Discuss the various problems human resource mangers faced in formulating human resource strategies/policies for their organisations with special reference to the article Involvement and Participation by Mick Marchington.
Discuss the various problems human resource mangers faced in formulating human resource strategies/policies for their organisations with special reference to the article Involvement and Participation by Mick Marchington.
Human resource departments are beginning to adopt the "soft" side of human resource management where employees are more involved in their organisation. The old management style excluded or had very little involvement with their employees. Employees now have inputs in decision making and often giving ideas for organisational development. Once an organisation's objectives and strategies are determined, human resource management objectives are to evaluate on how to help the organisation achieving its objectives. The role of the human resource manager is to act as a contact between the employer and the employee. The human resource manager's job is to help employees achieve their set of criterions set by the employer. Achieving the organisation's objectives will depend on the success of formulating of policies and strategies by the human resource department/manager. The inability to do this means that the organisation will ultimately fail.
Performance appraisal is evaluating how well an employee is doing his or her job. The appraisal process identifies training and development needs for those who are insufficiently trained. The appraisal process is also used to link rewards by determining who achieved their objectives. The problem for human resource managers in performance evaluation is developing an effective and efficient appraisal process. A performance appraiser must be able to do the following for performance appraisal to be effective:
Discrimination - the appraiser must be able to discriminate between those who are contributing to the organisation and those who are not. Those who do not perform should not be tolerated. Those who are under performing should be assists to improve and if the problem persist corrective action such as transfer or demotion should be taken. Leniency is bad in appraisal because it will send the wrong message to employees that under performance are tolerated at the organisation. Those who performed should be rewarded accordingly.
Reward - when an organisation do not have a performance measuring system, they often reward seniority or some other factor that often have nothing to do with the achievement of objectives. The result is over rewarding those who are performance incompetence and the under rewarding those with superior performance.
Development - the manager must remove any obstacle that prevents the employee from achieving maximum performance. Greater satisfaction in the employee is found in situations where the employee had participation in the appraisal process. Development must be emphasised when conducting appraisal. Employees performance appraisals are viewed as a report card rather than helping the employee's development so helping them relax and enjoy the evaluation process is crucial. Negative experiences will lead to oppositions of performance appraisal.
Feedback - discussing appraisal feedback to employees can be very stressful as it can lead some workers resenting their appraiser. Managers ...
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Development - the manager must remove any obstacle that prevents the employee from achieving maximum performance. Greater satisfaction in the employee is found in situations where the employee had participation in the appraisal process. Development must be emphasised when conducting appraisal. Employees performance appraisals are viewed as a report card rather than helping the employee's development so helping them relax and enjoy the evaluation process is crucial. Negative experiences will lead to oppositions of performance appraisal.
Feedback - discussing appraisal feedback to employees can be very stressful as it can lead some workers resenting their appraiser. Managers from different cultures prefer to give appraisal feedback in a certain way. ie. Managers from Chinese background felt that appraisal is impolite while Japanese managers only gives positive feedback while US and Australian managers gives ambiguous, incomplete feedback like "Try harder", "Keep on doing what you are doing, but do it a little better!" In this sort of situation, it is best to give feedback indirectly, like to a trusted third party by both the manager and the employee.
Human resource specialists are not the only people who can do performance appraisal. The immediate supervisor, peers, subordinates, multisource feedback and self-evaluation can do performance appraisal. However, non-human resource specialists do not have the skills to analyse the evaluation data and cannot be as efficient as a human resource specialist when dealing with appraisal problems. The human resource manager used performance appraisal to determine what the employee have done so far and if he or she is not achieving the goals, it is the human resource manager's job to help them achieving these goals. Performance appraisal can also determine pay, promotion, demotion, and retrenchment.
For performance appraisal to be effective, it must have a set of criterion and standards. This eliminates inconsistency and any bias or discrimination. There are many performance appraisal system that human resource manager can use. These includes:
Ranking - list candidates from best to worst.
Grading - gives a mark for achievement of criteria or objective.
Graphic scale - criteria measures are centred on subjective and or objective factors.
Critical incidents - record the employee's behaviour periodically or when it happened whether it was good or bad. This method enables the appraiser to monitor the subject over a period of time for accuracy.
Behavioural anchored rating scale- evaluates behaviour demonstrated in performing a job. Ratings are giving for or bad are placed o a scale for these performances.
Behaviour observation scale - the desired behaviour for a specific job is determined and the employee is evaluated on their demonstration of these behaviour on the job.
Essay description - the manager write an essay describing the employee's performance.
Management by objectives - employees agreed to the goals set by management and the appraisal process determined whether these goals where reached or not.
Assessment centres- these centres are costly and used to assess only highly ranked or paid jobs. The centre identifies high potential employees for promotion.
No matter what system the human resource manager uses, he or she will always encounter some problems. These problems include the lack of desire to change, recency effect or of lack of commitment from management. Performance appraisal must importantly satisfy equal employment opportunity law requirement or other requirements set out in laws. Trial and error will determine what system is best suited for a specific organisation or the manager may use a bit from each system to cater for the specific organisation.
Training and development ensures that the employees are able to meet the job requirements and that their skills are developed to perform their job properly. The new competitive global business environment means that organisations need to have a well-trained workforce because those who fall behind will not be able to compete. Developing the workforce means that the employees' skills are up to date and will be able to tackle many problems facing them. An organisation needs to be efficient and the purpose of training and development is a form of investment by the organisation in their employees. The return is a well-trained workforce who will increase their productivity.
Changes in the work environment like organisational change and especially technology change made the need for training and development greater than ever. The changes in the organisational objectives like the needs to reduces costs while increase productivity and profits place a lot of pressures on human resource managers to development training programs to effectively implement these changes. Human resource needs to introduce strategic programs or policies to help employees develop the skills required while trying to improve the quality of work life and motivation.
After the job analysis process, performance can be measures against the performance set by the job criteria. This criterion is related in the job description and job specification. A performance review is conducted to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses. Training and development is required to overcome the weaknesses or further build on strengths and develop new skills and knowledge. A human resource manager faces problems on how to train or development new skills for the employees. The training process is chosen to suit the organisation but there are five common process methods:
Circle - allows the candidates to sit and see each other sitting in a circle shape.
Classroom - the atmosphere is like the traditional classroom.
Square off - business like situation where the candidates sits in a U shape arrangement.
Semi-circle - candidates sitting in a semi-circle instead of a U shape.
Square - everyone sitting in a tradition square environment.
There is other training methods like on the job training, off the job training or further education like a university degree or technical college certificates. Whatever the method depended on the available of funds and the type of organisation.
Employee involvements in the organisation are often found in group briefing, task participation or teams like Total Quality Management. This is designed to tap into employee knowledge and opinion, whether at an individual level or through small groups. The uses of groups and employee involvement increase ideas input and encourage cooperative relation at the workplace. The autonomy and democratic managerial practices gave employees a sense of important in the workplace and encourages them to work harder.
The need to change by promoting employee participation in the workplace is important to an organisation, however resistance often occurred because of the lack of commitment and indifferences from line managers. The idea of team working and employee empowerment is popular with senior managers, lower ranking managers see it as a threat to their authority. This is also seen by supervisors who see themselves as much closer to the people for whom they are responsible, rather than being part of management, a feeling which may intensify as their job security is lessened and promotion opportunities are reduced.
Strategies and policies have also failed because of the extra pressure it have on workers and managers who are already over worked. The employee sees that did not benefited because of more workload or management did not stressed that changes are needed for the future of the organisation. The communication channel need to be open to everyone so that they understand the policies and strategies or distrust can arise.
The fast changing pace of the global business environment meant that human resource policies are closely related to organisational policies and objective. Human resource management is now more closely integrating human resource planning and business planning than ever. It is important that know that satisfying employee's needs and requirements can achieves organisational goals. . Employees are keen to have more say within their organisation and to find out more about actions which are likely to impact upon their own jobs and activities at work.
If an organisation is to survive and grows, and retains and motivates its top performers, performance management is a must. Japanese companies are successful because of their involvements with their staffs. Any new policies or strategies introduce should be introduce in a phased and planned manner, and attempts are made to ensure that there is at least some complementarity between these different techniques and try to find which one works the best. Implementing and integration with existing techniques at the organisation sometimes failed because employees find it hard to schedule or cope with the work burden they already have or managers/employees resist changes. The human resource manager need to communicate and stressed changes to old work practice and ideas because of changes in the organisation's environment and strategies.
Bibliography
Stone, R.J., (1998), Human Resource Management, 3rd edition, Jacaranda Wiley: Brisbane.
Marchington, M., Involvement and participation, Human Resource Management - Internal Subject Outline: Spring 1998, Charles Sturt University: Wagga Wagga.
Stone, R.J., (1998), Readings in Human Resource Management, volume 3, Jacaranda Wiley: Brisbane.
London, M., Bassman, E.S., Fernandez, J.P., (1990), Human Resource Forecasting and Strategy Development, Quorum Books: Westport.
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