Relationship Between the Global Strategic Planning Process and the Human Resource Management Function. Human Resource Planning, 9(1), 9-23.
While technological innovations can provide increased opportunities for organizations and give them a competitive advantage, not all employees respond well to changes in their everyday workflow. When an organization updates its systems, it can face some resistance from employees, especially when the employees do not feel properly trained and lack the confidence in using the new system. Employees may grow frustrated and become less productive and efficient. In some extreme cases, technology can also replace some of their duties and make their positions obsolete, leaving them out of a job. This ties back to the need for job security. Technology has come a long way in the past 50 years and the types of challenges just mentioned are a lot more common in this day and age than they were before. Therefore, managers need to adapt to this changes in the work environment and find a way to satisfy their employees’ needs while increasing work performance and
“Hr is shifting from focusing on the organisation of the business to focusing on the business of the organisation” (Zulmohd 2011). David Ulrich points out four distinctive roles of HR which makes the organisation most effective and produce competitive advantage. He planned to change the structure of HR function and build HR around roles. The four key HR roles identified by Ulrich, one HR business partner/strategic partner – aligning HR and business strategy which plays an important role in setting strategic direction. It builds strategic relationship with clients and strategically manages the development of the workforce. The second key role is administrative expert which creates and must deliver effective HR processes made to tailor business needs. It also involves managing people and HR related costs. To continue to the third key role, change agent which understands the organisations culture, and takes the responsibility to communicate those changes internally and gain its employees trust. The final key role identified by Ulrich is employee advocate which is a core in HR role represents employees and helps to improve their experience, protect employees’ interests and confirm strategic initiatives are well balanced. Employee advocates must also “ensure fair, ethical and equitable people processes and practices.” “David Ulrich’s HR Model is about defining the HR roles and
Strategic workforce planning is the first component of human resources management (HRM) from which all other HR activities are derived from and flow out of. It is based on anticipated HR requirements from the perspective of the present HR environment. This requires a proactive posture, analyzing internal and external factors, to determine the most appropriate responses to future needs. Additionally, when formulating long-term proactive plans, an element of flexibility must be
Successful change enablers rely on a tremendous use of tools that work. The most powerful tool that an organization uses to implement organizational change that’s effective is Lawin’s simple three-step ch...
In my opinion, HR practices can make positive contributions to organisational performances, because except the unpredictable external environments, human resource management can improve the most factors that affect employees’ performances which finally influence organisational performances in long-term perspectives. This essay is aim to prove human resource practices can positively effect organisational performances based on literature discussion and empirical evidences. The next section briefly brings few negative views about the limitation of HRM related to improving organisational performances. The third section discuss the positive relationship between HR practices and organisational performances are established by applying HRM processes of hiring, selecting, placing employees as well as creating employment relationships within organisations. The final section is going to analyse an example company Mark & Spensers successfully utilised HR practices to improve their organisational performances and created competitive advantages.
Introduction A comprehensive Human Resource Management Strategy plays a vital role in the achievement of an organisation’s overall strategic objectives and visibly illustrates that the human resources function fully understands and supports the direction in which the organisation is moving. A comprehensive HRM Strategy will also support other specific strategic objectives undertaken by the marketing, financial, operational and technology departments. In essence, an HRM strategy’s aim should be to capture the ‘people’ part of an organisation and its medium to long-term projection of what it wants to achieve, ensuring that. It employs the right people, those have the right mix of skills, employees show the correct behaviours and attitudes, and employees have the opportunity to be developed the right way.