Human resource benchmarking.

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Introduction.

Benchmarking has a been a key word for human resources since back in the 70', this paper explores the issue of benchmarking within the human resource function of a company, first it will be define and discuss the concept of benchmarking within an organization, secondly it will be explore how has benchmarking evolve over the years and where does it fit in the day to day operations of a company and finally it will be illustrated how benchmarking is used within the tourism and hospitality industry to improve business performance and its operations.

Benchmarking is a process of comparisons of one company with another, which is suppose to be the standard or benchmark, in human resources, aspects such as wages, sales or production objectives are aspects in which peoples managers are suppose to benchmark against other companies to measure their performance (Bramham 1997, Fowler 1997). They would also want benchmark analysis of recruitment procedures, number of staff employed and employee's productivity. So in sum there different areas for benchmarking, some are within the human resource department, others are organization wide and can be numerical or strategic like culture, value systems, development and appraisal, management training and so on. (Bramham1997).

Benchmarking should not be just a comparison of statistics of other companies, that can regarded as "Industrial Tourism" (Burn et al Fowler 1997), because that is just taking snapshots of what others are doing, but without penetrating in the real reasons that lie behind those performance gaps within the other companies and truly achieve best practice (Fowler 1997). To achieve this so called best practice it is necessary for the company to reduce its performance gap, performance gap can be regarded as a the distance that exists between the performance of the competition and other companies (Bramham 1997), Bramham considers this as "Z" Charts and are regarded an instrument to measure performance.

Figure 1. A "Z" Chart

1995 1996 1997 2000

Source: Bramham 1997.

According to Fowler (1997) there are 5 steps to make an effective benchmark process, the first one would be to elaborate performance indicators about those organizational aspects that can be improved and establish how to obtain the relevant data, the second one is to select a proper competition company from where to get the data from, the third step is to deeply analyse this data to detect any opportunity for improvement, in fourth place, there is the need to analyse the procedures of the competition and see if they are suitable to implement them in the company, and finally it would be to implement any changes in the processes of the company. There is little point in collecting data to benchmark and not make improvements over it; some time a common reaction of managers to benchmark data is the justification of the current performance of the company (Fowler 1997).
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A similar approach is taken by Bramham (1997), for him benchmarking is a cycle similar to the management cycle, the first step is investigating, in here it looks at other companies to undertake comparisons of key areas by obtaining data. After doing this it comes the analysis of this data, preparing Z charts to determine the company's position and discuss it. Then it comes the planning part, this means deciding courses of action and predicting consequences: and then comes maybe the most important part ,the implementation of whatever was decided, as it was mentioned before, this is a ...

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