HRM Links at Different Levels - Term Paper Example

REVIEW OF THE HRM FUNCTION Introduction Human Resource Management (HRM) function is one of the most important functions within the business organization and therefore it requires a greater degree of attention by the management. HRM can be defined as “a philosophy of people management based on the belief that human resources are uniquely important to sustained business success”. An organization gains competitive advantage by using its people effectively, drawing on their expertise and ingenuity to meet clearly defined objectives. HRM is aimed at recruiting capable, flexible and committed people, managing and rewarding their performance and developing key competencies (hrm.guide.net, online HRM news portal). Facilities Management Catering (FMC) was formed in 1999 by Frank McCartney, Collin Botting and Martin Joyce. Three of them have put in more than 25 years into the running of the largest business portfolio of sports, and social and event catering in Europe. Since it inception the FMC has developed into a leading specialist in the sports stadiums and event market. Now it is the catering arm of the Sports and Leisure Division of Compass Group. The Compass Group is the biggest catering company in the world. recruitment to country level projects, including processing factories that are put under the direct supervision of senior HRM managers who, in turn, are answerable to the HRM director in the US head office. FMC has been outsourced to provide all food and beverage supplies of the Chelsea Football Club(CFL) on home match days and for non-match day functions. My role in the company is to carry out all recruitments along with another manager and some assistants. Our recruitment department is responsible for the provision of staff for all non-match day functions and a further 700 staff for home match days. It is my function to provide staff to all our retail units on the site. There are 23 bars and 31 food units which require 310 staff members to man them during every match.. The staff members are usually recruited as casual employees on a seasonal engagement plan. Those current and newly recruited employees are inducted and trained and at the end they are required to sign a contract of employment at the beginning of each season. The above organizational chart illustrates how the various HRM links at different levels operate and interact to achieve the corporate objectives of the company. In my capacity as a recruitment manager I am responsible for the following integrated functions and make all strategic options and choices (Armstrong, 2006, p.133). All recruitment, including interviewing potential job applicants. Job analysis Preparation of job descriptions Job evaluation by applying HRM techniques Placement Training & Development Termination & Compensation I come under the direct supervision of the Employees Relations Manager who requires me to perform these activities with a greater sense of responsibility since the corporate objectives of the company are inevitably connected with the core elements of this function and I am expected to play a leadership role (Lengnick-Hall and Lengnick-Hall, 2002, p176). I have two recruitment assistants below me. My Employees Relations Manager comes under the General Manager who in turn is just below the Stadium Catering Director. It is the duty of me my colleague and the assistants to both coordinate and carry out the recruitment activities in close coordination with other managers in the catering department. We are expected to participate in a meeting with the Catering Director every two weeks so that we are apprised on what is new in planning and what’s expected of us in the process of implementation of new plans, if any. Particularly plans are drawn with the prime focus on their achievable targets which in turn are divided into short term and long term ones. For example one of the objectives is the creation of a ready-to-draw-on pool of well trained labor in the catering unit so that there would not be a skills shortage when seasonal fluctuations in demand and supply occur because of demand variations arising from various other league clubs.. I have focused my attention on the three strategic imperatives – Service Quality Index (SQI), Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) and Employer of Choice Index (ECI) in the process (Losey, Ulrich and Meisinger, 2005, p.191). My own recruitment strategy is based on a nation-wide breakdown of demographics. I have of late gone for casual on and off recruitment though the potential applicants look for more varied experience at different levels of operations. I have, particularly, been told to maximize productivity levels through a well coordinated effort with the other recruiting manager. In the process, a set of guidelines has been developed to offer a package of incentives to potential recruits who are more likely to stick with the company after training and development (Sartain and Finney, 2003, p.77). The package includes both monetary and non-monetary incentives such as pay rises, performance related pay and promotions. While the PEST or PESTLE analysis is primarily aimed at looking at the external environment of an organization, there is the ever increasing significance of this analysis for understanding the HRM function in the organizational context. The immediate impact of it on the HR manager’s functions can be seen when we take a step by step look at the whole process. PEST or PESTLE stands for political, economic, social, technological – and by extension- legal and environmental influences on the business organization. Political influences on HRM function include such active roles played by trade unions, advocates of labor rights, politicians of various hues and cries and shareholders. In my organization, there is no such significant role for this phenomenon because it is a catering company that depends on seasonal hands to run a service that does not last too long. Organized labor does not have a place of importance in my company, though even the casual employee is entitled to a minimum package of job related benefits. The recruiting manager’s freedom to engage services of a variety of employees is limited in the context of catering and therefore my tasks are basically determined by the scope of the general catering hand (Bogardus, 2007, p.129)For instance I have to deal with a team of supervisors who act in close coordination with their respective departmental heads to generate maximum revenue on a given day. Political influences are limited to a few instances of interference made by local authorities by way of imposing standards on service delivery. For example in the United Kingdom (UK) we have to deal with both the British government and different EU organs such as EU Commissions on employment though such dealings are negligibly smaller in number. Economic influences include all government policies such as fiscal, monetary, national minimum wage, supply-side and demand management. Our catering operations of the company are subject to what the British government seeks to implement by way of policy decisions to influence macroeconomic variables such as employment, inflation, money supply, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, government borrowings, the current account of the Balance of Payments and so on. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has been more active in achieving the target rate of inflation of 2.5% and this means prices of essential goods such as food and drinks will be watched persistently by it. As such we have been forced to increase labour productivity by spending more on training and development of skills. My company is affected by these policies as much as other businesses are. Social factors include different consumer group variations and their purchasing styles and habits. These habits definitely have an impact on my company’s sales. Nowadays, people are more conscious of health and therefore they place emphasis on health products such as cholesterol-free food and drinks. Technological factors such as recent developments in production processes influence business organizations in a manner that make them either vulnerable to competition or give them an advantage over their rivals. My company has increased its annual expenditure on food processing technologies though such expenditure is relatively smaller when compared to labour cost. Legal influences come from laws enacted by the government and local authorities to protect labor rights and even environment. However, rules and regulations that the British government and the EU put out from time to time to seek compliance with procedures such as quality and packaging increase the company’s costs. Similarly there are those illegal interview questions that I have to avoid asking from interviewees. For example questions about race, sex orientation, age, country of origin, color, personal preferences and family history of diseases are all prohibited by state and federal laws. Environmental laws also affect my company’s operations to a lesser extent. For example the company is responsible for the maintenance of the club premises from being littered by customers. Similarly we are subject penalties for any litter that may be traced back to our own packaging material. Thus we are subject to intense scrutiny by the authorities. In the light of above PESTLE analysis I have been particularly struck by the ever stringent nature of rules and regulations of the British government and the EU in Europe. I have been put in charge of a company project to determine the relative cost of new recruits after the recent legislation by the British government under Gordon Brown, requiring employers to pay work termination compensation in case of violation of contractual principles ex parte. However, the management of the company has decided to go ahead with new plans to expand its catering operations in other clubs as well. For instance, the management has been thinking of expanding its operations in a few more clubs such as Birmingham City, another Premier League, Level One club with roughly the same level of matches and non-match events up for grab by a successful bidder.. The company has plans to diversify into the energy drinks sector as well, i.e. drinks will be bought from a contract supplier in Ireland and will serve as an energy supplement to both players and visitors. . The recent research findings about excess hydrogenated fats or trans-fats in ready-to-eat food would definitely have an impact on our operations though. The company’s management has decided to teach and train a pool of supervisory cadre with a view to achieving long term objectives, such as sales targets and labour efficiency. Further the company has invested £150,000 in a programme of Training, Learning & Development (TL&D). The Programme is focused on rotating the core cadre on successive jobs that arise at different locations of the company as seasonal operations come to an end. SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In Britain in particular and Europe in general the level of competition coming from rivals is fairly big and my company’s strengths and opportunities are limited by the fact that expansion involves a long term commitment to quality and operational capacity. Though the existing operational scale is limited to Chelsea Club, there are plans afoot to increase our regional presence through a possible franchising network Franchising serves as a better alternative to pre-cooked food sales outlets like ours, albeit the capacity constraints play a major role here. Though the company has considerable economies of scale available to it through current operations, there are some logistics or supplies bottlenecks due to a persistent rise in transport and storage costs. The insurance premiums too have gone up in addition to rising overhead costs. Specially, indirect labor and material overheads are too prohibitive at times. These ever increasing labor and material overheads have forced the management to cut down on expenditure related to indirect labor and material purchases. A high level of absenteeism, for instance, could be a very bad internal weakness (Fitz-Enz, 2001, p.261). We have had such bad experiences as well. I have made a series of recommendations to the top management of the company to be adopted in its forthcoming strategic vision plan (Williamwson et al, 2003, p.20).There are six such fundamental suggestions to be included in this all-important plan. They are (a). All four basic personnel functions of job analysis, job description, job specification and job requisition, be coordinated at the country level so that recruitment process will be faster and less costly. (b). Searching for potential recruits within the company as an effective internal recruitment strategy be exhausted before undertaking an external recruitment drive. (c). External recruitment be limited to casual labour supply-network recruitment so that the existing cadres can be augmented by adopting a system of hire-for-event. Of course this is what we have been doing though such hiring is limited at times to anticipated requirements which may not tally with the actual requirements. Thus erroneous decisions cost the company quite a few sterling pounds. (d). Job enrichment, job sharing and job enlargement be encouraged and practiced within each department and to achieve desirable output targets with a view to reducing cost and waste. (e).Employees be recruited on the basis of a TL&D programme so that new recruits will have an added incentive to work efficiently. This has to be applied at least with regard to the core cadre base so that costly labour attrition rate could be brought down. (f). Performance related incentives be paid to employees in order to encourage them to be more productive and minimize costs associated with the law of diminishing marginal returns. REFERENCES 1. Armstrong, Michael (2006), A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, (10th Ed.), Philadelphia, Kogan Page Publishing. 2. Bogardus, Anne (2007), PHR/SPHR : Professional in Human Resources certificate Study Guide, Indianapolis, Wiley Publishing Inc. 3. Lengnick-Hall, Mark, L and Lengnick-Hall, Cynthia, A., (2002), Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy: New Challenges, New Roles, New Capabilities, San Francisco, Berret-kohehler Publishers, Inc. 4. Fitz-enz, Jac (2001), How to Measure Human Resource Management (3rd Ed.), New York, McGraw-Hill. 5. Losey, Mike, Ulrich, Dave andMeisinger, Sue(Editors), (2005), The Future of Human Of Human Resource Management: 64 Thought Leaders Explore the Critical HR Issues Today and Tomorrow, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons. 6. Sartain, Libby and Finney, Martha I ( 2003), HR from the Heart: Inspiring Stories and Strategies foe Building the People Side and Great Business, New York, AMACOM. 7. Williamson, David, Cooke, Peter, Jenkins, Wyn and Moreton, Keith Michael (2003), Strategic Management and Business Analysis, Massachusetts, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. 8. hrm. guide.net, Online news portal of HRM Retrieved on June 20, 2008. Read More