Managing Resources for Promoting Child Fire Safety Awareness - Essay Example

Running Header: Managing Resources Student’s Name: Instructor’s Name: Course Code & Name: Date of Submission: Contents Contents 2 Introduction 3 Staff Recruitment 4 Other Resources Required 6 Staff Job Description 8 Project Evaluation 9 Policies 10 Operational Assurance 10 Conclusion 11 Reference 13 Managing Resources Introduction Risk management of resources is vital component of strategic management of every company. This process aids a company to technically handle risks associated with its undertakings in order to attain continuous benefit in every task and throughout the portfolio of every task. There are different types of risks and they include hazard, strategic, operational and financial among others. As stated the (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2005, p. 5), Fire and Rescue Service (FSR) is used to actively eliminate fire occurrences and associated risks instead of acting only when fire occurs. It is important for the FSR to establish distinct human resource strategies which are connected with needs and goals of the firm in order to succeed in attaining these goals. Skills and learning have huge strength in human resource strategies. Management is utilized to attain objectives of the organization. Resource and human resource management is used to reduce risks such as fire through improvement of fire safety awareness among highly prone age group in the population especially primary school children. Management of resource is an effective and efficient way of utilizing resources of the firm when they are required. The resources are inventory, production resources, human skills, information technology or finances. Human resource management is an efficient way to utilize organization employees because they will understand what they are expected to do and the way to do it. In the proposed project, two full time staffs will be recruited to act as community safety practitioners in order to promote child fire safety awareness. Therefore, it will be a prerogative of the organization to establish resources needed, apart recruiting and hire staff, to run programme of awareness efficiently and achieve benefits. Distinct policy and objectives is paramount if the management process is to be successful. Operation assurance is used to give credibility on ability of organization to attain it objectives. Staff Recruitment It is absolutely vital to understand places where excellent applicants are easily found, the effective way to reach them and to obtain their job requests. This engages a wide knowledge of labour sources and recruitment methods. The effectiveness of ways of obtaining the right applicants will depend on position to be filled, organization nature and sometimes the urgency of appointment. The firm will look at several sources which are likely to have potential and will include advertising, personal introductions, ex-service organization, executive and professional registers, agencies for private employment, schools and colleges, universities, offices for career advisory and agencies and centers for job. Executive search or headhunting is slowly gaining popularity as a method to target suitable applicants. This technique uses direct interaction with potential jobseekers, mostly for challenging or executive appointments, to confirm their enthusiasm in offered job and if possible to try to obtain their application. However, the organization will adopt advertising as a way to attract potential applicants since it has higher chances to attain the appropriate applicant. Advertising of vacancy using mass media communication will reach many potential applicants as compared to others. The two vacancies can be placed in local or/and nation press, television, local commercial radio and trade or professional journals. Career and exhibitions conventions are also potential places to place advertisement. The advantage of professional journals is that they have higher probability to get the appropriate candidate in regard to experience and qualifications but they have a downfall of being much more expensive and it has a long time lag between advertisement placement and date of publication. Since advertising is expensive and important, it is a good practice to weigh media choices accordingly. The organization will use local press to advertise the two vacancies because it is cover a large area effectively. To make sure that this advertisement gets to appropriate and suitable candidates, it will contain information necessary to attract interest and attention of the required community safety practitioners. The advertisement that will be placed in the local press will give a vivid template or word-picture of the suitable applicant and will capture the position demand and personal attributes. Keen consideration will be put in place to contents, layout and design of the advertisement. It will contain telephone number and named contact for any informal queries. Since the advertisement might not contain every information required, the ‘please contact for more information’ procedure will be utilized. Our organization will hire two practitioners on the base of contract which will be renewable after they expire. The contract will contain agreements between our organization and workers which will explain their rights of employment, duties and responsibilities. These will be referred to as contract terms. The employees will be issued with written statement of main terms of employment before the end of eight weeks of beginning work. The contract will aid in eliminating disagreements between employees and organization at later dates. Terms of employment contracts will be used to roll out what the employees and the organization will expect from each other. Therefore, employees will be issued with written statement containing particulars of employment. This will roll out the principle statement or major terms of employment in writing. Our organization will provide the two employees with major details of employment in document. This will be regarded as principal statement and will include: (i) Organization and employee name. (ii) A brief employment description or title of the job. (iii) The time when the employee started working. (iv) Rate of pay and time to be paid. (v) Hours that employee will be working per day. (vi) Entitlement to holidays. (vii) Location of employment. (viii) Arrangement of sick pay. (ix) Periods of notice (x) Procedure for grievances and details about disciplinary. (xi) Any other agreement which will alter conditions or terms of employment. (xii) Pension schemes and pensions. (xiii) If employment is temporary, what period will employment extend, or if it is permanent employment, when will the employment be terminated. The organization will help the employees to understand the content of the contract of employment and steps to take in case of contract breaches. The organization will regard bending of any of the set terms as a breach of contract. In case of organization breaches a contract, the employees will be sensitized on the need to try solving the problem through mediation before considering legal action. However, the employee will be free to take legal action if it will be hard to solve the issue with the organization. This can be handled through civil court or employment tribunal. In case where the employee will breach contract, the organization will try to solve the issue informally. In the occasion where the firm will encounter losses of finance due to employee breach of contract, it will file a complaint for the loss against employee. Other Resources Required Apart from hiring the staff, the programme initiated by the organization will be acquiring equipments for the course of improving fire safety. Smoke detectors will be used by the staff in order to stress their importance and how they work. These are devices used to give early warning, aid the occupants in event of fire and they are effective in saving lives. Also fire extinguishers will be required by the staff to demonstrate how they are used effectively. Fire extinguishers are not made to contain a huge or fire that is spreading fast (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2005). There varying fire extinguishers depending on type of fire. Class A extinguishers are used in combustible materials that are ordinary e.g. paper, wood, cloths and rubber. Class B is used on fires emanating from flammable liquids e.g. gasoline. A fire from appliances, equipment and other tool is put off using class C extinguishers. Flames from metal are contained using class D extinguishers while class K is used to contain fires from animal or vegetable oils or cooking fats. Labels containing instructions on how to use fire extinguisher will be obtained and put near them. Kits for emergency evacuation will be necessary as they are important when some emergencies happen and prolong than expected. The staff will be requiring literature materials to carry out education exercise. This will include posters, magazines and videos. They will be designed in away to attract primary school children. All of these equipments will be obtained from the Fire and Rescue Service under consideration of special programme (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2005). This will be in accordance to one of FRS key tasks which is to improve safety of fire in its region, including setting out steps for the provision of encouragement, information and publicity to eliminate fire and injury or death by fire. It also has a task of providing equipments and services necessary and efficient to cover the requirement (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2005, p.12). The cost to obtain these equipments from FRS is obviously low because this is a governmental organization and it major goal is not to make profit but to make sure that its main objectives are met. Net present value calculations will be used for this option and compare with other options to confirm that the option picked will have financial advantage over others. The net present value of this project will be the gap between sum of cash flows that are discounted which are predicted from the project and the money that was invested at the beginning. These resources will be obtained from a third party through process of procurement. This process involves the entire cycles from pointing out needs to the termination of contract of services. Procurement is found to be having several functions which include pointing out of needs of business, technical services, contracting and purchasing, commissioning, management of contract and replacement and decommissioning. Fire and Rescue service will to carry out procurement of equipments and services required by our project. Equipments to be procured are A, B, C, D and K classes of fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, kits for emergency evacuations and education materials. Staff Job Description The hired staff will have the responsibility of educating primary school children on the fire safety. Their job title will be educator. The staff will be required to have obligation of maintaining clean and safe working environment and coordinate with the organization on all issues concerning safety and health. CRB clearance will be mandatory for every staff member and it will be in accordance with legislation. Project Evaluation The aim of the project is to recruit community safety practitioners to educate primary school children on fire safety. The benefits of this project will be reduction of deaths, injuries and property losses. Children are expected to have gained techniques to handle and prevent risks at the end of the project (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2005). To identify that the project has attained these benefits, cost benefit analysis (CBA) and weighted benefit scoring will be adopted in order to incorporate effect of factors that are non financial on the proposed project. Cost benefit analysis will try to put a value on every factor having influence on the project. A value will be set on every factor and each will be measured in terms of finance e.g. a value on benefits of having children who have high awareness on fire safety. CBA is mainly recommended for huge projects with vital social benefits and this is the case with our project. CBA is where benefits and cost can be valued on basis of their cost of economy i.e. cost of opportunity offered, near satisfying, by values of market. Weight analysis of benefit is a method used in sectors of non profit where the firm has so many objectives and it is basically not interested in maximizing profit or to gain other objective of finance. It is mostly referred to as method of desiderata because initial step involves identifying a list of benefits which the firm is looking from an investment. The next step is to weight the desiderata and lastly ranking is done. The decisions to choose weight, scores and benefits are done by a wide group of representatives of parties that are interested. Policies The organization will formulate policies which will aim at retaining hired staffed. This is because the organization will have spent a lot of effort and time in training and recruiting the staff. Retention of the staff in the organization will ensure that the objectives set are attained efficiently. Employees who are contented with their job are not likely to move away. Staff commitment to the organisation is also connected with retention rate. Therefore, our organization will make policies to ensure that work practices are of high performance. In order to achieve this, it will include: Comprehensive selection and recruitment methods. Management system of performance and incentive compensation. Intensive training and employee involvement. Operational Assurance The organization will make sure that staff hired to educate children on fire safety awareness have met the minimum requirements set. It will also be able to know staffs that are trained but not on current levels of skill. To give a broader assurance on the ability of trainers to create awareness among children efficiently, the organization will establish a team of operational assurance consisting of highly experienced practitioners, which will be reporting on the progress made. This process will sell the credibility of the organization to the society they want to serve. Conclusion Management is the overall practice used to attain the objectives of the any organization. Management of resource is an effective and efficient way of utilizing resources of an organization when they are required. Therefore, resource and human resource management will be used to reduce risks such as fire through improvement of fire safety awareness among highly prone age group in the population especially primary school children. In to attain the objectives, the organization will recruit two full time staff to act as community safety practitioners to promote child fire safety awareness. The organization will adopt advertising as a method of attracting potential applicants because it has higher chances of obtaining the appropriate candidate. The local press will be chosen by the organization because it is an effective, countrywide and appropriate method. Contract will be adopted as a method of hiring the practitioners and they will be renewable. Agreements between the company and the employee will be clearly laid out in contract terms to eliminate future disputes. The organization will be seeking to acquire other resources apart from recruiting two practitioners which will help to accomplish the aim of the project. They will include smoke detectors, literature materials, fire extinguishers and kits for emergency evacuation which will be used by the practitioners to raise fire safety awareness. These equipments will be obtained from FRS and net present worth calculations will be used to support the decision. Procurement process will be adopted by the company to obtain these resources. The recruited staff will have their job description as educators and their role will exclusively involve educating school children on fire safety. Cost benefit analysis (CBA) and weight benefit scoring will be adopted as methods to evaluate our project. Policies on recruitment methods, compensation and training will be established with aim of retaining hired employees. Operation assurance will be used by the organization to sell it credibility to the public. This will be achieved through establishment of team of experienced trainer who will evaluate the performance of recruited staff. Reference Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2005, ‘Creating sustainable Communities’, National Procurement Strategy for the Fire and Rescue Service: 2005-2008, vol.1, no. 1, pp. 5-49. Read More