Attracting and Retaining Talent in the Current Environment - Research Proposal Example

Attracting and Retaining Talent in the Current Environment 1. Introduction Perhaps the greatest challenge that faces organisations in the current business environment is to find appropriately qualified and experienced candidates and to retain them after they have worked for a couple of years (Gerardine, 2006). This thesis would explore ways and means as to how information systems strategy - ISS can be used to aid strategic human resource management - SHRM to attract and retain suitably qualified employees. The emphasis is on ‘suitably’ qualified employees and this would refer to not only the technical skills and experience but also to soft skills and culture fit of employees. The current business environment is not just about the economic recession, job losses and bankruptcies. These are a part of the ‘bust and boom’ economic lifecycle and manifest themselves every one or two decades. The current business environment or the e-world is about the opportunities that globalisation and mobility offers to employees. While in the previous era, people sought a ‘job for life’, the current world that is enabled with information technology provides a host of opportunities for the employee and the employer. Clearly information technology and the widespread use of Internet along with globalisation have broken down barriers and borders. A person from UK would probably not hesitate if a suitable offer and position came up in US or any other country. At the same time, employers also have the option of a much wider talent pool and a HR person from UK would not hesitate to recruit someone from US (Martinsons, 2009). Considering all the issues and opportunities, the thesis looks at ISS as an enabler and would find ways and means to link it with SHRM thus creating a competitive advantage for a firm. The paper would be using both primary and secondary research with extensive literature review and survey to link the two areas. 1.1. Rationale for the paper Competitive advantage for organisations is obtained by managing and maintaining key resources that are scarce and are difficult for other firms to imitate and which provide a firm an advantage over its rivals. Among the key resources available, human resources are regarded in many firms as irreplaceable. Being ‘irreplaceable’ is very true in the case of hi technology firms such as Intel or Pharmaceutical companies that have a high worth of intellectual capital. Other firms also regard skilled technicians, good instructors, a good sales team or even excellent programmers as valuable and these employees help in retaining a competitive advantage (Youndt, 2006). There has also been a major shift in the manner in which human resources department and its functions are regarded. In the past, HRM dealt mainly with recruitment and selecting from a ‘lot’ of similarly qualified prospects, giving them rudimentary training and then absorbing them on the company rolls. The job of HRM was then to give yearly raises based on the number of years served and taking care of attendance, salary, leave and so on. With SHRM, the role of HRM has changed radically and firms consider human resources as an inseparable part of the strategic planning process. SHRM is about meeting the strategic goals of the firm with the best use of employees and also ensuring that employee engagement and satisfaction is high. The idea is to create a synergy between employee motivation, meeting employee and organisation needs and ensuring the employee costs are rationalised. SHRM is not about retrenching of employee but in using employees so that productivity per employee is the highest (Wright, 2001). There are a number of publications that speak and advise about SHRM. ISS has played a major role in helping organisations to become more efficient. Applications for finance, accounts, enterprise resource management, customer relations management and many others are available in plenty. There are also many computer applications available that are used by HRM to maintain employee records. This practice has advanced to such an extent that HRM is being called eHRM. However, HRM professionals are doing the work of data entry operators in that they add employee data, update the information and so on (Yeung, 2005). The concept of using ISS to help SHRM is limited to preparing reports, typing and so on. However, there are a number of employee metrics that can be generated, based on their periodic performance evaluation. Some examples of metrics are employee attitude, skill rating in certain technologies, work attitude, team spirit and so on. These metrics can be initiated by the HR department but authenticated by individual departments. There is no publication that has attempted to link ISS and SHRM or explain how ISS can be leveraged to generate the input for SHRM. This thesis would take up the unique task of understanding wow information systems can be used to identify, attract and retain talent to meet SHRM objectives (Arthur, 2004). 1.2. Literature Review It was Cantillion (1730) who had first written about the changing face of trade and industries in the days preceding the industrial revolution. The author was speaking of the scarcity of artisans and craftsmen in British shires who were inclined to abandon their trade and flock to the cities in search of much higher paying jobs and perceived better job opportunities. Maslow (1943) built up on the preceding centuries of observations and growth and laid the foundation for motivation theories that guide HR studies. Over the years the field of HRM has transformed and in importance and it is now called as Strategic Human Resource Management. It was realised that with automated systems to take of routine tasks such as attendance, leave, overtime, holidays and so on, HR personnel had new priorities and directions. The priorities were oriented for meeting the business goals of an organisation, meeting sales targets, reducing rework, improving productivity and so on. SHRM involves among other tasks, job designs for team based approach, workforce with flexible approach, employees who take the lead in improvement of quality systems and practices, empowering employees and introducing incentive based compensation and so on. SHRM is created to understand the strategic needs of an organisation and develops a competitive strategy to meet the operational goals (Rockart, 2002). The use of information technology and with the advent of information systems and HR specific software applications, HR practices were fully computerised. There are a number of robust enterprise resource application software packages such as PeopleSoft, Oracle HR, SAP HR and so on. These applications have removed the drudge out of the HR work and with swipe cards, the attendance, salary, leave and other employee related data was calculated automatically. The software applications did satisfy the normal HRM requirements. However, with SHRM, the bar has shifted to a different level. Again, there are claims of intelligent computer systems that have been deployed and which take over the tasks of humans while taking decisions about HR requirements. However, there is much difference between the level of decision making abilities of computer systems and the ability to use these decisions for strategic planning of the organisation (Schuler, 2007). What is required is an intelligent system that intuitively examines the work nature of the project and makes suggestions for work teams, based on certain predefined employee metrics. The use of metrics in appraisal systems has been around for a few decades and also figures in SHRM strategies. Unfortunately, appraisal cycles are never free from perceived or alleged bias of the appraisers. In many cases, ill trained appraisers are pulled from their active work and are forced to take up annual appraisals of the employees. It is also known than one or two bad behaviour incidents or unsatisfactory results often bring down the rating of an otherwise hardworking professional. This leads to dissatisfaction, less employee engagement and more dissatisfaction and also the possibility of an employee leaving the organisation because of a bad rating. There is thus a need for metrics based employee appraisal system that is activated all the year around and gains inputs from colleagues, seniors and customers, both external and internal. This metric system would be qualitative and quantitative and help in assessing an employee for performance, job knowledge, attitude and impression and acceptance among peers. Current appraisal systems give an on and off grading and while 360 degree appraisal system do give a somewhat some impression to what has been proposed, the 360 degree method is unstructured and is one off. The results that are obtained are used mainly for self development plans and the feedback are competency based (Bartlett, 2002). The issue of retaining employees has indeed received widespread attention and there are various levels of ‘acceptable attrition’ among different sectors. The fact however remains that employee turnover is very important and there have been various theories and empirical research that explain why people leave. Salary, growth opportunities, bad treatment at current organisation, perceived ill treatment of employees during appraisals and many others have been attributed as salient causes. The research has proposed that by linking ISS with SHRM, employees would be appraised thorough different metrics and this would lead to a better understanding of employee engagement and satisfaction (Hom, 2001). The study would make some recommendations for reducing employee turnover. As an example, suppose a firm wants to set up offices in a new country or it wants to develop new products. In both these requirements, the unknown component is more. The hunt for team members would be based on traditional appraisals like quality and schedule adherence, discipline and so on. With ISS in place, the system would give feedback on how the employee would fare when faced with predictive and un-predictive or unknown situations and how well the employee reacts to unexpected situations. These inputs are used in developing the team for SHRM that would again be meeting the organisation strategic needs (Yeung, 2005). The above scenario and arguments are used to frame the basic requirements for using ISS to meet SHRM needs. We use ISS since information can be shared and collaborative working is easily possible. Also ISS would involve the identifying metrics benchmarks that can be applied for a variety of situations and conditions. The use of ISS helps to answer questions such as ‘should being successful be the only criteria to judge an employees performance; should efforts put in, innovative solutions that are developed be considered and if so, how. There are also questions asked about the individual efforts in a team appraisal and while the team has been successful, would all team members have put in the same efforts or will one or two members have taken extra efforts and the benefits are shared by all. According to Tannenbaum (2009) such questions are never resolved satisfactorily and the result is that someone who is a favourite of the project manager or one who is voluble gets rewards and recognition. The silent types or the reticent contributors often remain unnoticed and unrecognised and they would be the first to leave. There is the argument that conventional appraisal systems should indeed look into these aspects but that does not happen since the system is manual and prone to human bias. When the feedback and observation is year round, with multiple-rater feedback, user bias is removed. It is expected that such systems and trying to link ISS to SHRM would not be practical considering the huge number of employees. If indeed the system is difficult to implement for all employees, then in the initial pilot phase, the system could tried out on key projects where the project has strategic importance for the organisation. The choice of employee metrics would also differ among organisations and the roles of employees. A service technician who faces customers would have a different role and would be judged as per different metrics while a programmer who interacts only with employees of an organisation would have different metrics. When the SHRM function is defined by metrics, decision making is much more focussed, predictive and accurate. When ISS and SHRM are interlinked, decisions to meet organisation goals are taken based on metrics and benchmarks. Mistakes in staffing become very expensive and by using this integration, the question of fit of the employee for a role would not be done on guess work but by informed decision. 1.3. Research Question and Objectives The research question proposed is “Attracting talent and retaining them in the current environment. How information systems can be used to identify, attract and retain talent to meet SHRM objectives”. Objectives of the research are: To examine how ISS is developed and applied in organisations To examine how SHRM is developed and applied in organisations To examine various metrics that are used to measure and asses employees To find methods and processes so that these metrics can be generated over a certain period of time for employees and stored in archives To examine how ISS can be used to extract these metrics and use them for SHRM to meet organisations recruitment needs 1.4. Proposed Methodology A combination of qualitative and quantitative research and primary and secondary research is planned. Secondary research would be done through a literature review of peer-reviewed journals, books and reliable Internet sources to obtain a set of learning. Next, a survey instrument would be designed from the learning’s that emerge from the literature review. Primary research would then be done by applying the survey instrument to project managers and HR managers of different organizations that would be shortlisted based on the size and HR systems used. In addition, some project managers would be interviewed and their views on how ISS can be leveraged to link with SHRM would be obtained. A triangulation would then be done with the literature review, the survey findings and the interview to obtain a set of conclusions. According to Miles (1994), qualitative research focuses on “qualitative data” or “descriptive data” that describe the social phenomenon under investigation with respect to the nature of people, objects, and events. They further highlighted that the emphasis is on discovering emergent findings not on a measurement of predetermined variables. The author speaks of qualitative research as multi-method in its focus, involving an interpretative, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in a natural setting, attempting to make sense or interpret with minimum intervention. Miles agrees that due to the desire to discover the emergent findings rather than measurement of variables, qualitative research requires a minimum intervention of the study setting in order to allow the qualitative data to reveal themselves in a natural setting. Diefenbach (2007) has argued that quantitative analysis is more likely to be secondary and exploratory (or descriptive) in nature, summarizing data in the form of charts, tables, percentages and averages. In the event that a survey is carried out, the data obtained would mostly be categorical, hence is likely to be ranked across a scale. This data might be represented in terms of frequency, central tendency or dispersion. It is highly unlikely the research might require the necessity of inferential data analysis. 1.5. Project Management It is estimated that the project would take two months to complete. Following figure gives the Gantt chart for the project. Figure 1.1. Project Schedule Gantt Chart 1.6. Conclusions The proposal has provided the rationale for selecting the topic and it has provided a list of aims and objectives for the research. A combination of primary and secondary research with qualitative and qualitative analysis with literature review and survey method has been proposed. The preliminary literature showed that there is a possibility to create a link between metrics used for strategic planning, ISS and SHRM. These metrics would be further examined in the thesis. A time frame of 8 weeks has been proposed for the research. References Arthur, J, B., 2004. Effects of Human Resource Systems on Manufacturing Performance and Turnover. The Academy of Management Journal, 47(3), pp. 670-687 Bartlett, C. A., 2002. Building Competitive Advantage through people. MIT Sloan Management Review, winter, 34-41 Cantillon Richard, 1730, Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, Fifth Edition, London: Methuen and Co., Ltd. Diefenbach, T., 2007. The managerialistic ideology of organizational change management. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 20(1), pp. 126-137 Gerardine, D., 2006. Human Resource Information Systems- A Current Assessment. MIS Quarterly, 10(1), pp. 15-27 Hom, P, W., 2001. Toward a Greater Understanding of How Dissatisfaction Drives Employee Turnover. The Academy of Management Journal, 44(5), pp. 975-987 Maslow AH, 1943; A Theory of Motivation. Psychological Review, 50, p. 74-76 Martinsons, M.G., 2009. Human resource management applications of Knowledge based systems. International Journal of Information Management, 27(5) pp. 35-53 Miles, R, E., 1994. Fit, failure and the hall of fame. California Management Review, 26(3), pp. 10–28 Rockart, J. F., 2002. The Changing Role of the Information Systems Executive: A Critical Success Factors perspective. Sloan Management Review, 24(1), pp. 2-13 Schuler, R. S., & Jackson, S. E., 2007. Strategic human resource management. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Victoria, Australia. Yeung, A., 2005. Reengineering HR through information technology. Human Resource Planning, 18(2), 24-37 Youndt, M, A., 2006. Human Resource Management, Manufacturing Strategy, and Firm Performance. The Academy of Management Journal, 51(4), pp. 836-866 Tannenbaum, S. I., 2009. HRIS information: user group implications. Journal of Systems Management, 41(1), pp.27-32 Wright, P, M., 2001. Human resources and the resource based view of the firm. Journal of Management, 27, pp. 701-721 Read More