Improving Employee Attraction and Retention at Wealth Management Solutions - Coursework Example

Running Head: HRM - Wealth Management Solutions Name Instructor Institution Date Improving employee attraction and retention at Wealth Management Solutions a. Training of the Employees Duties and responsibilities of human resource managers have become so myriad that they need to be acquainted with demand and dynamics of an organisation. Abby as the new human resource director for Wealth Management Solutions is not exceptional. In the eve of Wealth Management Solutions (WMS) having a problem of attracting and retaining younger employees, Abby should consider strategic and long lasting methods of securing adequate supply of employees endowed with relevant skills so that Wealth Management Solutions can still meet its objectives. To underscore the above argument, an in-depth analysis to evaluate methods needed to improve employee attraction and retention will form basis of this question. One key strategic plan Abby should undertake is the exhaustive training and skill development of the required work force. Taking a case of the fresh graduates who sees this company as a stepping stone to complete their accounting accreditation, Abby needs to conduct a thorough training and programmes so as to make the new recruits feel part of the organisation. Training as detailed by Jucious, (2001) will form a foundation of acquiring specific skills to perform a job better within Wealth Management Solutions. For better implementation of training and development program, Abby should understand the three major phases involved in training process: The assessment phase The implementation phase and The evaluation phase The assessment phase is sometimes also called the identification phase. As a human resource director who wants to attract and retain employees, Abby should not carry out impromptu developed training programme as the basic principle under the assessment phase is to understand the objectives of the company in comparison to needs and expectation of the employees. During this phase, Abby is mandated with identification of job-specific knowledge, attitudes and skills of the applicants or employees. This will help him know which employee can competently perform a particular job. By doing this, the director will also be able to motivate his new employees by making them know that Wealth Management Solutions is committed to advancing their career ambition as well as taking a revision control process to maintain and improve existing programmes and materials. Further consideration that needs to be incorporated by the director is that this phase needs to be performed accurately and without unnecessary expenditure of the available resources so as to ascertain training needs and identification of job-specific training requirements. The data that Abby will find from this phase should be used in developing explicit training objectives and associated training materials. The next step Abby will consider doing during the planned training is the implementation of the process. This is the point where the director will activate the training plan, or it is the process of putting a training programme into operation. After the employees have been trained, an evaluation process needs to be carried out. This will help in determining the relevance, effectiveness, and impact of activities of the new or the existing employees in light of their personal and organisational’s objectives just like Kirkpatrick, (1976) explains “evaluation process is used for guiding decision making and for assessing the relevance and effectiveness of various training components." Other than the phases, the director should note that effective training will require him to incorporate the aspect of psychological learning. And while this is implemented, these employees have different views and myriad learning styles. It is important to design different training mechanisms as some of the recruits can grasp concepts better when given written instructions while some will excel in group discussion. It therefore stands out that while recruiting new employees, Abby should note that his criteria should take care of the career objectives of the applicants who intend to develop their careers. b. Career Development In as much as the company needs to meet its objective in order to be competitive, it remains to be the mandate of Abby to know that to attract and retain the employees, there need to be two-way nature of the employment relationship. As technology and innovations change, Wealth Management Solutions through its director need to appreciate the fact that employees need a satisfying careers and longer term benefits which can be achieved if the organisation allow them to work with a flexible terms. From the general understanding of the business world, career development of an employee is carried out by upper management and human resource personnel. Regardless of company endeavour and leadership for career growth, employees have the main responsibility to ensure their career development goals proceed how they want them to. Typically, employees need to scrutinise what they want from their job currently, as well as in the future. The most basic career development guideline Abby should adopt is to have the responsibility of ensuring the needs of the company though pressing, must coincide with the employee's career goals in order to achieve an overall balanced work atmosphere for both junior and senior employees. To attract and retain more employees, the director should plan to provide compensation structure that compliments business needs as well as the hard work of the employees. For instance, an employee who has consistently exhibited a certain admirable growth in needed skills should be promoted to a higher rank so that the special skill can be made use of even more. Lastly, the company through the director should share the vision of the company more regularly. As a leader in the company, Abby needs to know that this is a no-barrier and should embrace the act of sharing with the staff. He can do this by virtually painting a picture on how the company will be evolving more over time they should look forward to the challenging opportunities that is soon opening for them. This will inspire an employee to work harder in a particular direction to be ready for another role. In due course, it is for an employee to realise that there has been an increase for an individual to take charge of their own career development. This will help the employee to access appropriate information and make informed occupational choices. Such decisions may include: The first effort the employees should do to develop their career is to learn their strategies. This is a situation whereby they need to describe how they plan how to accomplish certain tasks or objectives. For instance, an employee in this company may choose to interview and interact with successful individual on areas s/he feels that are challenging. The other option is to carry out summary results of the set strategies. After completing a given task, the person should reassess the success and failure of the activities. This will help the new employees know new insights, skills and knowledge gained. The advantages and disadvantages of a pay for performance system Intelligently laid out incentive programmes will help the company who is looking to retain its employees for long time. Abby should be aware that in as much as the departing employees claim that they are looking for opportunities to develop their careers, the bottom line of the idea is that there are some monetary values attached. Therefore lucrative incentives, be in form of bonuses or stock, it is worthwhile for an employee to stay at the company. This will enable the employees to feel that their hard work is appreciated, thus reflecting well on their director and this company as a whole. One thing I will not deny is the fact that within Wealth Management Solutions is the presence of commission for promotion or sales of a particular product. When Abby introduces commission schemes as a type of incentive can indeed spur sales staff to work even harder and smarter since they will be aware that a significant portion of their pay depends on the performance incentives. In due course, the company is set to benefit from healthy competition when these benefits will be compelling enough. One big problem Abby will need to bear with as a result of pay for performance system is the employee opinion and sentiments from general public. There is going to be divergent view on certain rewards by the employees themselves. And in case of highly compensated executives, there is going to be disgruntled members of public especially during hard economic times. For instance, there was public outcry about corporate greed during the time when American International Group Inc. members of executives received bonuses worth close to $100 million in 2010 after a government bailout. Therefore Abby should be advised that when there will be high unemployment rates, there is always elevation of public criticism of employee reward programmes. Another problem the director will have to deal with is what Kingston calls “employee entitlement”.1 When her employees will be given reward programmes that increase after every calendar year then Abby risk making her workforce believe that they are entitled to certain bonuses and reward for simply doing what they are already salaried for. Instead, going by Flippo, (2002) human resources best practices definition of employee rewards is more closely aligned with rewarding employees who make remarkable contributions to the organization's success. Methods used to measure the effectiveness of the Human Resource policies Abby can adopt various methods is she wants to measure effectiveness of policies. These could be: Staff turnover or labour turnover Productivity Worker absenteeism a. Staff turnover or labour turnover Abby should take a measure of her workforce that quit employment with a given year. While doing this, she needs to understand that some companies always have uncontrolled level of staff turnover. But for her organisation which is financial institution, Dave Ulrich proposes that staff turnover of about 5% should be taken as normal. Therefore to measure this trend, she needs to divide number of employees she is losing annually (multiplied by 100/1) by the average number of full time employees over a given time. If the result shows that there was proportionately large number of her staff leaving after a short time with the company then the policy needs to be re-examined. b. Productivity Productivity being the measure of output against a given standard of input, it will be a key factor in measuring the effectiveness of her policies. For instance, the automobile companies use this policy to measure the output of their sales per worker per year. If her policies will be working productivity of this financial company should improve. This will be so especially when her capital investment will be at par with her close competitors. c. Worker absenteeism When Abby realises that most of her employees are constantly absent, then it will be an indication of some unpleasant policies. For instance, if an employee was to miss 12 working days out of let’s say 218 working days in a calendar then she will record absenteeism rate of about 4.6% which will result in ‘sick building syndrome’ which is a strong indication of dissatisfaction with director’s policies. References Flippo, E. B. (2002). Principles of personnel management. New York: McGraw Hill. Jucious, M. J. (2001). Personnel management (5th ed.). Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin. Kirkpatrick, D. (1976). Evaluation of training. In R. L. Craig (Ed.), Training and development handbook. New York: McGraw Hill. Read More