Buying Choices In Staffing

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Human Resource Business Partnering II

Queen Charlene Swartz – Student no: 21110159

Contents

Question 1

Flow of People

The flow of people refers to the movement of talented people within an organisation. How they enter, develop their skills and move through the organisation either by promotion or leaving the organisation. What happens to the organization's key asset-its people-including how people move in, though, up, and out of the organization. Proper attention to people flow ensures the availability of the talent the organization needs to accomplish its strategy.

The range of available people practices is regarded as a menu with six sections and it is the responsibility of HR to prepare this menu of choices and help managers choose what suit their situation.

Buying: Choices in Staffing

This is how people enter into the organisation. It is regarded as the most important HR function as this forms the foundation for the organisation. Staffing involves three major processes namely expanding the candidate, pool hiring the best candidate and orienting them to do the work. Staffing brings people into the organization. It is perhaps the single most fundamental HR practice, because if you have inadequate personnel, all the training, incentives, and communication in the world will not complete their transformation. Your people must have the abilities needed for today's job as well as tomorrows.

Expanding the candidate pool improves your firm's chances of getting the employees it needs. You can expand the pool by building relationships with key sources of talent (e.g., campuses, search firms), using referral hiring, having an Internet hiring presence, and targeting special employees. No matter how large the pool, it's still dire to seek out the right candidates and keep them hooked. Ideas for increasing the hit rate include interviewing with intent to hire, offering financial backing, being determined, and paying attention to personal issues, forming relationships, and communicating genuine but appealing prospects.

Once someone is hired, orientation is crucial in getting the candidate quickly up to speed and productive. Sample orientation efforts include dealing with the administrative details, providing early feedback on performance, finding early assignment successes, orienting the new employee to the entire value chain, integrating the employee to your culture, and listening to ideas from the employee.

Example: advertising, shortlisting, interviewing, references, offer of employment and orientation.

Building: Choices in Training and Development

This means unleashing underlying talent on either training or development. For HR to make informed choices about training the following questions should be addressed:

Who should attend the program? Employees at one level or multiple levels, alone or in teams, customers, investors, or suppliers?

Who should present the program? Professors, consultants, line managers, customers, investors, analysts, or others.

Who should design the program? Professors, consultants, line managers, customers, line managers, or investors?

What should the program cover? Focus on individual abilities or organization capabilities, content or action planning, results or personal skills.

How will the program be delivered? On site, off site, with cases or action learning, through technology or face to face, short time period or long time period.

How will the program change the participants? Reactions to training, knowledge received, behavioural change, actions taken, or business impact.

The other half of the build menu comes from development-from opportunities to learn from experience.

Forms of Development:

Mobility – learn from new assignments that to learn new skills

Mentoring or coaching – help employees to learn

Outside experience – Participation in community service can help employees build both relationship networks and leadership skills

Personal Development plan – creating one

Temporary assignments – project in addition to regular duties.

Borrowing: Choices in Contracting for Talent

This refers to using talent that is not part of the full-time employees. Some options for using talent without ownership include joint alliances with consulting or other firms, site visits to learn from others, outsourcing work to targeted vendors, and maintaining relationships with former employees.

Bouncing: Choices in Shrinking the Workforce

In the current business environment, a firm needs a workforce of the correct size for its immediate and near-term success. Organisations may need to reduce to bring things into balance. And size isn't the only factor: It doesn't matter whether poor performance comes from a bad hire or from failure to keep current, the firm will suffer as long as it is allowed to continue. We refer to both types of cutback as bouncing.

Removing employees for any reason should be difficult. It should be personally painful for the responsible leader and require reflection on what went wrong. Communicating care for the employees who leave and who stay becomes important in any circumstance. The TV-cute tag line "You're fired!" is archaic and destroys employee goodwill. It's necessary to move decisively but to show care by offering performance and outplacement counseling, and by considering the impact on the individual.

Binding: Choices in Retaining Talent

Keeping existing talent to in your organisation matters at all levels. Senior managers with vision and competence are essential to an organisation’s success, which is why they are hot prospects for rival recruiting. Many technical, operational, and hourly workers are equally important. Investments in individual talent often take years to pay back. Often referred to as "A" players, an organization's top talent produces many times the value of average or poor talent. To bind talent, you might think about finding out why talented people leave, offering incentives to keep talented employees and offering non-financial rewards to stay.

Boosting: Choices in Promotion

Some of the choices in promotion are to promote current employees, putting the right people in the right positions.

Choices around promotion:

Establish criteria for the new job, match the person with the job and see if they meet the requirements

Allow volunteers, but don’t stop there and see if they are ready for the position.

Evaluate the candidate’s potential by doing an assessment on the candidate’s potential and capacity to grow.

Support new job holders; support the candidate you decided on.

Question 2

Human Interaction Patterns

Individual Production

This is production that is done by only one person. An example of such a production can be cooking supper for your family.

Sequential Production

This is usually an assembly-line production process. When one person does their part of the production and pass it on to the next person who then passes it on it on to the next one in line. An example of a sequential production is the building of a house. One person digs the holes for the foundation for the foundation, another lays the bricks, another does the plumbing and so it goes until the house is complete.

Interactive Teams

Flexible teams that interact with each other and activities flow backward and forward. An example is the graphic designers in a company that bounce ideas off each other and send the designs back and forth among them until it’s complete.

Sequential Teams

These are assembly-line production that works in teams. One team does their part and passes it on to the next team. Like a university operates, the administration team receives the assignment and send it to the markers/lecturers that mark it; they send it to the next team who does a second check and then back to administration that sends it back to the students.

Virtual Teams

Teams that use technology such as email, teleconferencing, videoconferencing and Skype to work on the same project even though they are miles apart. An example of such a team would be divers that do research under the ocean but can still communicate with others that work on the project and is on the land.

Question 3

HR Competencies

Question No.

How I rate myself

(1 = Poor 5= Excellent)

What I can do to improve my rating

1

5

2

3

Lobby management team to see the importance

3

4

Read more, research more

4

5

5

5

6

5

7

4

Practice more and be open to corrections

8

4

Practice more and be open to corrections

9

3

Conduct a survey and identify development areas

10

4

Practice more and be open to corrections

11

3

Read more

12

3

Read more

13

4

Read more

14

4

Read more

15

3

Market research

16

4

Read more

17

4

Explore options

Question 4

The flow of Information

What keeps people aware of the organization and their combined knowledge resources. Proper attention to information flow ensures that people know what is happening and why, and can apply themselves to what needs doing to create value. The flow of information is an important part of any organisation and it is a means of sharing goals, compiling strategies and making decisions.

Information flows in Different Directions

Outside In

Know the "what" and the "how much" of customer information. As an organisation it is imperative to know what your customers, so that it can be easier for you to accommodate their needs. \this can be done through suggestion boxes.

Know most about the most important customers, as some customers are more important than others. It might be that these customers buy more or they are less costly.

It is also very important to gather comparative data, how your customers compare you to your competition and how they see today and against what they expect from you as a service provider.

Create and gather information through joint interaction with customers. Join customers in mutual advantageous activities.

It is also helpful to expose management and employees to customer requirements. The behaviours of employees and management can be affected by customer interaction, like having info sessions with customers. This is a platform where you can discuss how your products and services influence the lives of the customers.

Another form of outside in information flow is bringing investor’s logic into the organisation, investors are objective and credible when they provide feedback on company performance therefore they will be able to contribute positively to staff meetings and gatherings.

Sign up vendors as extra sources of innovation; subcontracting innovation alleviates threats, speed up innovation and reaches otherwise inaccessible talent.

Inside Out

Generate the substance of brand than communicate it. Products and services that are perceived to be of high quality must indeed be of high quality. It is fraudulent to give customers the wrong impression.

Another form of inside out information is to communicate the brand image and then work hard to sustain the portrait image, which means that the brand that is communicated to the outside should be sustained.

It is also wise to create emotional ties with customers, try and convince customer to love your brand instead of just valuing it. Creating ties of trust with customers is another form of this information flow, build trust with your customers through giving them products they can trust and rely on.

Top Down

Present major issues in top management’s voice, employees tend to detract information depending on who the source is. Messages have higher impact when it comes from top management.

Present action items first in the immediate supervisor’s voice. First line managers need to be trained in communication skills by HR so that they are able to share important messages.

Balance the and the whys, managers to tend to communicate what is happening, needed and expected. Employees may be impatient but when they understand the what they will accept the how. . Balance the big picture and details, employees need to understand how their individual jobs add value to the whole organisation. Therefore they need to be well informed about their duties and responsibilities, their performance and the consequences of it.

Balance good news and bad news, some professional are good at sharing good news others at bad news. However employees most value honesty. Apply multimedia, even though employees prefer face to face communication, the changing multiple media is more popular such as videoconferencing, emails, websites and so forth.

Bottom Up

Acknowledge the importance of upward information flow, upward information flow is the most constricted because of seniority and powers. Employees fear senior managers will reject honest feedback.

Be where the action is, the closer you are to your work the more informed you should be about your work. Collect and use imperial data, establish a database of employee’s views and on-going issues. Approach management and they will be able to make a rational decision. Provide avenues for upward communication management should create a channel for upward communication.

Side to Side

Remove obstacles, get colleagues to talk to each other. Have them sort out their differences and have an open communication channel. Promote efficiency, if more information flows from side to side less will have to flow up or down. This is economic and results in better coordination.

Develop a system of integrated horizontal linkages, horizontal communication flow can be best viewed as a series of system, interpersonal info sharing, interteam, interdepartmental, interdivisional. Expand market opportunities. Employ the full range of vehicles for horizontal info flow, temporary work assignments and ad-hoc meetings.

Question 5

Principles of Professional Development

Adult Learning

This is very different from childhood learning because adults have experience and they build on that. This is a platform for adult to learn new ideas, new ways of doing things and just add to their years of experience.

Principles of Adult Learning

Base new ideas on business realities

When adults understand what they should learn, they more readily accept it. For example if you graduated as a doctor in 1990 and started practicing then, thing were very different than what they are today, and the technology and techniques being used are also different. If as an adult you understand this you will be more open to learn and adapt to new techniques.

Focus on application

Adult are more interested in the theory itself than in how the theory can help them. Thus HR professionals are pertinent to find the fundamental theory of human nature and motivation less interesting than its implication from building a compensation practice that focusses employees on high-value added performance and behaviours.

Accept multiple learning styles

In general adults have a preferred way of learning, which is individual to them. It is up to HR to adapt to these learning styles and make them individual to the employee.

Present information via multiple channels

Adults learn through reading, listening, observing, watching videos, analysing case studies, role-playing and discussions. It is up to HR to develop gram with different learning technologies to entice adults.

Ground and program in personal reality

Adults tend to develop and grow through strengths and weaknesses, however accurate feedback is not always given under the pretence of sensitivity.

Articulate a clear goal

Adults know what they want which makes it easier for them to strive towards reaching their goals. They also compare themselves to others and to the business strategy and see how they get to that point. When you have a clear vision of what is need of you from the organisation, and how you want to grow your competencies you will draw drawn by the magnetic field of your vision.

Earn and build on respect

It is easy for adults to learn from those they respect. In experts you learn from your peers as wee as your mentor or lecturers.

Create a friendly learning environment

HR professional should strive to have an open and friendly learning environment, where the employees are open to asking questions and a have an open two-way communication. They want to feel like they are being treated as adults and not school children.