Implementing Human Resources Strategies: Kenya Tea Development Authority - Case Study Example

Implementing Human Resources Strategies Table of Contents 0 Introduction 3 2.0 Literature Review 4 3.0 Critical Analysis 6 4.0 Recommendation and Conclusion 8 4.1 Consider Strategic Vision 8 4.2 Demographic Consideration 9 4.3 Transfer of Knowledge 9 Bibliography 10 ‘’Human resource strategies can be stimulating to produce and satisfying to display, but how can we make sure that they are implemented?’’ Torrington, D et al, 2011, p73 1.0 Introduction Organizations are run on various resources that all seem important in achieving its objectives. However, among these resources, human resources stand out to be the core engine of organizations. This becomes a fact as it is evident that every other organization is powered by its people. It is the people in the organization who even plan on how to use the other resources wisely in order to achieve the organization’s objectives. In cases where human resources are not well managed, there’s always failure in the organization with a lot of losses and unattained aims and objectives. It is therefore critical that various strategies be formulated, provided and implemented in order to ensure that all the necessary requirements are available to make human resources work effectively. There are human resource professionals employed in various organizations to come up with the most appropriate strategies. These strategies stirrup the performance of human resources in order to support organizational direction. However, a lot of resources and effort can be employed in coming up with such resources that will never be implemented or partially implemented. It is therefore necessary that every human resource strategy that is formulated, gets implemented in order to achieve its intended purpose. Organizations therefore must think beyond just strategy formulation and go a step further to ensure that those strategies are implemented in the high-level areas that can drive success in the organization. An organization can resort to produce the best human resource strategies in the world since they have the best human resource professionals in the world. Those strategies can also be produced in the highest numbers possible. However, if those many strategies that are considered to be the best, are not implemented, it is better not to even come up with them in the first place. This study will be aimed at examining the Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA) that has been criticized in regards to their management of human resources. The assessment of the shortcomings of this organization’s approach and the impact of this shortcoming to the performance of the organization will also be done. The last section will look at the organization can integrate a more strategic approach to their human resource management and how the organization would benefit from the proposed recommendations. 2.0 Literature Review Any organization is capable of affecting its performance through either good or bad human resource management strategies. However, a good human resource management strategy is one that combines various systems of human resource activities in order to impact the outcomes of the organization. Adequate emerging as well as past researches on strategic human resource management have come up to assert that human resource strategies does indeed affect an organization’s performance as well as its outcome levels (Batt, 2002, p. 587). His finding has been proved amidst criticism. Significant relationship between various organizational performance and measures of such performances, have been established by several researches (Arthur, 2004, pp. 670-687). Some of the measures of human resource performance as used in this study include: high performance and high involvement work systems (Huselid, 2005, p. 635). Factors such as stiff global competition in businesses that is brought about either by technological advancements, shortening of business cycle, and an organizational shift from manufacturing to knowledge based economy have prompted organizations to formulate and implement strategies that can make them stay on top of competition (Dyer & Reeves, 2005, p. 656). Organizations are therefore triggered by the pressure to achieve competitive advantage due to such factors. Human resources and systems of practices set aside to manage employees are considered to be part of the competitive advantage in an organization. Organizations can therefore harness this competitive advantage from the employees through formulation and implementation of human resources strategies that are in the same line with the organization’s purpose of existence and objectives (Wright, et al., 2001, p. 701). There has been a concentration in the study of specific human resource functional areas such as employee training, compensation, appraisal and selection, in the past (Boxall & Purcell, 2000, p. 183). Therefore, the earlier researches used to consider such human resources functions as means and ends in themselves. This is to mean, for example, that training was examined and studied in isolation of other functions with all the failures and successes associated to human resource management performance were associated with the inputs and the outputs specific to the training function (Porter, 2005). However, there was less done to find out the impact of combining other human resource functions together such as, the impact in human resource management outcome when the training function could be combined together with selection, compensation, and appraisal. This concept led to the development of the human resource functional areas in isolation from one another without doing much research on the impact of coordinating several functional areas together (Wright & MacMahan, 2002, p. 295). This led to the evolution and rise of the concept of strategy and strategic management whose main focus was on how organizations could position themselves strategically, ready for global competitive business environment (Miles & C.C, 2004, p. 36). This development was then followed closely with an interest on how human resource management can be able to formulate and implement the correct strategies specific to their organizational systems. Several of these studies were used to show and prove that strategy implementation is more of a craft than strategy formulation which is more scientific. 3.0 Critical Analysis The Kenya Tea Development Authority is the body in Kenya that is responsible for production, research and marketing the Kenyan tea. The organization has however had several human resource lapses for a very long time. The authority has been blamed for low compensations by the employees and farmers. The recent introduction of a machine that aids in plucking tea has also faced equal criticism. The organization has therefore faced a lot of shortcomings due to the various human resource management problems that they have been having and not able to contain. To begin with, the organization was blamed for paying its employees, especially the laborers who pluck tea, a small amount in compensation that is not equivalent to the amount of work they do. This has seen the laborers go on the road multiple times demanding that the pay be raised. In terms of the Organization’s capacity and daily returns, such days are some of the toughest days for their companies when the laborers don’t turn to work. Tea being the major export of the country, there are specific goals that need to be met in order to achieve the required quantities required for export by the importing countries which are mainly the European countries. The strike by the workers only mean that lower quantities of tea will be processed per day hence this will lower the capacity of the factories to meet their export targets. Because of that, the expected revenues also decrease drastically hence the economy is also impacted. Another impact of low compensation of workers to the organization has been that, the organization has experienced a system where good employees that it has depended on for a very long time have been leaving their companies for other private factories that give higher compensation. This leaves the organization’s factories with few workers who sometimes also have inadequate experience to do the work. It still falls back to affect the organization’s export capacity. When the organization through its various factories, keep on losing good workers, it needs to also keep on training other workers to take up the positions of those lost. As training exercise is an expensive exercise, the organization will risk wasting a lot of resources in training workers that it cannot keep for long. In this scenario, it is the private tea factories that benefit as they receive already trained workers that leave KTDA. The organization also faces a risk of losing older employees who are considered to be more skilled as they are approaching their old age and will soon retire. The organization also acquired new machines that are able to do the plucking with a reduced number of laborers working for it. However, this is a step that has been criticized greatly by both the laborers and the workers’ union which bargains collectively on behalf of all the workers. The criticism has always been that, when this machine is introduced, many workers will lose their jobs hence rendering them jobless. This is against the Kenyan government’s manifesto and vision 2030 that aim at providing jobs to all employable citizens of the country. The machine is able to do much work while using only one man to control it, hence it was thought to be the best step for the organization to reduce its human resource expenses and increase efficiency. It is estimated that one such a machine, being operated by one worker, is able to do eight times as much work as one man working without the machine can do in a day Due to the initial forceful introduction of this technology, there was a massive demonstration by protesting workers who were against it since the technology would take their jobs and render them jobless. The organization therefore had no alternative than to just do away with this ‘’good-bad’’ technology. As a result, the organization has faced, and is still facing human resource management problems as it has to deal with many workers who are also not as efficient as expected. The organization uses too much expenses on to maintain the employees, an amount that more than half could be saved for other operations. The company therefore faces the problems of dealing with this big number of workers with reduced output than work with few men with the plucking machines and increase its output by eight times in a day and save more than half its salary expenses. Looking at the organization keenly, there’s lack of strategic human resource management skills that is able to deal with such human resource management problems. It will be in the best interest of the organization to take up certain human resource management strategies in order to deal with its human resource management challenges. 4.0 Recommendation and Conclusion As a good human resource manager, I would give the following three recommendations for implementing human resource strategies to help it fix its human resources management problems. 4.1 Consider Strategic Vision The human resource strategies that are being formulated cannot operate in a vacuum. It would be important for the organization to have align its strategies with the strategic vision so as to know where it is aiming to be in the future. Therefore, the human resource strategies will be implemented in such a way to make the organization meet its vision. It would be wise for the organization’s management to review their vision and organize the human resource activities that are in line with it and can help them achieve the vision. 4.2 Demographic Consideration The organization should realize that employees grow old with time and as this happens, they approach retirement. In this case, the organization should not put their reliability on some few most experienced workers without considering training and coaching of new and young workers who will take over afterwards. To avoid high staffing costs associated with an aging employee population, it would only be best for the organization to mx its employees, both old and young. The organization also needs to offer better compensation and even bonuses to its workers as a motivated employee normally produces higher returns and do not waste working hours on demonstrations. The compensation to the workers should be higher than or at the same range with those of the competitors to avoid losing good workers to the competitors. 4.3 Transfer of Knowledge The organization requires to transfer knowledge from one department to another. In this case, it will be able to minimize on losses whenever a particular department fails to deliver since other departments can deliver on the same duties. This will reduce overreliance and promote continuity and minimal impacts on targeted productivity and effectiveness. In a nutshell, it is always advisable for all organizations to maintain proper practices and functions of human resources management. In this case, functions such as selection, compensation, appraisal and training, when coordinated together, will ensure higher performance and employee outcome levels. Strategic human resource management involves coordinating such functions in line with an organization’s strategies. The process however, involves strategy formulation and implementation. A strategy that is only formulated and not implemented is more or less a strategy never formulated at all. Implementation of strategies is more of a craft than a science. Therefore, for better human resource management, there should be a proper recommendation for human resource strategy implementation. Bibliography Arthur, J., 2004. Effects of Human Resource System on Manufacturing Performance and Turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 37(3), pp. 670-687. Batt, R., 2002. Managing Customer Services: Human Resource Practices, Quit Rates and Sales Growth. Academy of Management Journal, 45(3), p. 587. Boxall, P. & Purcell, J., 2000. Strategic Human Resource Management: Where have we come from and where shpould we be going?. International Journal of Management Reviews, 2(2), p. 183. Dyer, L. & Reeves, T., 2005. Human Resource Strategies and Firm Performance: What do we know and where do we Need to go?. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 6(3), p. 656. Huselid, M., 2005. The Impact of Human Resource Management Practices on Turnover, Productivity and Corporate. Academy of Management Journal, 38(3), p. 635. Miles, R. & C.C, S., 2004. Designing Strategic Human Resource Systems. Organizational Dynamics, 13(1), p. 36. Porter, M., 2005. Competitive Advantage. 1st ed. New York: New York Free Press. Wright, P., Dunford, B. & Snell, S., 2001. Human Resources and the Resource Based View of the Firm. Journal of Management, 27(6), p. 2001. Wright, P. & MacMahan, G., 2002. Theoretical Perspectives for Strategic Human Resource Management. Journal of Management, 18(2), p. 295. Read More