Assignment
On
Human Resource Management
Contents
Introduction:
Human Resource Management is the management of human resources within the organization that is designed to maximize employee performance in service of an employer’s strategic objectives. HRM is concerned for overseeing employee benefits design, recruitment, employee training and development and evaluation of their performance on continuous basis, organizational change and industrial relations issues. Throughout this assignment understanding of human resource theory and practice, impact of different laws and regulation and topical issues on the practice of human resource by today’s organization will be discussed. Throughout the following four task of this assignment application of Guest model in the organization, comparison of Storey’s definition of HRM, personnel and industrial relations issues, implications of line managers and employees’ for developing a strategic approach to HRM, details of flexibility, labor market influence of HRM, types of discrimination, effect and solution to discrimination within the organization, performance management ways, management of employee welfare, implementation of health and safety regulations in the organization and the overall theory and practice of HRM will be discussed (Gelade, and Ivery, 2103).
Task-1
A.C.1.1: Explaining the application of Guest’s model of HRM to ‘Uniliver’.
David Guest introduced His Guest’s model in 1987 that is really essential component of managing human resource management. This model holds that HRM policies and applications should be maintained for combination of strategy, commitment by the employees, appropriate adaptability and flexibility, competent and highly skilled personnel. In this model employee relationship is considered unitary between individual and the company. This model is unitary in nature that means employee conducts and commitment are linked into the goals of strategic management and closely related to the Harvard model of HRM.
Uniliver is one of the best and top multinational companies of the world. It believes building relationship between employee commitment and high performances it could be more successful. That why they view employee relationship as one. Their employees’ commitment has a direct connection with valued business consequences of the firm. Increasing social and corporate value and reducing various environmental effects this company wants to increase its business growth. To build a better and flexible working environment for their stuffs Uniliver designs their Human resource policies and strategies that have a direct relation with the various perspectives of David Guest’s model so that they can motivate the employees to provide their best performance and satisfy the goals and objectives of uniliver .Applying Guest model Uniliver is benefitted by their employees’ higher analytical and problem solving capability, amazing performance, continuous high performance with strategic objective and efficiency, reduces employee turnover (Stevens, and Campion, 2014)
A.C.1.2: Comparison of the differences between Storey’s definitions of HRM, personnel and IR practices:
Storey’s definition of HRM: HRM is an exclusive approach that wants to achieve competitive advantage by the development of highly committed and skilled workforce and overall use of cultural, structural and personnel techniques. Uniliver follows this definition of HRM in some cases. For example they want to achieve advantage over competitors by their workforce that is why they deploy the most efficient diplomatic people as line managers to deal with people. As a result their sales are increasing and market share is growing.
Personnel management: Personnel management or personnel focuses on stuffing, contracting with employees and other administrative tasks while human resource management focuses on management of workers, training of workforce, well being of the workforce. Personnel management directly handles employees and act as the mediator between management and the employees.
Personnel management of Uniliver is done by managers who get order from top management and deliver them to the frontline employees and they perform the task of hiring and developing of workforce that includes analysis of jobs, needs or recruitment, selection of right people, management of wages and salaries etc.
Industry relations: Also called employment relations or employee relations hold that Uniliver, for example, get more bargaining power as labor market is not perfectly competitive and there remain inherent conflict of interest between Uniliver and their employees for salary, benefits. Uniliver try t reduces the conflict and assures a better working environment (Gelade, and Ivery, 2013).
A.C.1.3: Assessing the implications for line managers and employees of developing a strategic approach to HRM for Uniliver.
Strategic approach to human resource management is formed and changed frequently with the changing event within the organization and environment. Strategic approach involves the overall task of planning, recruiting, training, developing, motivating, evaluating and rewarding workforce to satisfy the firm objectives and goals. Line manager and employees play a critical role in doing so.
Implications for line managers of Uniliver: Line manger deals with day to day people management for this they are called developers of people, reduce operational cost effectively, gathers and exploits technical knowledge to perform daily operations. Line manager of Uniliver continuously monitor and evaluate the work processes so that no fault occurs during production and operation, they examine the product quality and employee performances. Line managers allocate the total works among the workforce to get the tasks efficiently done and make sure dealing with wholesalers and retailers and their clients to allocate the goods among them and build a good long term relationship with the customers and client.
Implications for employees of Uniliver: Efficient and innovative employees of Uniliver have brought the firm in today’s height providing their bets performances and they are treated as key asset and foundation of productivity by Uniliver. Uniliver hires leaders who set direction and implement corporate strategy to bring employee commitment. Uniliver needs continuous development to grow market share and for doing so their employees are establishing performance matrices. Employees of Uniliver are very much productive because they get the support for the firm and their cooperation and work sharing prospers efficiency. Uniliver facilitates effective communication and feedback from employees that help to decrease mistakes and frustration during work (Michie, and Sheehan‐Quinn, 2011).
Task-2
A.C.2.1: Applications of model of flexibility in Uniliver
Flexibility is a management technique proposed by John Atkinson of the institute of Manpower studies in 1986 for organizing the workplace to maximize the use of human resources. This model divides the workforce into core and peripheral. It integrates flexible conditions into the management of Uniliver’s functional operations to fulfill the increasing demands of competitive market and reach strategic objectives and goals.
Core work force: core group consists of employees those are crucial to Uniliver, flexible functionally and difficult to replace because of their skills, technical knowledge and work experiences.
Peripheral workforces: the peripheral group consists of employees with numerical flexibility based on their supply of plenty of skills in the labor market and can be replaced easily and necessary for peaking times across the working day or week.
Uniliver applies the flexibility model in some changing business situations. When economic recession occurs around the world and the purchasing power of customers’ decreases then they produce low priced quality goods to comply with the situation and retain market share. When competitors enter into the market Uniliver changes its marketing strategy such product, price, place promotion strategy to deal effectively with the competitors .Flexibility benefits the operational and administrative level of uniliver with various included facilities (Aycan, 2015).
A.C.2.2: Discussing the types of flexibility developed by Uniliver.
Numerical flexibility: Uniliver sometimes establish numerical flexibility that enables them to change numbers employed at a sudden notice meet the fluctuations in demand for workforce. Uniliver adjust with this flexibility by hiring full time permanent, par time permanent employees or full and part time permanent/ volatile terms contract.
Temporal flexibility: Uniliver sometimes faces temporal flexibility situations that include the pattern of working hours to keep a balance between the company demands and their workforce needs. Uniliver deals with this type of flexibility by annualized hour employee hiring strategy where employees are contracted for a certain number of hours per year while the working hour in a week by employees may vary.
Financial flexibility: Based on the performance, designation, standard and participation level Uniliver sets flexible wages or salary or compensation structure. Here Uniliver provides individualized wages rather than standardized wage structure.
Functional flexibility: Uniliver motivates its employees for team working practices diminish the difference between craft and operators duties by using functional flexibility where employees have several skills and competent for more than several tasks. Uniliver terminates most of the boundaries between the tasks of employees (Chadwick, and Cappelli, 2015).
A.C.2.3: Examining employers and employee perspectives regarding the use of flexible working practices.
Flexible working arrangement helps both employers and employees in several contexts. Some common forms of flexible working practices are
Part time worker: Less than full time and usually 35-40 hours
Job sharing: Two or more employees share a work to complete the task more efficiently based o their context of expertise
Flextime: Within a time period employees are free to start and end the work
Home working: Without physical presence workers perform assigned tasks form home.
Tele-working: Through the digital media people perform task as form of consultancy, focus group training etc.
From the employer perspective: Employers of Uniliver use flexible working practices to keep competitors away, increase employee productivity, bring diversity to the organization, increase the attendance rate of employees, reduce overtime and property costs, to cultivate fresh employees and exploit their talent in the organization. Uniliver practicing flexible working arrangement have been able to reduced employee turnover, additional hours of operation, can build corporate image by friendly working environment with diversified workers.
From the employee perspective: Employees can work without tiredness and they can work willingly without any pressure. They can work in different firm to earn experience in diversified field balancing between work and family commitments. In this arrangement employees are more satisfied with career development and growth. Working at home arrangement employees can work for a long time, If Uniliver can reduce the harmful effect of flexible working arrangement they will be attaining competitive advantage (Welch, 2014).
A.C.2.4: Discussing the impact of labor market changes on flexible working practices.
Labor market is the combination of labor demand and supply where number of job and workers are available building a relationship between job seeking people and the job hiring organizations. Labor market changes frequently so Uniliver needs to cope with the changes.
Labor market changes have greater impact on flexible working practices of Uniliver. Demographic changes includes short and long stamina worker, costly and cheap workers, aged and younger workers. For example, when Uniliver perform business in Bangladesh they utilize the cheap labor, part time worker and full time worker on temporary basis. Aged worker are rising in UK so the young workers those are willing to work from home, at night shift. Uniliver need to manage that.
Women worker are increasing day by day in labor market. Hiring women worker is beneficial in some case and harmful in some cases like pregnancy leave, family pressure; do not let them work properly. Uniliver are hiring lot of women to deal with customer and clients and marketing managers are mostly women to handle diplomatically
Skills and qualifications is another very important factor that affect the flexible working practices of Uniliver because sometimes skilled worker are scarce and they fail to produce quality output. Flexible working practices cannot properly serve the firm with skilled and qualified worker (Schuler, Budhwar, and Florkowski, 2012).
Task-3
A.C. 3.1: Analyzing the different forms of discrimination in the organization.
Different types of discrimination with real examples:
Discrimination by race: If the applicant or employee is discriminated based on his/her color, race for recruiting, promotion, training, compensation it is called racial discrimination. For Example, Adams vs Chicago, 94CV5727 that was about promotional test for Chicago Police Department in which African-American and Hispanic Chicago police contended that the fewer minorities were offered promotions conducting discrimination.
Discrimination by sex: If the employees and applicant are discriminated based on their sex for recruiting, promotion or any other reason than sexual discrimination occurs. For example, In 1988 National Public Radio faced a situation of sexual discrimination when they were paying consistently 20% less than men to Nina Totenberg and Cokie Robert 20.In 1995 a contract reporter named Katie Davis filed a case of 1.2 billion against NPR.
Discrimination by age: If the employer terminates an employee before 40 years old or discriminate in hiring, promotion the applicant may have a valid reason to complain against the employer. For example, Elite force a well known security providing firm has a policy of retiring employees when they reaches 50.It is unlawful and discrimination against them (Folger, and Cropanzano, 2013).
A.C.3.2: Analyzing the practical implications of equal opportunities legislation for Uniliver.
Uniliver ensures equal opportunities in their working environment for all the employees to boost up the performance of the workforce. In Uniliver employees are judged on the basis of their skills, expertise, experience and competence not on the basis of sex, color, race etc. Men and women are treated equally in recruitment, promotion, benefits, firing, development and appraisal. Uniliver deals with three different areas of EEO.
Discrimination: Uniliver does not allow any discrimination in the working environment and they have a complain cell for the sufferer. They ensure equal opportunities for employees and applicant in promotion, training and development, compensation and any other benefits
Harassment: Unwanted and threatening behavior those are unwelcome and embarrassing for the victims. It takes in different form like swearing, joking, inappropriate or sexual favor, pinching, touching r etc .Uniliver never allow this kind of harassment within their organization. They treated men and women equally and a punishment cell for the people doing that kind of behavior ensures EEO in Uniluver
Affirmative action: In 1995, Uniliver Bangladesh faced with a situation where a lady worker was undue influenced for sexual relationship by the senior of her. The lady threatened to sue against the person but strict affirmative action taken by the Uniliver disciplinary committee made the person leave the job. So Uniliver always be careful for the equality of the employees (Daley, 2012).
A.C.3.3: Comparison between the approaches to managing equal opportunities and managing diversity.
Uniliver practices equal employment approach in their organization that includes combined efforts, equal participation and responsibilities for all the employees eliminating gender, sex ethnicity and disability differences. Equal opportunity is the engagement of employment practices and processes do not committing any discrimination, giving equality for the persons of different groups for higher productivity. Equal employment and Human rights commission forces Uniliver to appoint and reward employees based on different job related criterion
To drive equality in Uniliver diversity approaches give business and social justice incentives and it is proactively increasing employee skills, qualities that a diverse workforce should has. It is not like managing equal opportunities that focus only no discrimination against employees it encourages Uniliver to identify the differences among employees. Following dimension of Uniliver can be used to further differentiate (Youndt,Snell, Dean,and Lepak, 2016).
Force for change: Managing equal opportunity of Uniliver is influenced by the external forces like govern rules and regulations, public right, social fairness etc whereas managing diversity is influenced by internal forces of Uniliver like firm structure, top management, vision etc
Goals: Goal of equal opportunity is to minimize the discrimination and rectify mistakes occurred within Uniliver whereas goals of managing diversity is treating employees as individuals, giving unique assistance to each of them.
Integration: Diversity In Uniliver is very much integrated to make equality into practice is the duty of all managers whereas equal opportunity management is less integrated and driven by only human resource managers (Ichniowski, Shaw and Prennushi, 2013)
Task-4
A.C.4.1: Identifying and comparing the performances management methods used in Unilliver.
Uniliver continuously measure the performance of the employees for better performance management. Traditional and modern methods of performance management are by Uniliver in varying situation.
Identification and comparison of performance management methods:
Traditional methods: This methods are used in some special cases , for example, the critical incident method is used by uniliver on the basis of performance by the employee on a critical situation faced by the organization like handling public complain. Other traditional methods include graphic rating, alternative ranking, paired variation etc (Donnelly,Robinson and Reese, 2010).
Modern methods:
360degree feedback method: Feedback is gathered from a range of people like supervisors, subordinates, senior managers, group members and peer groups to gather the difficulties of performances and gathering more self awareness information.
Management by objectives (MBO): Uniliver use this performance management method when they have predetermined goals and objectives and deadline to achieve those set by technical managers and stuffs. Performance is measured comparing actual output with the set standard output by this objective oriented method.
Assessment center: Uniliver arranges this type of evaluation in an appraisal center combining the employees and managers together and they perform in simulation mood and the output is observed by expert people (Briscoe, and Schuler, 2014).
A.C.4.2: Assessing the management of employee welfare approaches in Uniliver.
Uniliver is concerned of employee welfare within and outside the organization .Uniliver conducts some effort to make the lives of employees worth living sometimes by set the pressure group or by their own willingness. This firm conducts welfare activities to increase loyalty and staying workforce, create experienced and productive worker, avoid pressure from government and other pressure groups and build overall good will and corporate image.
Unliver first identify some critical features of employee welfare like services and benefits provided to them in economic or other forms, balance between working and family life etc. Then they set some principles lke identifying employees’ core needs, never considering as benevolent gesture, ensuring reward on the basis of performances and cost of the service should be calculative (Gelade and Ivery, 2013).
Types of employee welfare services by Uniliver:
Safety services: Uniliver has a safe working environment with fire evacuation, smoking free zone, complaint box, own vehicle for employees and gratuity and after leave benefits.
Health services: Uniliver has a medical booth for emergency situation. Moreover there is health policy where one can save money for their further Medicare.
Counseling services: Uniliver have arrangement for counseling services for their employees in various situations. When employees get tired of working they can take counseling and on several issues like psychological, family related, personal issues they can take counseling services (Adler and Ghadar, 2010).
A.C.4.3: Analyzing the implications of health and safety legislation on Human Resource practices.
For preventing accidents, injuries, diseases in the working environment occupational safety and health legislation set some standards and specify the consequences if the standards are not followed properly or broken by any organizations. It mandates a firm what should be done and how should be done to reduce workplace incidents and clarify the employee, employer and managers responsibility.
Health and safety at work Act 1974(HASAWA) is an act of UK government that depicts the principles of organizational structure and authority for inspiring employee health and safety. It bounds the firms like Uniliver operating business in UK to be careful of the employee health and safety. Uniliver designs their building with fire evacuation, emergency escalator, own transportation system, security guards at workplace and emergency medical booth as a result of the implications of Occupational Health and Safety legislation in the organization.
Though health and safety legislation involves increased costs on employee training and HR practices, human resource managers have to ensure that both the employees and the organizations must comply with the requirements set by the Health and Safety legislation (Fey and Björkman, 2011)
A.C.4.4: Evaluating the impact of another topical issue on human resource practices.
Topical issues are current issues those are running into the present world that can bring changes in the practice of human resource management of any firm like Uniliver. Uniliver needs to change their strategies including recruitment strategy, selection strategy, work distribution strategy; performance appraisal strategy etc. One of the most important topical issues of present business world is rising of aged people participation in the workplace. Aged people are participating in various working condition with various capabilities and so the strategy, standards and welfare planning and benefit planning should be matched in order to exploit ultimate benefit from this working group. A firms arrangement for recruiting, selecting, training, developing, motivating, evaluating, rewarding, eliminating discrimination activities facilitates topical issues that usually include-Productivity improvement, Safety of workers at workplace, arranging training facilities, alleviating workplace discrimination based on sex, race, color, age etc, ensuring on work and after job benefits and advantages, appropriate personnel recruitment and motivation and managing diversified workforces (Coff,2015)
Conclusion
Human resources practices are getting important day by day because of the competitors action, governmental disciplinary activities, and movement from different pressure groups and increasing demand by the workforce. Eradicating all types of discrimination within and outside the organization form should ensure he4alth and safety measures, equal employment opportunities to create a bunch of loyal, hardworking, effective, productive, long lasting, qualified workforce. Employee performance should be continuously monitor end their performance should be evaluated to provide appraisal that help workers to get motivation and encouragement to complete the task efficiently to match the human resource objectives. Organizations should practice human resource theory continuously to conducts daily operations effectively to ensure a better flexible working environment (Welch, 2014).
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