Organizational Change: Perspectives From Human Resource Management

In this assignment I am required to research and discuss the fields of Human Resource Management. The topics I have chosen to conduct my research on and discuss include Staffing, Change management, Performance management and the Retention of staff. I will focus my research on resources advised in my Human Resource Management module such as peer reviewed academic papers and journals. Additionally, I will include and reference any further academic sources or information that has aided my research using the Harvard Referencing System.

Staffing is a fundamental piece of human resource management. Staffing involves phases such as recruitment, screening, selection and a handful more which are required within a company when filling job openings.When interviewing potential candidates for a role, the following recruitment/interview process stages should take place:

Planning

Determining what type of candidate is needed is detrimental to the recruitment process as you can’t find what you need, if you don’t know what you need, planning for and identifying the company’s needs and what roles need to be filled is of top priority in the interviewing and recruitment process.

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Searching

After a company plans for the recruitment and a strategy is in place, the search for suitable candidates can go ahead. Searching for staff that best suit the needs of an organisation involves two steps:

1. Source Activation: Usually, search techniques are only activated due to employee acquisition, meaning until or unless a company confirms that a job vacancy exists, the search for candidate cannot start.

2. Selling: Selling refers to how the company sells or markets their job vacancy to possible candidates. This can be difficult as organizations want to make the vacancy as attractive and desirable as possible without overselling the position.

Recruitment

After an organisations basic needs are met, the next step is recruitment. It needs individuals with the correct aptitudes, intelligence, and capacities to fill the necessary job openings. Individuals are an organization’s most significant asset as an organizations staff play a huge role in creating or ruining its reputation due to their first-hand contact with employees or clients.

Screening

This stage of the process involves the review of resumes/CV’s and cover letters provided by potential candidates. While reviewing these documents the company considers qualification’s, skill set and previous experiences in order to find the candidate most suitable for the job vacancy.

Interviewing

There are a handful of aspect to the interviewing stage, however the two key aspects that organizations seem to neglect the most are:

1. Timing: The interview itself must be limited to a certain amount of time in order to keep the candidate interested and prevent them from losing interest.

2. Communication: It is important for interviewers to be direct and informative during the interview. Where candidates are within the process and what they are to expect should be clearly communicated, failure to do so will result in the candidate looking elsewhere for work since top candidates usually are interviewing with a handful of companies.

Offering of employment

This delicate stage of the recruitment process involves communicating to the candidate/candidates that their application has been successful. The offer should never be taken for granted by the interviewer, however if the interviewer has taken the correct steps with the recruitment process, then the candidate usually accepts the offer.

While looking further into the Human Resource Management aspect of staffing, research also uncovered that the staffing policies and approaches of organizations can differ completely. An organization’s roots and current practices could impact these staffing policies. Moreover, cultural factors as well as a company’s size could also impact these decisions.

Examples of these staffing policies include:

• Ethnocentric staffing

The approach of the ethnocentric policy refers to a multinational companies’ efforts of employing staff for key roles who originate from the same nationality as the parent company.

• Polycentric staffing

In contrast with the Ethnocentric staffing policy, the polycentric policy involves the opposite approach, workers who live in the same area or country in which they work are assigned to the top positions in a company and other employees who originate from overseas are given different positions.

• Geocentric staffing

The geocentric way to deal with staffing appoints job roles to individuals most appropriate for the role, paying little mind to the worker's circumstances, and irrespective to his/her culture or nation of origin.

It is essential for HR supervisors to know these policies as these staffing policies are key for HRM efficiency.In view of the significance of staffing skilful and devoted employees, adequate human resource management is pivotal to organizational achievement.

• Change management

How human resource management professionals view organizational change and their roles matters because those perceptions serve as a foundation for how they define their roles and boundaries for what they see as possible. (Baran, Filipkowski and Stockwell, 2018)

If a significant change is occurring in an organization, managers and employees will go through a period of transition and will need to readjust in accordance to their new duties and workplace environment. The main goal of successful change management involves planning, analysing and execution that aims to limit both short- and long-term disruption in order for a smoother transition.

Working in Human Resources means being many things. A facilitator. A communicator. A mediator. And perhaps most importantly of all, a foundation of effective change management. (Wayland, 2019)

HR staff introduce change management by:

1. Guaranteeing that the change objectives are met by involving themselves and other managers in the planning and process of the change.

2. Taking employees expectations and needs into consideration and forming a thorough understanding of them in order to utilise them during the change.

Upon the reading of case studies and journals about effective change management I was given insight into certain strategies which prevent successful change and how to overcome them.The primary conclusion after researching the management of change in relation to human resource management was that poor communication, rumours and uncertainty within an organization results in unsuccessful change efforts.These factors being present in the pre-acquisition stages of change will result in negative outcomes such as the disruption of employee trust, a decrease in dedication and employee morale and an increase of negative attitudes and emotions.

The academic journal “A Tale of Two Corporations: Managing Uncertainty During Organizational Change” suggests that in order for organizational change to be successful, HRM professionals should implement the following strategies:

• Communication

Good communication is key for successful change. If managers announce the change early and create estimated timelines to inform employees of the change it can increase the chances of its success. Being informative towards employees about the change and not handling the information in a secretive manner will also build trust with the employees and leave no room for rumours or speculation about the change.

• Collective planning

“When employees and managers face the unknown as individuals, they tend to reinforce old assumptions and fears” (DiFonzo and Bordia, 1998). Involving those directly involved and effected by the change and establishing an open and collective planning process surrounding it will aid the change process as refusing to do so can either slow down or prevent it altogether. When staff are not included or are uninformed their focus will shift from the organization to themselves and they will be dependent on rumours for updates about the change.

• Post-change support

Offering support and continuous information to employees after the change has occurred. This is an important strategy as this way staff can report problems and easily show their satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, of the new change.

Offering support and continuous information to employees after the change has occurred. This is an important strategy as this way staff can report problems and easily show their satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, of the new change.

• Performance management

Performance management (PM) involves effective measures which organizations use to measure their employees progress and work. Conducting performance management includes objective setting, performance appraisal, reward and incentive strategies and career planning, these stages of PM determine that staff are “working together in an optimum fashion to achieve the results desired by the organization” (Biron et al. 2011, p. 1294).

It has been proclaimed that performance management is key to strategic human resource management as staff management is directly related to an organization’s objectives.

• Planning

In a complex and changing working environment, everyday planning is frequently expected to aid staff performance.

Results show that Time Management Planning (TMP) and Contingent Planning (CP) affect employee performance due to improved engagement at work.

TMP includes deciding tasks and assignments to be completed on a specific day, organizing and booking such assignments, and outlining the estimated duration of each.

CP involves taking any disruptions and possible interruptions into account that might delay or prevent any tasks or objectives from being met and determining how to overcome them.

• Monitoring

Performance monitoring is significant when it comes to PM as it is an opportunity to motivate staff and promote citizenship between employees. However, monitoring should not be intrusive to the employees work as this could greatly effective their productivity.

• Rating

Rating is the process stage which involves analysing and reviewing the progress and achievements employees have made towards reaching organizational goals and targets.

This can be done through an annual performance review meeting between managers and employees in which they can discuss progress, issues and opportunities for improvement and growth.

• Developing

The main goal of PM is to motivate employees to do better and develop. While working together employees and managers, with the use of a performance management system (PMS), can work together to determine goals and objectives to work towards and create an employee development plan.

• Rewarding

Performance managements last and probably most important stage in its process is rewarding. In this stage managers fairly recognise and praise employees’ abilities and work efforts. Such recognition and praise can motivate employees to be continuous with their hard work and continue to meet organizational goals.

Research supports the idea that when built and introduced into the workplace correctly performance management can offer many benefits such as effective motivation of employees as employees work harder towards their goals when their work is recognised and rewarded, therefore could lead to higher morale and retention as highly motivated employees are more likely to be loyal to an organization and stay within the company as well as producing the ability to identify and eliminate under-performers in the organization and increase communication.

• Retention of people

Retention of staff is key to the success of any company or organization. Retention of staff can provide customer satisfaction, can increase product sales, satisfy other employees and staff.

Organizations should recognise that the retention of employees is essential in providing growth and development within the market as well as maintaining their leadership.

After conducting research referring to the retention of staff it was found that a company can take on board several retention approaches in order to successfully keep their staff.

Key employee retention approaches include:

Improving recruitment procedures:

• This can be done to provide candidates with a sensible impression of what their roles are within a job and ensure there are no hidden or undeclared roles they are expected but unwilling to do.
• Support:
• Continuous support throughout the employee’s time at the company is key to retaining staff especially during the critical first few weeks in the new role. If employees feel like they are not supported within an organization it could result in them leaving the company.

Clear plans for development:

Offering clear development plans and opportunities of progression to staff can motivate them and influence them to be loyal to the organization.

• Consideration:

Taking an employee’s work-life balance into consideration will strengthen the relationship between manager and employee. A small amount of leniency toward working hours etc. goes a long way.

• Wage and benefits:

Offering a competitive wage as well as benefits is a major component in retaining staff. If staff feel they are not being paid fairly, or have enough benefits it is likely they will leave the company. In order to retain employees, benefits and pay should be appropriate and competitive.

Good working environment:

Offering a pleasant working environment to employees is another key factor to take into consideration when trying to retain employees. Appropriately handling complaints, workplace bullying and negativity will provide a enjoyable environment in which employees will want to work in.

• Communication:

Strong clear communication within an organization plays a huge role in employee satisfaction. If employees feel as though they can openly and comfortably communication among other employees and management, and receive strong, clear communication back they are likely to enjoy their job more and stay within the organization.

To conclude in order to retain staff companies have to provide an attractive and favourable work environment. Failure to retain staff, or high turnover of staff, can be expensive for any organization and can also indicate the poor selection of staff.

Works cited

1. Armstrong, M. (2019). Armstrong's Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice. Kogan Page Publishers.
2. Baran, B., Filipkowski, T., & Stockwell, H. (2018). Human Resource Management Professionals' Perceptions of Organizational Change: An Exploratory Study. Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship, 23(1), 32-52.
3. Cao, L., & Guo, L. (2019). A Research on the Challenges of Human Resource Management Under the Background of Big Data. International Journal of Information Management, 47, 56-62.
4. Chelladurai, P. (2017). Human Resource Management in Sport and Recreation. Human Kinetics.
5. Farndale, E., Scullion, H., & Sparrow, P. (2010). The Role of the Corporate HR Function in Global Talent Management. Journal of World Business, 45(2), 161-168.
6. Gubman, E. L. (2018). Talent Management: Strategies for Success. McGraw-Hill Education.
7. Nishii, L. H., Lepak, D. P., & Schneider, B. (2008). Employee Attributions of the “Why” of HR Practices: Their Effects on Employee Attitudes and Behaviors, and Customer Satisfaction. Personnel Psychology, 61(3), 503-545.
8. Phillips, J. J., & Gully, S. M. (2015). Strategic Staffing. Pearson Education.
9. Wayland, R. (2019). Effective Change Management: What You Need to Know for a Career in HR. Society for Human Resource Management.
10. Wright, P. M., & McMahan, G. C. (2011). Exploring Human Capital: Putting ‘Human’Back into Strategic Human Resource Management. Human Resource Management Journal, 21(2), 93-104.