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执行概要
在困难时期,几乎每一个商业领袖都试图实行整体成本削减计划, 使现有的业务更加正式的以最少的资源获得最大的生产力。省钱是很重要的,然而留住关键员工和激励员工一起度过困难的时期的问题也是至关重要的。人力资源是任何企业的顶梁柱，管理也是保持长期可持续性的竞争优势的关键。本文通过乐购的实例探讨人和绩效管理的观点。这需要注意的是，乐购的主要重点是在现有的员工，他们将不断努力，即使在其他企业正在削减运营成本最小化的方式，学习和发展预算这样艰难的情况下，通过学习和发展活动，发展他们的技能。员工定期的反馈是另一个关键的一步，为员工提供一种被重视和识别的感觉，从而达到满意度。它对员工产生了一个积极的影响。整个组织的沟通是明确的，职业发展也在每个水平得到正确地传达。研究生计划是吸引年轻人才和选择最佳市场保持不断变化的业务需求。HS需要考虑额外的准则，以乐购作为榜样。在这种情况下，工作保障是影响员工的经济和心理健康的重要原因。这可能有助于整体员工的士气和生产力。
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In tough times, almost every business leader is trying to implement overall cost cutting plans and making existing operations more formalized to get maximum productivity with minimum resources. To save money is important however the issue of retaining key staff and motivating the workforce to go along together through difficult times is vital. Human Resources are the back bone of any business and managing them is critical for long term sustainability and competitive advantage. The Tesco example has been discussed keeping in view of its management of people and performance. This is important to note that Tesco's main focus is on existing employees and they are putting continuous efforts to develop their skills through learning and development activities even in this tough situation where other businesses are searching ways to cut the operating cost and minimizing the learning and development budgets. Feedback from employees on regular basis is another critical step that is providing employees a sense of importance and recognition and hence leading to satisfaction. It creates a positive impact on employees. Communication across the organization is clear and career progression is properly communicated at each and every level. The graduate scheme is to attract young talent and selecting the best from the marketplace keeping in view of changing business needs. HS needs to consider additional guidelines considering Tesco as a role model. Job security is important in this situation which affects the employees' economic and psychological wellbeing. This can contribute positively to overall employee morale and productivity. In this tough economic climate Hyper Store's main focus should be on employee's strengths instead of weaknesses. Employee Involvement is a strategy that allows workers more responsibility and accountability. Employee Involvement provides employees a great understanding of decisions because they are more likely to be involved in making those decisions. Employees must be asked on a regular basis what support and guidance they need along with the already planned training and development. The key to motivation is to identify what motivates an individual as well as the types of environment in which that individual would perform better. Extrinsic and intrinsic both kind of motivation required however HS needs to focus more on intrinsic because that has long term impact. Hyper Store should join ‘CORTCO' for enhancing retail image and to discuss industry specific issues.
INTRODUCTION
HyperStore as stated in the case report is a leading UK-based retail outlet and is growing in the other markets like US and Western Europe. There is no problem at HS in current circumstances however there are some possible threats regarding maintenance of their employment record that could create problems in future. The first threat indentified in the case report is the tough economic situation that leads businesses to save money and to make employee redundant in order to remain competitive in the market. There is no doubt every business is trying to save themselves by any means to remain in the business and for working smarter. Smart organizations plan well ahead; foresee the future and change themselves according to change in technology, environment and circumstances. This allows the businesses to put into place actions and contingency plans that can be implemented in tough times.
In tough times, almost every business leader is trying to implement overall cost cutting plans and making existing operations more formalized to get maximum productivity with minimum resources. Economic gain and stability is the first and foremost responsibility of management. According to Peter F. Drucker “Management must always, in every decision and action, put economic performance first. It can only justify its existence and its authority by the economic results it produces” (1968, P. 19). This is really important however what businesses do, they put all their efforts on economics at the cost of employees which is very harmful in the long run.
“The main focus of many business leaders is inevitably on reducing the costs involved in running the business. Although this is obviously important, the issue of retaining key staff and motivating the workforce to go along together through difficult times is vital. Companies that focus on people issues and keeping their staff motivated enjoy greater success. This has been proved in many researches that a motivated workforce generally translates into higher productivity, reduced absenteeism and reduced employee turnover. An economic downturn increases employee's feelings of insecurity which will in turn impact on an individual's motivation a key factor in performance and productivity. A business will not survive if key employees resign and join competitor companies, leaving behind a de-motivated and unproductive workforce. Senior personnel with the responsibility for steering a business through economic uncertainty have to remain focused on the long term business objectives. The danger, otherwise, is that some people will simply putt off rather than making real efforts on driving the business forward”
"The fact is that there is a real difference between 'can do' and 'will do'. People may possess the right 'competencies' for a particular role but this is of little consequence unless the individual is also motivated to perform in that role. Employers should consider in what way and to what extent they can make use of an individual's ability and personality. This process will help in describing the individual's ideal role, direction for development, need for support, rate of progress and level of aspiration."
"Businesses should also avoid knee-jerk reactions for example making redundancies as a solution to reducing costs. The cost of recruitment can be significant, so it is important not to make rash decisions about who should be made redundant and how many redundancies there should be. Such decisions will further damage the business and result in more costs in the long term. Also, if the workforce is reduced, then employers should remember that the staff remaining are likely to feel de-motivated especially as they may be faced with increased workloads."
CASE BACKGROUND AND ANALYSIS
The retail sector is different and generally perceived as shelf staking and drudge work even mentioned in the case. It is associated with low pay, long hours and is considered easy moving in and out. In some instances it has been described as the last resort sector, where jobs are available if all else fails. The supply of retail employees has, therefore, had a number of characteristics depending on the state of the economy and the stage of the demographic life cycle at any one time.
In times of booms in the economy, the retail sector got difficulty to find out most suitable employees and workers as every business is trying to find best talent available and retail industry is affected due to its image. Retailers find themselves at such times struggling to obtain the labour they require. With wages apparently low and other sectors of the economy also looking for workers, retail gets squeezed out and is very much the second or third choice. This cycle can cause retailers to consider carefully their use of capital and other resources to replace or enhance the performance of workers. The reverse of course holds when the economy is in recession. Whilst retailers also suffer in times of recession, the excess labour in the entire economy is available for use in retailing and views the sector in a more favourable light.
According to the above scenario retailers face problems of getting employees whether in good economic conditions or in recession. Hyper Store needs sophisticated recruitment and selection technique in both circumstances to hire self motivated and team oriented individuals that have abilities to work with organization in the long term. It is important and beneficial to look at the ‘TESCO' position in these circumstances, a snapshot provided by the (Sarah McPherson is Head of Leadership & Development, Tesco Stores Ltd.).
“Tesco is the UK's largest and successful grocer and also have operations in 14 international markets. It is also the world's third largest grocery retailer. In the current economic climate it is worth noting that Tesco has announced it will create over 11,000 new jobs in the next year. The recession and impact on the jobs market has made people everywhere generally more unsettled and this could clearly impact morale. Tesco is focusing to develop existing talent in the current climate. They are aware of the importance of keeping a long-term perspective and continuing to invest in learning and development and their internal talent pools so the business is stronger when the climate improves”.
“Tesco has increased its focus on career progression opportunities so that people can see a future with the business. As well as there being opportunities to work in different departments, there are also opportunities to work in the different countries of the international business. It is worth noting that Tesco is continuously making investment in Learning and Development smartly and making it value-adding. As such there is a rigorous decision-making process applied to new learning and development products and ongoing evaluation of existing initiatives”
“Tesco is filling vast majority of promotional opportunities through internal talent pipeline, and this has not changed as a result of the recession. External recruitment strategy therefore complements internal talent pipeline and the changing needs of the business. Tesco has not reduced its overall intake of graduates, with some parts of the business slightly increasing their intake this year. They are experiencing a high calibre of graduates in the marketplace and are not having any problem filling places on the schemes. This is attributed to slightly less competition for graduates as other employers reduce/freeze activity and due to greater awareness of the different opportunities that Tesco can provide. Such opportunities are communicated by existing employees who have been through the graduate scheme and can talk from direct experience.”
“They have introduced several initiatives to support managers in their team's development and especially those identified as high potential. These include products to develop their coaching and feedback skills. There is evidence through qualitative employee feedback that this is having a positive impact. They are also looking to integrate organisational design, talent and performance management to ensure that the right people are put into the right stretch positions at the right time”.
This is important to note that Tesco's main focus is on existing employees and they are putting continuous efforts to develop their skills through learning and development activities even in this tough economic situation where other businesses are searching ways to cut the operating cost and minimizing the learning and development budgets. Coaching/Support and feed back from employees on regular basis is another critical step that is providing employees a sense of importance and recognition and hence leading to satisfaction. It creates a positive impact on employees. Communication across the organization is clear and career progression is properly communicated at each and every level. The graduate scheme is to attract young talent and selecting the best from the marketplace keeping in view of changing business needs.
AGE DISCRIMINATION LEGISLATION
Discrimination can be defined as the process of responding to a person differently based on that person's individual differences. This is often the goal for human resource managers. These managers make selection decisions by discriminating among the applicants. For example when five applicants apply for one job, one has to be selected, as long as decision of this type are based on the abilities and skills of the applicants, discriminations is legal however it becomes illegal when the differences used to separate individuals are not job related such as gender, race, nationality, age and sexual orientation.
“Legislation against age discrimination in employment was introduced in the UK on October 1, 2006 in response to the European Employment Directive on Equal treatment. This legislation outlawed age discrimination in employment and vocational training and covers every member of the workforce. More specifically, the employment Equality (Age) Regulations:
- Banned direct and indirect age discrimination in recruitment, promotion and training;
- Banned unjustified compulsory retirement ages of below 65; removed the previous age limit for unfair dismissal and redundancy rights;
- introduced a right for employees to request to work beyond retirement age and a duty for employers to consider that request; and
- Required employers to give employees six months notice of their retirement date so that they can plan for retirement.
The introduction of this legislation had potentially significant implications for employers as it required them to audit their HR policies and practices in order to remove or to justify objectively policies that were seen as discriminatory according to age, and to introduce the new systems around retirement. In some cases, this will have led a need for considerable change within organizations”
In the United Kingdom, Every business is affected by tough economic downturn directly or indirectly however, the onset of recession, from which retailing is no longer spared, has managed at least labour availability problem as in both cases retailers are in better position always to get the best talent from the market. They have been able to maintain current levels of employment if required and fill vacancies from a larger than expected labour pool.
“Employers have often viewed older employees as liabilities, rather than as valuable resources. Workers within 10 to 20 years of retirement are often considered fixed in their ways, unable to learn new skills, distrustful of new technology and not worth investing in when training budgets are planned. This perception of older workers can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When senior staff do not feel valued and see younger, less experienced employees being promoted over them, they may decide just to ride out their time until retirement. In fact, many older employees welcome being singled out for redundancy or early retirement schemes because they feel so demoralized in the workplace.”
Hyper store needs to attract and select both younger and older workers regardless of age discrimination as stated in the new legislations. The graduate hiring is vital in order to pumping fresh blood in the organization as and when required similarly like TESCO as discussed above. Hyper store needs to focus on the development of older workers as they are already trained and have tacit knowledge that someone can have only with the experience.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Hyper Store must consider following guidelines/recommendations in order to maintain existing mix of key employees and workers and also to motivate them at this present stage:
1- Hyper store needs to offer job security of key personnel in order to keep and sustain them as a part of long term strategy. Job security which affects the employees' economic and psychological wellbeing must be properly incorporated. This can contribute positively to overall employee morale and productivity. According to Marchington and Wilkinson (2005, P. 73), “There are obviously limits to how much employment security can be guaranteed. It does not mean that employees are necessarily able to stay in the same job for life, nor does it prevent the dismissal of staff who fails to perform to the required level. Similarly, a major collapse in the product market that necessitates reductions in the labour force should not be seen as undermining this principle. The most significant point about including employment security as one of the high commitment HR practices is that it asserts that job reductions will be avoided wherever possible and that employees should expect to maintain their employment with the organisation”.
2- The main focus should be on the development side. Hyper Store needs to concentrate on the strengths of employees instead of weaknesses in order to enable them to cope and handle difficult situations.
3- Employee Involvement is a strategy that allows workers more responsibility and accountability. There are a number of reasons why Employee Involvement is an essential component of the high commitment paradigm (Marchington and Wilkinson 2005).
a) Employment Involvement provides employees a great understanding of decisions because they are more likely to be involved in making those decisions. “Argyris suggests that the way to provide employees with more "power" over their own work is to re-design jobs by means of job enlargement. Argyris suggests, however that it is not sufficient merely to increase the number of tasks to be performed and their complexity. The employee "must be given responsibility, authority and increased control over the decision making that affects his immediate environment. He must become self-responsible". This conception of job enlargement is similar to Herzberg's notion of the job enrichment. By job enrichment, Herzberg means "loading" jobs with the "motivators", i.e., building into the design of jobs high amounts of responsibility, clear-cut opportunities for advancement and specific recognition for performance. The assumption is that if jobs are redesigned in this way, performance will be increased because employees will "want" to do a good job. They will want to do a good job, according to Herzberg, because they have a chance to gain recognition, to experience growth, in short, to gain satisfaction from the performance of the job”. Hyper Store needs to redesign jobs as proposed by ‘Argyris' and ‘Herzberg' to make jobs more creative and interesting. It will create positive impact on staff in these uncertain times and they will have equal chance to be recognized.
b) Employee Involvement capitalize on the increased social pressure other members will place on fellow worker to comply with decisions the group made as a whole
c) Employee involvement provides a greater team and organizational identity, which is shown through greater cooperation and coordination among members at all levels
d) When conflict does arrive at employee involvement situation, the people involve are better able to constructively deal with it
4- Communication is vital in order to identify employee needs and what support they required in their current roles. Employees are the only source to find out such type of information. Employees must be asked on a regular basis what support and guidance they need along with the planned training and development. Although HS already has comprehensive and detailed training and development program at each and every level however regular communication is vital in order to listen and motivate them.
5- Hyper Store needs to find out employees future aspirations as where employees want to see themselves down the line. This information will help Hyper Store to analyze and plan for the future. Hyper Store needs to develop a structured career plan which will provide focus and give employees future direction in accordance to their own aspirations.
6- Recruiting and retaining outstanding people and ‘capturing a stock of exceptional human talent' (Boxall 1996, p66-67) is seen as an effective way to achieve sustained competitive advantage. Even though employers have always wanted to recruit the best people available, this is nowadays more likely to be systematised through the use of sophisticated selection techniques and taking greater care when hiring. Increasingly, employers are looking for applicants who possess a range of social, interpersonal and team working skills in addition to technical ability. There is no evidence in the case about recruitment and selection methods currently deploy by Hyper Store therefore sophisticated recruitment and selection techniques would help HS to attract and select the best employees available from the labour market.
7- The key to motivation is to identify what motivates an individual as well as the types of environment in which that individual would perform better. In the past, many companies have attempted to motivate the workforce by focusing on the extrinsic. Rollinson, Derek (1998, P. 191) states “Extrinsic rewards are those tangible benefits such as pay, fringe benefits, pensions, conditions of work and security that individuals receive in return for their efforts. Because these are provided by the organization, how much is received is largely beyond the control of the individual. In other words, they offer extra rewards and benefits in an attempt to persuade people to work harder. The 'extrinsic approach' can work in the short term but will be insufficient to retain key people in the long term. For example, many people are headhunted and persuaded to leave their existing company with the promise of significant salaries, company cars and bonuses. Six months later, once the honeymoon period is over, they often become dissatisfied due to a lack of intrinsic motivation. It means intrinsic motivation has long term impact on individual's behavior. Rollinson, Derek. (1998, P.191) states that “Intrinsic rewards are the psychological rewards that come from the experience of work, or from being part of an organization; for example, having an opportunity to use skills and abilities, having a sense of challenge or achievement, or having one's efforts recognized and appreciated. These rewards come from inside the person and are given by people to themselves, which can only occur if the conditions they experience allow them to feel this way”. HS needs to focus more on intrinsic rewards instead of extrinsic as the present situation is more on the extrinsic side. Employees and workers both have the opportunity to earn more with different weekly and monthly time based payment schemes as mentioned in the case however there is no evidence of challenging tasks and recognition across the organization. For example many organizations promote the “employee of the month/year” scheme to bring forward the high achievers.
8- Hyper Store needs to be very careful in recruitment and selection methods and there should not be mentioning of age keeping in view of new age discrimination legislation. For example whenever human resource department advertised the vacancies by using any method like Job ad in newspaper, online job posting or with the help of agency there must not be mentioning of young and old employees/workers age. Hyper store have to make sure the selection and assessment process should be without discrimination in a sense like focus should be on skills and experience rather than on age and appearance.
9- In the UK, the mid-1980s saw the formation of the Consortium of Retailing Training Companies (CORTCO), which comprised several major retailing organizations (Boots, CWS, Kingfisher, John Lewis Partnership, Marks & Spencer, Safeway, J. Sainsbury and Tesco). Early meetings of the group identified the problems of recruiting graduates into the industry and, as a result, some central aims of CORTCO were to work on enhancing the image of retailing as a career for graduates and to recruit the most appropriate and suitably qualified graduates into their companies. Hyper store should join the ‘CORTCO' in order to be part of elite panel and to get mutual benefits that other members are getting. It will enhance the HS image in the retail industry and provides platform to raise industry specific issues that may arise in future.
REFERENCES
Argyris, C. (1964) ‘Integrating the Individual and the Organization'. New York. Wiley.
Argyris, C. (1957), ‘Personality and Organization. New York. Harper and Row.
Bruce H. Kemelgor and William R. Meek, (2008) ‘Employee retention in growth-oriented entrepreneurial firms: An exploratory study' Journal of small business strategy, Volume 19, (1).
Carolyn Wiley, (1997) ‘what motivates employee according to over 40 years of motivation surveys' International Journal of Manpower, Vol 18 (3), pp 263-280.
Emma Parry and Shaun Tyson, (2009) ‘Organizational reactions to UK age discrimination legislation', Employee Relations, Vol. 31 (5), pp. 471-488.
Joanne Commins, Diane preston (1997). ‘The attractiveness of retailing as a career for graduates: an update', International Journal of retail and distribution management, 25(4) pp. 120-125.
L Sparks, (1992) ‘Restructuring Retail Employment', International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Vol. 20 No. 3, (1992), pp. 12-19.
Marchington, Mick and Adrian Wilkinson, (2005). Human Resource Management at work. CIPD, London.
Peter F. Drucker ‘The practice of Management', (1968). Pan Books Ltd, London.
Rollinson, Derek. (2005), ‘Organizational Behaviour and Analysis: An integrated Approach'. Pearson, England
Ronald Bigelow and Peng S. Chan, (1992) ‘Managing in difficult times: Lessons from the most recent recession', Management decisions, Vol. 30 (8), pp. 34-41.
Unknown, (2006) ‘Is ageism the acceptable face of discrimination? Changing the attitude toward older workers' Managerial Law, Vol. 48 (6), pp. 521-524
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