Human Resource Management - Essay Example

?Human Resource Management Introduction The drive for competitiveness and economic performance is a process that never ends in a business because it is what the organization depends on for sustainability (Anonymous, 15). The current global business environment is sometimes very volatile and hence, it requires businesses to be flexible, adaptive, and responsive so as to achieve their desired goals. For organizations to respond to such challenges, they need to invest more in employee participation and involvement, other than just technology and capital manipulation. Anonymous (6) believes that change rate is another significant challenges to organizational behavior that after being successful in a competitive business environment. The survival of business dictates critical attention that focuses on the competition, competitive profits, and human resources. To achieve positive outcomes for both the organization and the individual employee, many an organization have resorted to the application of Employee Involvement (EI). Ulrich (1996, pp. 12) notes that EI has helped many organizations respond to business challenges besides improving their economic performances. Such organizations have adopted many strategies, ranging from customer satisfaction, quality circles, teamwork, participatory decision making, consultative committees, work life quality, total quality management, and many more. The most important pre-requisite in copping with these strategies is the employees’ and managers’ willingness to change the manner in which work in their organizations was traditionally done (Wilkinson, 1988, pp 107). EI has increased processes and practices that are being utilized by organizations. However, despite EI programs being available from a long time, their contributions in improving the performance of organizations has not yet been clearly recognized or understood. Employee Involvement and Participation Employee involvement involves exerting an upward and countervailing pressure on management by employees (Armstrong, 2006, pp97). Additionally, it is associated with the adversarial model of relations in a workplace. Employee participation can either be direct or indirect. Employee involvement engages the consideration of common interests between employees and management. The information communication, financial involvement, consultations, problem solving, worker directors, among others are all aimed at influencing the behavior of employees and changing organizational culture. Organizations mainly introduce EI for three main reasons: economic, moral and behavioral. Indirect employee participation and consultation makes use of employees’ potential benefits in the process of decision making. The major impediments to employee participation are attitudes of trade unions and management. EI is a participative process that makes use of the entire employee’s capacity. Legge (2004, pp 43) encourages organizations to employ employee management because it increases employees’ commitment for the success of the business. In distinguishing EI from employee participation, Robins by observing that EI tends to be more encompassing as employees utilize all their capacity in the organizational success. This view is further supported by Wilkinson (1988, pp98) as he defines EI as the participative process that utilizes workers’ entire capacity, designed to encourage commitment among all employees. On the other hand, employee participation does not specifically seek that individual commitment degree and hence, it is only seen as a subset of employee involvement. For example, participation by employees can only be limited to their participation in the circles of quality and their outcomes. However, employee involvement links quality circles to organizational success and therefore is acts as a strategy to improve performance. Importance of Employee Involvement EI refers to the creation of an environment in which the employees have an impact on the actions and decisions that affect their work. EI is neither a tool nor a goal. As many organizations practice it. EIO is rather seen as a leadership or management philosophy about the way people are able to contribute to the organization at their best. High performing organizations normally focus on investing and valuing their employees. Anonymous (12)says that it is important that management understands the designed processes and practices that tap the skills, knowledge, and abilities possessed by their employees, as they can lead to greater performance and productivity. Management of strategic human capital is usually a pervasive challenge. Service companies have the greatest gains of shifting from bureaucratic to EI as their employees are based on the front-line besides understanding their customers in a better way than part of the organization. The benefits that an organization is likely to achieve by encouraging employee participation are improved, efficient and more innovative work procedures and methods (Ulrich, 1996, pp 71). Efficient work procedure and methods reduce cost of production thus increasing profits and performance. On the other hand, improved and innovative methods will definitely ensure product and service quality. High quality services and products consequently guarantee consumer satisfaction, and hence guaranteed market. This ensures that the business survives in the competitive global environment. Secondly, EI ensures that the organization has better communication with its employees from teamwork and cross training. Ulrich (1996, pp 56) says that communication is the basis of improved organizational performance and survival. It ensures employees satisfaction in the made decision. Consulting employees and giving them a chance to contribute in the decision making process helps to deal with things like strikes or go slow in an organization. Another important benefit of EI is attracting and retaining employees. This benefit accrues to both the employee and the organization. Retaining employees for a long time ensures quality work because once employees become accustomed to one working environment, they become specialized in their specific areas. This yields quality services as well as employees’ satisfaction. It also lowers the costs associated with training new employees besides ensuring workers’ job security. Moreover, it increases staffing flexibility (Ulrich, 1996, pp 42) because employees can engage in running different departments since they have the experience. On the other hand, there is minimum supervision by the management because the employees feel attached to their work and are seriously committed. Employee flexibility also increases turnover besides reducing absenteeism by employees. Employees enjoy their work and are sure of job security in an organization that employs EI. Therefore, they will report to work daily since they are not interested in other jobs, and they understand their role and importance to the organization. EI also ensures effective conflict resolution and reduced grievances (Ulrich, 1996. Pp. 21). Once the management and employees interact freely at their work place, it becomes easy to monitor them. Incase of a conflict, it can be easily resolved. On the other hand, grievances are easily reduced as employees and management are likely to communicate effectively hence airing their problems freely without fear of intimidation. Additionally, EI ensures that only the best decisions are made in an organization, through the consultative approach. Involving employees in decision making is very healthy since some employees can contribute valuable information that will help in improving business performance. Furthermore, employees feel they are part of the organization and hence are satisfied by the decision made since they were involved in coming up with the same. One other benefit of EI is the expansion of staff skills (Anonymous, 5). This results from the fact that employees work for a very long term that they get to participate hence know what is involved in every department. Therefore, they can work anywhere in the organization and this becomes beneficial in case of staff shortage. In such a case, the employees benefit by shifting from monotonous work thereby killing their boredom. Others include improved morale and less change resistance. EI involves three essential variables: communication, teamwork and participatory decision making. EI allows attitudinal reactions among employees to influence the performance of the organization. EI increases satisfaction, motivation, communication across and within functions, willingness to participate in problem solving as well as enhanced acceptance of practices and pr4ocess that organizations may initiate. If EI is believed to be an important strategy in developing the competencies of core business, unlike traditional business, product and market strategies, the focus is then downward driven to the individual (Anonymous, 11). Conclusion For businesses to survive in the competitive global environment today, EI is very important. EI links organizational performance outcomes to a variety of a wide range of workplace problems like absenteeism, high production costs and poor product quality to an efficient production process (Ulrich, 1996, pp 56). The correlation between business performance and employee involvement has generally been found to be marginally positive. EI involves many operational practices that are common to many approaches ranging from human resource management, high involvement and high performance. The involvement associated with such approaches is a continuum that starts from seeking of information through to investment decisions involvement, and dependence on organizational context. Employees also reap important benefits from EI. These include gaining a wide range of skills, flexibility that reduces work boredom, improved job satisfaction and morale, reduced supervision, reduced grievances and improved conflict resolution and better decisions. Therefore, it is important that modern business switch off from bureaucratic and traditional approaches to employee involvement in order to improve their performance and survive in this competitive business environment. References Anonymous. Employee involvement. Retrieved on 11th July, 2011 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/32526359/Employee-Involvement. Armstrong, 2006. A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice (10th ed.). London: Kogan Page. Legge, K. 2004. Human Resource Management: Employee Participation and Involvement. (Anniversary ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ulrich, D. 1996. Employee Involvement: How does it Benefit the Employees and the Organization? Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. Wilkinson, A. 1988. "Empowerment: theory and practice". Personnel Review 27 (1): 40–56. http://hermia.emeraldinsight.com/vl=2601464/cl=84/nw=1/fm=docpdf/rpsv/cw/mcb/00483486/v27n1/s3/p40. Retrieved 2007-10-17. Read More