Human Resource Management Strategies and Policies Order Instructions: 1. In what ways is NCR’s human resource management different from traditional personnel management?
2. How did the HRM strategies and policies of the company contribute to its success?
3. How did the managing director earn the trust and loyalty of the employees?
4. Why did he think their trust and loyalty were important to the company?
Human Resource Management Strategies and Policies Sample Answer
Q1. There are significant differences between NCR’s human resource management and traditional personnel management. These differences exist in terms of scope, approach, and application.
The scope of Services
Generally, NCR’s human resource management (HRM) has a wider scope compare to traditional personnel management. The scope of the latter involves functional roles such as planning of manpower, analysis of jobs, recruitment, job evaluation, performance appraisal, training of administration, and other associated activities. On the other hand, NCR’s HRM encompasses all these activities and an additional of other organizational developmental duties such as communicating shared values, developing the culture of an organization, leadership, and motivation.
Furthermore, the HRM approach is integrated into the company’s core strategy and vision. It aims at optimizing the use of human resources for the attainment of an organization’s objectives. It is this philosophical context and strategy that makes it become more purposeful, effective, and more relevant when compared to personnel management approach.
Variation in Approach
The traditional personnel management seems to be more attached to crucial customs, norms, and established practices. This is different from the human resource approach that offers accords significance to the values and mission of NCR. The personnel management approach also involves the establishment of policies, rules, contracts, and procedures. It is determined to monitor and enforce compliance with these regulations, at the same time delineating from a written contract. The HRM remains quite impatient with the organization’s rules and regulations. It is for this reason that NCR’s HR managers tend to relax rules in accordance with the needs of the business and hence; proceed with the spirit of the contract instead of the letter of the contract.
Difference in Nature
HRM has quite a proactive nature unlike traditional personnel management that is reactive. Personnel management remains aloof from crucial activities of the organization; it functions independently and uses a reactive approach when coming up with changes in corporate strategies and goals. On the other hand, is integrated with the organization’s strategies and makes use of a proactive approach to organizing the employees to work to attain the corporate goals.
Difference in Application
Personnel management is devoted to reconciling the aspirations this leads to an instance whereby there is the fixation of work conditions that are applicable to all employees rather than being aligned with overall corporate goals. HRM values thrust on handling each working independently and accord greater significance to development activities that are customer-focused. It also promotes individual staff members instead of negotiating with trade unions.
Finally, personnel management lays down strict job description with several grades and fixed policy of promotion. This is different from NCR’s HRM that has fewer grades and ranks. It widely defines job responsibilities hence; offering much scope for using creativity and initiative, and several career pathways commitment, and talent which are the basic drivers of advancement of careers.
Q2. The main responsibility of HRM is to distribute the duties of personnel departments over a large number of people so that everyone is responsible for something. HRM also deals with and decreasing the firm’s costs. Therefore, HRM comes up with policies and strategies that drive firms towards achieving their goals. For instance, it develops strategies that aid in increasing the workers’ motivation, thus promoting performance. Another very crucial role of HRM is financing. HRM deals with wages, therefore, it makes policies that save a great deal of money and improve the company’s development rather than the personnel department saved money.
HRM policies also aid in improving productivity. Some of its roles include training, induction, job description, and redundancy. All these help in promoting the product, therefore, increasing the satisfaction of customers. By doing this, the company benefits by having a good reputation which offers them a competitive advantage that sets them a notch higher compared to similar firms in the market. HRM comes up with innovative on record keeping that helps the company with its taxes and how to increase the company’s performance.
Q.3 Trust is regarded as the bedrock of any organization’s success. Mostly, people tend to concentrate on the issue in terms of clients, and how they have to believe in the company’s management and their products and services. However, trust within any company is very crucial, employees must believe in each other as well as their managers. Without trust, there is poor communication, teamwork this deteriorates performance.
Make a connection
One of the effective strategies of managers building trust is through the creation of a personal connection. It has been proven that as an individual’s power increases, their perceived trustworthiness decreases simultaneously. Therefore, managers should counteract this view by knowing his/her team and allowing them to know him/her too. To achieve this, the managers can chat about how they share a hometown or how they like some common sports teams. They can also host regular brown-bag lunches or take part in some activities of their team members.
Transparency and honesty
Managers should share as much as they can about the current health of the company as well as its future goals. Without such communication, an information void may develop. Employees will fill this void and they will do so with negative information. Therefore, managers should share some data such as compensation and regularly distribute information pertaining performance metrics, financial results, and some notes on what was discussed in board meetings. This helps the employees to trust the manager. As a result, they get greater faith and loyalty in the manager. Transparency also calls for the manager to have the integrity of telling the truth even though it is a point where the manager is the bearer of bad news. Mostly, employees do not trust managers that do not tell them the hard stuff.
Encourage instead of Commanding
It is certain that employees can differentiate between being given orders and being offered an encouragement. Managers should learn that they will not succeed in the long run if they tell people what to do instead of motivating them to do it. This is because employees tend to work harder and smarter when they are empowered to succeed and believe the company’s aims are in line with theirs.
Some other ways through which managers can earn trust from their staff involve taking the blame during some instances and giving the credit too, they should not favor some employees and should be competent.
Q4. Employees depend on their managers for development and guidance on how they should better their skills. According to PAHL and RICHTER, trust promotes the development of employees by the employees trusting the manager is accurate whenever he is analyzing their performance and creating a development plan (PAHL & RICHTER, 2009, Pg. 17).
For change to be executed properly, a strong bond of trust should exist between the manager and the employees. The employees should trust that the information given to them by the managers for successful implementation of the change. With trust, a manager can ask an employee to go beyond is duties and handle an important project. In turn, the employee believes that she/he can do it and devotes to put on an extra effort.
Human Resource Management Strategies and Policies References
PAHL, N., & RICHTER, A. (2009). How To Gain Trust From Employees. München, GRIN Verlag GmbH. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2010091421028.
