The Human Resource department deals with all factors associated with the employees including:
- Human Resource and manpower planning
- Recruitment and selection
- Induction and training
- Promotion and transfers
- Appraisal and termination of employment
- Discipline
- Rewards and conditions of employment
- Working conditions
- Career development and welfare
- Wage bargaining and disputes
- Complying with employment laws and trade unions
In this assignment I will be looking at each of the above in turn and then compare it to how John Lewis PLC does it.
The importance of planning
Managing Human Resource effectively is vital to the company for several reasons.
Staff are one of a business most valuable, but also expensive, assets, so it is vital that a business plans its staffing carefully. It needs to make sure that its employs the right number of appropriate staff to meet its needs.
If it employs to many it is not cost effective and if it has too few it will not be able to carry out all it's work.
The company needs to have a stable workforce. It is costly and inefficient if there is a high turnover of staff.
The business needs to recruit the most appropriate staff for any vacancies.
The business must make sure their staffs are properly trained in order to carry out their work effectively by being motivating them rather than demotivating.
The business has to abide by laws and regulations concerning it's staff or it's could face prosecution or difficulties later.
The Human Resource department need to make sure that pay levels are appropriate. Paying too well is costly, but paying below the acceptable rate can be demotivating
To give the business a competitive advantage, Human Resource planning should consider the future needs of the business as well as current needs.
A successful plan will achieve a suitable mix of employees in terms of age, skills, and experience and will provide for developing those employees to meet the future business needs. To plan staffing effectively, a business will need to analyse both its own workforce and the external labour market.
When a company has to fill a vacancy the Human Resource department will need to consider certain information about the local area, which might include
- Employment/unemployment levels in the area
- The skills of local workforce
- The type of workforce
- The proportion of people working in tempory/part-time jobs
- The future trends – i.e. – any major developments
- Local and national wage bands
The Human Resources Function at John Lewis
John Lewis is one of the most successful retail groups in Britain, which includes both John Lewis department stores and the supermarket Giant, Waitrose.
John Lewis operates a partnership ownership. Which means that there are no outside shareholders, Instead every person within the partnership owns a share in the company.
Over 57,000 people are employed within the company, all off which are known as partners, as every employee of the company owns a part of the company. When the company was founded the owners son Mr Spedan Lewis believed that every person should feel apart of the company and not just some one who works there. He also stated that it was unfair for either the private owners of a business, or shareholders who invested money in it, to have a greater claim on its prosperity than those who invested their time and labour
At John Lewis the Human Resources department is known as staff office. The staff office at any of it 25 department stores will be out of the way from the main shop floor and most probably in a staff only area. This is because the customer have no need to visit the staff office as all they are more concerned about is getting a good service on from the staff on the shop floor.
Another reason for having the staff office off the shop floor is due to all the partners private details are kept there, and if the customers don’t know where the information is kept there is no chance that it could get hacked into.
Staff office keeps all the private and confidential information about the staff such as home address and telephone numbers. Under the data protection act only certain people with a legitimate need may have access to these kind of details, but before any one can gain access permission must be given by the partner allowing their details to be viewed.
As well as keeping all the partners details it is also the role of the staff office to recruit staff and keep staffing levels at what is required. It is also the role of the staff office to ensure that the partners have the skills required to do the job. If the partner does not have the skills then they may need training.
At John Lewis the staff training department is separate to the staff office, but like the staff office it will be out of sight of the consumer to the stores.
Like all organisations, John Lewis has to train all their staff when they first start at any of the stores and then on a regular basis with training such as health and safety. There are some training courses that only John Lewis will use there are other that every employee in the country would have received at some point in their working lives.
