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Students: Chapter 1

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Quizzes

Self-test Questions

  1. According to Ulrich, what are the four main roles played by human resources?
  2. What financial benefits did Huselid find for organisations that had significantly above-average scores in using HR practices?
  3. Name five HR practices that research has indicated produce a high level of commitment.
  4. What is a ‘handmaiden’, according to Storey?

     

  5. Describe five factors that have led to uncertainty in employment and have contributed to redundancy over the last 20 years.
  6. How did Zotefoams promote team efforts?
  7. Name six difficulties identified with the theory and practice of business partners.
  8. When looking at the resource-based view of the organisation, competitive advantage is associated with four key attributes. What are they?
  9. What were the main initiatives leading to improved performance in the Claridge’s case study?

     

  10. What are the main ‘bundles’ of HR activities that some researchers have indicated lead to improved organisational performance?
Answers

1.

  • Change agents
  • Business partners
  • Administrative experts
  • Employee champions

2. An extra market value per employee of between £10,000 and £40,000.

3. Select five from:

  • Employee involvement
  • Employee voice
  • Harmonisation of terms and conditions
  • Employment security
  • Sophisticated recruitment and selection
  • Extensive training and development
  • Self-managed teams
  • Extensive systems of flexibility
  • Performance pay

4. Those working in human resources who play little part in implementing policy, operate at a tactical level only, dealing with administration and the provision of welfare, training and basic recruitment.

5. Select five from:

  • Decline in manufacturing
  • Technological advances in the service area, especially related to telephony and computing
  • Delaying
  • Business process engineering
  • Decentralisation
  • Takeovers, mergers, buy-ins, buy-outs and float-offs
  • Privatisation in the public sector
  • Outsourcing
  • Creation of agencies in the public sector

6. Through a benefits harmonisation programme together with employee share options and profit-sharing schemes.

7. Select six from:

  • The lack of clarity as to what a ‘strategic partner’ is actually supposed to do
  • Business partners had difficulty in identifying how they ‘added value’ and too much time was taken up by trying to ‘measure’ this value
  • Business partners often reverted to what they knew best and simply became a generalist working for their line management team
  • Insufficient training has been given to business partners in consultancy, relationship management and third-party management skills
  • Line managers have not received enough training to develop expertise in day-to-day HR activities (so business partners carried on doing this part of their job)
  • The cost of service centres has been greater than anticipated
  • The loss of ‘generalist’ activity has been regretted by HR staff who have regarded this area as their heartland
  • Confusion over roles with lines of responsibilities not defined
  • Perceived remoteness of shared-service operations

8.

  • HR is seen to be valuable
  • The rarity of certain key employee skills
  • The inability to substitute
  • The difficulty of imitation

9.

  • A new reward and recognition scheme
  • A new performance management scheme
  • Skills training
  • Internal promotion
  • Regular communication through a quarterly newsletter.

10.

  • High level of employee commitment and employee involvement
  • Employee voice
  • Harmonised terms and conditions
  • Employment security
  • Sophisticated recruitment and selection
  • Extensive learning and development operations/talent management
  • Self-managed teams
  • Extensive system of flexibility
  • Performance pay

Annotated Links

The website for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. http://www.cipd.co.uk

Major US site concerned with all aspects of human resources – free registration. http://www.hrworld.com/

The American equivalent of the CIPD. http://www.shrm.org

See CIPD podcast 45 at http://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/_articles/_building-hr-capability.htm?WBCMODE=PresentationUnpublished

See CIPD podcast 63 at http://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/_articles/hr-business-savvy.htm?WBCMODE=PresentationUnpublished

See CIPD podcast 30 at http://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/_articles/_sustainablehighperformance.htm?WBCMODE=PresentationUnpublished

Annotated Further Reading Guide

Fox, A. (2012) Reach New Height. HR Magazine, June, 34–39.

Includes good case examples of how to make business partnering a success.

Kearns, P. (2009) Human Resource Strategy. Routledge.

Holbeche, L. (2009) Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy. Routledge.

Reilly, P. (2012) The Practice of Strategy. Strategic HR Review, 11(3): 129–135.

Using evidence from Fujitsu and the Housing Ombudsman Service, the author advises on how to improve strategic development, HR skills and management support for HR.

Rowley, C. and Jackson, K. (2010) Human Resource Management – The Key Concepts. Routledge.

Ulrich, D. and Grochowski, J. (2012) From Shared Services to Professional Services. Strategic HR Review, 11(3): 136–142.

Ulrich suggests how to enhance and professionalise the shared-services operation through five steps.

Woods, D. (2012) Winners and Cave-dwellers. Human Resources, July, 33–35.

A good case study of how AmicusHorizon, a failing housing association, turned around its HR operation to become a multi-award-winning example of HR excellence.

Woolf, C. (2012) How Employers Align HR with the Business. IRS Employment Review, 30 July.

A survey showing a variety of methods operated by businesses.

For a balanced view of outsourcing HR and the use of shared HR services, see:

Pickard, J. (2009) Calling the Shots. People Management, 2 July, 20–23.

Reilly, P. (2000) HR Shared Services and the Realignment of HR, IES Report 368, July.

Extra Case Studies

Culture change at Colt

Background

In 2007, the decline of once high-flyer Colt Telecom was clearly apparent. At one time a member of the FTSE-100, it had nearly been wiped out by the dot-com collapse and the rise of mobile telephony. In the early 2000s, it made a faltering recovery but still was unprofitable and into its fifth CEO when Rakesh Bhasin arrived at the helm.

By 2012, the company was making a (modest) profit, had paid off its debt and had a strong revenue growth. All this had come about through a gigantic restructuring, rebranding and culture-change programme, moving the company into growth areas of data centres and IT-managed services and away from engineering and infrastructure.

The key structural initiatives were to centralise customer services to Barcelona and Bangalore with multilingual customer teams serving Europe and Asia providing all but the most complex technical support which was retained in small local teams for ‘application fixes’. The Bangalore office’s new responsibilities included the back-office data gathering and processing for, among others, human resources, finance and marketing.

Change process

To smooth the path of change to IT services, the company introduced two major initiatives – ambassadors and story-telling:

Ambassadors for change

A team of 90 ambassadors were recruited from different functions and countries out of the 5,000-strong workforce to spread the word and act as a conduit for grass-roots concerns. Managers put forward names of staff who were confident, accepting of change and good communicators. The successful staff were trained in London for three days in 2009.

Story-telling

A consultancy was utilised that developed an effective approach to communicate all the changes so that all levels of staff could make sense of what was going on and their role in it. The ‘story’ was divided into chapters outlining the company’s new core values, the challenges and the actions required.

At the London training session, the ambassadors were trained in the outline script they would use in workshops in their own country, integrating their own local input – cases and anecdotes – as they felt fit. In the workshops, staff were asked to identify what management could do better to help the company fulfil its potential. Of the 56 genuine suggestions that came forward, 6 were agreed to be crucial to the success of the enterprise. Once these ideas has been adopted, a project team was created to ensure they were incorporated into the change programme.

Realising the changes

The new structure involved substantial job changes, with many positions, such as country executives, being abolished and 3,000 staff affected in one way or another. It had been decided to implement all the changes in one go rather than by ‘death of a thousand cuts’ so speed of change was of the essence. Having the ambassadors to persuade their colleagues of the importance of the process was vital. When staff heard the story from a marketing officer, an IT programmer and a fibre manager, it made the process more acceptable than if it had simply been a dictate from a distant senior executive.

After interviews with over 3,000 staff, the changes went live in January 2011. A total of 300 staff left, many of them senior staff, but the ambassadors’ roles continued, with their being involved in projects around the company’s key priorities and with a key role in training, learning and development.

The key to the success of the process was the understanding by staff that change did not take place in isolation but was part of a bigger programme. The early engagement, the listening to employees’ concerns and the high visibility all helped to ensure staff bought into the changes.

Source: Syedain, H. (2012) A Colt following. People Management, October, 30–33.