Key HRM issues:
Recruitment and selection process: The Company ‘s greatest assets are the staff force hence the right recruitment and induction processes are vital in ensuring that the new employee becomes effective in the shortest time. The success of the Company depends on having the precise number of staff, with the precise skills and abilities. The best Human resource practice which can be adopted by and aero engine unit:
• Defining the job process of each individual skill required to ensure it meets our business desires.
• If a member of staff is leaving the company analysis over a short period of time if there is a real need to replace the role, if required will do it immediately or compensate within the current work force.
• Before recruiting company draws up a job description and the candidates are judged based on whether he/she will possess the key skills to meet key tasks. This process helps opportunities to outline the key tasks and responsibilities.
• The process of recruitment involves key steps:
1. Advertising using the right medium to attract the right person.
2. Using recruitment agency, describing them the job profile of the vacancy to match the requirement with the apt candidate.
3. Internet can serve as good tool for recruitment.
4. Fresh talent recruitments (graduates).
5. Campaigns, road shows, job fairs, etc…..
Legislation:
Company’s responsibility to ensure current legislation is covered when applying any employment process and failure to do so could mean that the organization is breaking the law. The law prohibits for company to take into account a person's gender, marriage, colour, race, nationality, ethnic or national origin or disability in employment decisions. Taking these legislations into consideration, company adopts an important strategy when developing a job description and person specification that it must be undertaken thoroughly and objectively as the first step to ensure compliance with legislation Key areas, if legislation to be considered is:
• Disability Discrimination Act 1995
• Sex Discrimination Act 1975 & 1986
• Race Relations Act 1976
• Working Time Regulations 1998
Health and safety at work:
The health and safety at work is majorly concerned in U.K. Each and every company needs to adopt the health and safety. The company which fails to will be fined a huge amount. At manufacturing unit it is regularly monitored and nearly recruited employed are briefed with health and safety. The employee who fails to follow the procedure will be dismissed from work according to the health and safety regulation law.
Trade Unions:
A trade union is an organized group of employers or labours. Its main goal is to protect and advance the interests of its employee .A union often negotiates agreements with employers on pay and conditions. It may also provide legal and financial advice, sickness benefits and education facilities to its members. If a union is recognized by an employer, it can negotiate with the employer over terms and conditions known as 'collective bargaining'. For it to work, unions and employers need to agree on how the arrangement is to operate. For example, they might make agreements providing for the deduction of union subscriptions from employers wages, which is to represent workers in negotiations and how often meetings will take place. Both these agreements on procedure and agreements between employers and unions changes the terms applying to workers are called 'collective agreements'.
Employment contracts and conditions:
A contract of employment is an agreement between an employer and an employee. Type of Contracts:
Fixed-term contract: Fixed-term workers have the same minimum rights as permanent workers. There are special regulations which protect fixed-term employees. The fixed-term employees are issued contract for certain period of time.
• Additional staff recruited for six months during a peak period
• A specialist employee taken on for the duration of a project.
• Someone employed to cover during another employee's maternity leave/absence.
The fixed-term employees have the right as the permanent staff:
• The same pay and conditions as permanent workers.
• The same or equivalent benefits package as permanent workers
• The right to be informed about permanent employment opportunities in the organization
Part- time: Working part time can be a good way of balancing the work and personal commitments. Part-time, workers will be having the same right and be treated fairly in comparison to full-time colleagues.
Our Human Resources Strategy in UK:
Recruitment and Selection:
Recruitment is the process of generating a pool of candidates from which to select the appropriate person to fill a job vacancy. Vacancies may also be created when additional or new work has to be undertaken or significant changes occur in technology, procedures, or circumstances.
Recruitment and selection are the processes by which organizations solicit, contact and engender interest in potential new appointees to vacant positions in the organization, and then in some way establish their suitability for appointment.
The traditional or normal view regarding recruitment and selection is to assert that it is perhaps the most basic of personnel activities- if we get the wrong people in the organization, there will be problems. The problems that we might face are high labour turnover, absenteeism, disciplinary problem, disputes and low productivity. Therefore, having the right people in the organization is very crucial.
A key feature of our recruitment and selection strategy would be to follow the traditional approach of interviews, application forms and references and at times, more sophisticated techniques like psychometric tests and assessment centres. Internal candidates may be sort by searching the records, asking managers or supervisors for recommendations, or internal advertisement on notice boards and in-house journals. Besides, we would also be selecting candidates with the help of recruitment agencies and consultancies, advertisements in newspapers, Internet recruitment will also play a major part in our recruitment strategy, for example, vacancy pages on our company website, providing vacancies on commercial job websites, websites of educational institutions, etc. We would also be recruiting fresh talented graduates directly from universities in UK. This is very important to us as we would require a large number of fresh graduates for our plant. Recruiting fresh graduates directly from universities would save us both time and money.
• Graduate Engineers and Skilled Technicians:
As mentioned above our main focus would be to recruit fresh graduates directly from universities in UK and Europe. As our plant in UK would only be a fabrication plant and does not involve assembly or maintenance, there would not be a very high requirement of skilled technicians. We would use recruitment agencies, advertisements, and references to recruit our skilled technicians from UK and Europe.
• Middle Management:
There is a considerable requirement of middle managers for our concern and thus internet recruitment, word of mouth, application forms and interviews will be used for recruiting such managers.
• Senior and Executive Managers:
The need for senior and executive managers in our UK fabrication plant is limited and so we would only be following the process of applications and one-on-one interviews to assess senior managers.
• Expatriate Staff:
We would be requiring expatriate staff to manage our UK subsidiary, for which we would be using internet recruitment as the main source. Also, we will take the help of recruitment consultants and agencies in Europe to appoint and select expatriate staff.
INTERNALLY RECRUITMENT AGENCIES ADVERTISEMENT WORD OF MOUTH VACANCY PAGE ON COMPANY WEBSITE VACANCY ON COMMERCIAL JOB WEBSITE DIRECT FROM EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL OTHER
U.K 21.2 23.4 49.3 2.1 2.6 0.4 0.4 0.7
FRANCE 25.4 10.3 25.4 10.3 6.3 0.8 2.4 19.0
GERMANY 37.4 1.4 37.4 3.2 8.6 6.1 5.8 0
ITALY 42.2 11.9 13.8 4.6 2.8 2.8 10.1 11.9
SPAIN 38.4 12.6 13.2 6.0 6.0 11.3 8.6 4.0
Source: Cranet (2006)
Retention Strategy:
Training and Development:
An organization’s employees are increasingly considered as essential competitive resources which, if developed effectively, will contribute significantly to the achievement of strategic business goals. The various environmental changes faced by organizations in recent ears, including globalization and the rapid growth in the use of Information technology, have produced an increased focus on training and development in both literature and practice of HRM.
TNA
“Training Needs Analysis is the technique of assessing of training required to fill the gap between what skills and knowledge are possessed by employees and what ought to be possessed. In our company, analysis will take place at three levels. First, the corporate level, in order to establish organizational needs in line with the overall business objectives. Second, the departmental level, addressing the training required by different functional groups, project groups, and teams. Third, the individual level, establishing specific employee requirements.
According to Garavan et al. (1995) failure to acknowledge that employee training and development is a key factor in establishing and maintaining the effectiveness of the organization will inevitably damage its productivity and competitiveness, and consequently its future success. One measure of training and development activity is the amount of money spent on it. The Cranet survey suggests that two-thirds of respondent organizations in the UK invest between 1% and 5% of their annual wage bill in training and development.
Most of our expatriate staff and some of our middle and senior management staff would have the opportunity to undergo a yearly placement in our assembly and maintenance plant in Shanghai, China. This placement period gives the employees the opportunity to attend several training and career developing programmes instituted between the firm and certain engineering universities and other institutions in UK.
The use of in-house sessions and on the job training would also be encouraged and all expatriates have a Performance related objective of ensuring Knowledge Transfer in the work place.
All employees, including the senior most employees of our firm, will be subject to training of some sort or the other. Training can be classified into two different categories: Formal training and informal training. Formal training is defined as “classroom trainingâ€, which means sophisticated coaching or mentoring system. But, we would be concentrating more on informal training—which is that type of training that is “on the jobâ€, which means that the employees will learn by experience while on a job.
The chart below shows the proportion of annual wage bill spent on training and development in the UK:
% UK
Year 1992 1995 1999
< 1 21 17 7
1 – 1.9 29 33 32
2 – 2.9 20 20 23
3 – 4.9 16 15 21
5 – 9.9 11 11 13
>10 4 3 4
Source: Cranet (2006)
Performance and Reward Management:
The management of remuneration, it is argued, is necessary condition of successful management of the employment relationship. The rationale for this appears to lie in the traditional notion of pay as the indicator of an individual’s worth to an organization. It is widely maintained that the management of rewards and performance needs to be consistent, and there should be some degree of synergy between the two if they are to achieve improvements in organizational productivity and performance. As far as reward management is concerned, recent developments in HRM literature on organizational systems and structures point towards the word “Pay†being replaced by the word “Rewardâ€.(Armstrong 2001)
In our company, direct financial rewards, including basic pay and premium elements such as incentive pay, overtime, allowances and bonuses will form the basic reward package for our company. Indirect rewards such as pension schemes, company car, educational support, shares, childcare provision, health insurance, sick pay, subsistence expenses and relocation expenses will form a significant part of benefits to our employees. With the use of such rewards in the company, the government will offer tax incentives to our company.
With the use of such rewards, it will help or organization to improve productivity and growth and will help us monitor employee performance. In our company, we will also look forward into making appraisal schemes which will be extended to the clerical and manual staff. With the help of this, the efficiency of our employees will improve highly. Even though we would be giving incentives and various benefits to our employees, we would be taking strict action for non-performance by employees.
Just like our China subsidiary, benefits would be determined by the contractual agreements and the stated benefits for individual positions. To foster more employee loyalties we would tie certain benefits to length of stay with the firm. For example, leave days increase the longer the employees are in our employment, our contribution to social security on behalf of employee increases the longer the employee is with the firm (though this would be related to employee performance), and we would introduce end of year profit sharing formulas for all staff which we believe is key to fostering employee commitment and loyalty.
Flexibility and Change Management:
Change Management is the process of developing a planned approach to change in the organization. Typically, the objective is to maximize the collective benefits for all people involved in the change and minimize the risk of failure of implementing the change. The discipline of change management deals primarily with the human aspect of change and therefore related to pure and industrial psychology(www.findwhitepapers.com/index.php)
• People Skills
• System Skills
• Business Skills
The whole of an organization is based on social system. There is no single organization without the existence of people management. Each individual holds the responsibility to adapt to the changes in the business environment for reducing risk and being flexible to organizational changes for betterment of the organization. The individual has to also adapt to technical changes which enhance the skills of modern world human resource management. They have to adapt to changes in the business practices which is changing due to the volatile money environment. For this each individual has to know the inflow and outflow of cash into the organization and keep predicting the future to face the changes.
OTHER KEY ISSUES:
Manpower planning:
Our aero-engine manufacturing concern needs to develop plans for effective recruitment process for future. When developing recruitment goals, it’s really important to set a retention goal. Employees are assets and they can be effectively utilized. This system takes care of planning and managing the requirement of specific employee skills for specific jobs and departments.
We need to also consider manpower planning problem (MPP) with single type of job under uncertainty demands over a long planning horizon where dynamic demands for manpower must be fulfilled by allocating enough number of employees. Taking into account the recruitment/dismissal factors and setup cost and considering staff substitution. We have developed a company model approach to solve this kind of stochastic problem through a feedback control scheme.
No smoking policy at work:
Our company would also regulate no smoking policy at work place. In 2006, smoke-free legislation set out in Part 1 of the Health Act was passed by Parliament. The Act sets out the broad provisions for smoke-free legislation, and also provides a number of legal powers to enable the more detailed aspects of the legislation to be dealt with. During 2007, the Government published the final versions of the five sets of smoke-free regulations made under the Health Act 2006.
Conclusion:
Thus, we believe that we have justified our choice of the United Kingdom as the location of our fabrication plant. We have decided to go in for our China plant as a wholly owned subsidiary because...............
References:
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• Brewster C and Sparrow P and Vernon G(2007), International Human Resource Management,CIPD
• Larsen Henrik H and Mayrhofer W(2006), Managing Human Resources in Europe, Routledge
• Sisson K(1989), Personnel Management in Britain, Basil Blackwell
• Leopold J and Harris L and Watson T(2005), The Strategic Managing of Human Resources, Prentice Hall
• Dowling Peter J and Welch Denice E and Schular Randall S(1999), International Human Resource Management, South-Western College
• Heery E and Noon M(2001),A Dictionary of Human Resource Management, Oxford University Press
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