Organizations these days are highly influenced by market rationalism principles that support, impacts and facilitates in strategically aligning management along with leadership practices with HR strategies at every level of the company (Armstrong 2014). This has resulted in increased pressure on attaining short-term financial performance with the companies those are not able to sustain strategic HRM practices.
Avatar Group is one of the most established business organizations in UK that provides good quality technology based products and services all around the world to meet the needs and expectations of the customers with ease and effectiveness. The company supplies superior technology personal portable gadgets and develop wireless network infrastructures and technologies for supporting it (Baczy?ska 2015). Avatar Group is among the largest and financially successful companies internationally. It’s headquarter is situated in among the world’s largest liberal market economies. The company ranks among the top business publications that are listed among the world’s best known brands, highlyinnovative and great places for working.
There are certain organizational situations which have resulted in the current investigations of the case study and related HRM concerns faced by the line managers (Bessant and Mavin 2016).
The business organization is considered as a prototype because it functions with the shared capital provided by its various shareholders and investors. Multiple organizations are present on the list of liberal market stock exchange companies, among which Avatar Group has achieved most of the shares by selling superior technology based products. Due to the increased payout ratio related to increased share, the company has managed to attract many customers, which has generated more revenue. It also helped to provide the shareholders with the maximum amount of money based on the investments made by them. This created a sense of trust and loyalty among them furthermore influenced them to make investments again (Crow Sr 2017).
The objective of the paper is to evaluate the case study ofAvatar Group and consider making highly effective and prudent strategic decisions that is forward going and can enhance effectiveness of the company’s line manager. Moreover, the report will also analyze distinct operational HRM problems and challenges experienced by line managers of the company who is responsible for delivering performance and strategic goals. From the evaluation of such HRM challenges, the paper will be able to provide its consumers with certain focused and concise evidenced based recommendations that can resolve such HRM issues.
Organizational goal of the company is to attain its financial targets through offering a range of services and products and by accomplishing the most important business goals and objectives including the recognition of cost and better generation of revenue consistently. (Cvetkovski 2017). Line managers act as intermediaries between the employees and manager of the organisation for making the staffs know about the goals and objectives set by the manager. They are also responsible for dealing with issues associated with maintaining financial process control. This process is where the company gets an opportunity to implement the actions that are set out by the company as a strategy. Spending is not taking place in required places and excessive spending is observed in several unimportant operations.
To deal with the challenges of increased competition, Avatar Group directed revenue generation by means of producing better quality products and services and ensure providing the best value that was previously promised by the company to its customers (Govender 2014). For dealing with challenges associated with shifts in strategy along with offering new services and products, the company involved itself in “re-orgs” for multiple times all throughout the year. This kind of operation was done for managing changes and improvements in certain portion of the company for becoming successful in the future. To undergo these changes, the roles of team members were stopped for a certain amount of time to implement the new changes as soon as possible. Change of role took place in a year among the years (McDermott 2016). This had adverse impact on people and they felt the pressure of performing the following:
The line managers were also facing an issue from lack of innovation within the generative work. Such work in the company is funded from capital expenditure (CAPEX) budget (Han et al.2015). Avatar Group line managers failed to be in employee acceptance to change and the innovation was required to be future based and so something new was implemented.
The employees were involved in the generative activities for the development of new ideas, opinions and concepts so that those could be applied based on different case studies in business. It not only facilitated the proper management of project plans but also enhanced the efficiency of the projects undertaken by Avatar Group though constant monitoring, evaluation of progress and keeping updated as well. For the generative activities, knowledge and information sharing is free for all, because of which it does not generate any appropriate and perfect ideas, knowledge was not shared in “bottom up” communication by line managers nor was deemed to be associated with success of the company as stated by the CEO of Avatar Group (McDonald and Cathcart 2015).
Line managers are not capable enough to develop clear strategy that can ensure important innovation and attaining pre-defied financial objectives (Hasso 2015). From the case study analysis of Avatar Group, consistent communication must be present so that the knowledge and information sharing staffs could provide useful responses and opinions to the senior management team and keep the CAPEX secured during the management of projects.
The employees are needed to communicate and explain their knowledge to senior management in financial terms. Failing to ensure the same indicated denial of CAPEX so more priority has been put on the hierarchical structure for managing the financial aspects and make sure that the line managers do support them to do so (McFarlin and Sweeney 2014).
Improper information communication was observed in case of Avatar Group as the line manager stared that investment approvals of the company gets rejected every time as it was caught upon in the governance approvals and red tape (Heiskanen and Jokinen 2015). The company lostsix months to consumer market as approval needed detailed information flow regarding business vase and the conducts if competitors. Orhazational goal of the company is to attain its financial targets through offering a range of services and products and by accomplishing the major business goals and objectives including the generation of revenue and understanding the costs of products and services delivered. (Cvetkovski 2017). The line managers are dealing with issues associated with maintaining financial process control. This process is where the company gets an opportunity to implement the actions that are set out by the company as a strategy. Spending is not taking place in required places and excessive spending is observed in several unimportant operations.
Another challenging HRM issue observed in Avatar Group was concerning operational performance targets that further reduced the human resources, i.e., the employees and even decreased their skills and capabilities to perform. The aims and objectives associated with the reduction of OPEX were managed with the use of benchmarking process, though it brought some negative impacts by reducing the human resources, its capabilities and even the new machineries and equipments used (Kendall 2015). Both the senior management workers and line managers, were not engaged with the making of operational decisions, which left the OPEX budgets monitored without any supervision. The line managers who were involved with the management of business operations also failed to state about what they had done and how much costs should be incurred while undertaking the project.
From the case study analysis of Avatar Group, it was observed that the company presented increased threat to job security. Re-orgs also indicated that people were regularly changing manager that needed them to create a positive mindset among the managers who have been selected (Kerzner 2013). The insecurity and ineffectiveness was though not managed by the senior management properly, which further deteriorated the ability to monitor the business functioning and projects undertaken consistently (Sharma and KU 2013). Moreover, incompetency of the line managers has been observed from analyzing the case study of Avatar Group. This is because of the reason that wrong decision making took place after investing a huge amount of money. Several changes took pave that included changing of departments where people couldto adjust themselves and were not needed and has indicated that the line managers were highly incompetent (McCracken et al.2017).
Another challenge faced by the company was the job insecurity that resulted due to the lack of management ownership to make proper financial decisions. This created stir among the employees because the senior management did not make decisions properly, which resulted in job redundancy as well. The tasks associated with the management of project were also not assigned properly to the employees, rather it was dispersed in such a manner that the employees performed poorly (?ukowski and Gudowski 2014). This strategy failed because of the reason that the directors of the Avatar eventually concededvsuch mistakes along with re-hiring certain project managers on contract. Employees frustration increased because of the fact that the company made millions per day within profit. Employees spoke regarding the ways in which the senior management (Townsend and Kellner 2015). In addition, the employees are the to deal with the challenges of increased competition, Avatar Group directed revenue generation by means of producing the best quality technology products and services for meeting the needs and requirements of the customers (Govender 2014). For dealing with challenges associated with shifts in strategy along with offering new services and products, the company involved itself in “re-orgs” for multiple times all throughout the year. To implement the necessary changes, many of the roles of team members were stopped and it was checked that the new changes implemented could bring the most favorable outcomes for the company. Change of role took place in a year among the years (McDermott 2016).
Conclusion
The objective of the paper was to evaluate the case study ofAvatar Group and consider making highly effective and prudent strategic decisions that is forward going and can enhance effectiveness of the company’s line manager. From the evaluation of such HRM challenges, the paper was able to provide its consumers with certain focused and concise evidenced based recommendations that can resolve such HRM issues. From analyzing the case study, it is gathered that the line managers are dealing with issues associated with maintaining financial process control. This process is where the company gets an opportunity to implement the actions that are set out by the company as a strategy. Spending is not taking place in required places and excessive spending is observed in several unimportant operations. Improper information communication was observed in case of Avatar Group as the line manager stared that investment approvals of the company gets rejected every time as it was caught upon in the governance approvals and red tape. The company lost six months to consumer market as approval needed detailed information flow regarding business vase and the conducts if competitors.
Another challenging HRM issue observed in Avatar Group was concerning operational performance targets that resulted on decreasing pool of company resources. It is also observed that Avatar Group line managers failed to be in employee acceptance to change and the innovation was required to be future based and involved contributing to generation of something new. From observing such concerns, the company is recommended to enhance its financial performance through enhancing overall team along with individual performance as well as offering performance reviews. The line managers must also be aware of their proper communication of relevant information to the upper management as well as the employees of the company. The line manager must realize their role as critical cogs in making sure that new programs can be implemented within an effective and timely manner.
To address such HRM challenges faced by the Avatar Group certain recommendations have been provided that can enhance the strategy making decision power and effectiveness of the line managers. Such recommendations are explained under:
References
Armstrong, P., 2014. Limits and possibilities for HRM in an age of management accountancy. New Perspectives On Human Resource Management op. cit. at, pp.154-166.
Baczy?ska, A., 2015. Analytical, practical and emotional intelligence and line manager competencies. Management and Business Administration, 23(4), pp.34-54.
Bessant, C. and Mavin, S., 2016. Neglected on the front line: Tensions and challenges for the first-line manager-academic role in UK business schools. Journal of Management Development, 35(7), pp.916-929.
Crow Sr, L.E., 2017. The Police Chief and City Manager: Cultivating and Maintaining a Practical Line of Communication and Philosophy in the Workplace.
Cvetkovski, A., 2017. Support for the first-line manager and self-managing teams provided by HR departments (Bachelor’s thesis, University of Twente).
Govender, B.A., 2014. The role of the line manager as performance coach (Doctoral dissertation).
Han, B., Gopalakrishnan, V., Ji, L. and Lee, S., 2015. Network function virtualization: Challenges and opportunities for innovations. IEEE Communications Magazine, 53(2), pp.90-97.
Hasso, R., 2015. The influence of a perceived innovation-focused HRM system on employees’ innovative work behavior and the moderating effect of line manager behavior (Master’s thesis, University of Twente).
Heiskanen, T. and Jokinen, E., 2015. Resources and constraints of line manager agency in municipal reforms. Nordic journal of working life studies, 5(3), p.79.
Kendall, F., 2015. Program Manager Assessments: Professionalism Personified. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Washington United States.
Kerzner, H., 2013. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
McCracken, M., O’Kane, P., Brown, T.C. and McCrory, M., 2017. Human resource business partner lifecycle model: exploring how the relationship between HRBPs and their line manager partners evolves. Human Resource Management Journal, 27(1), pp.58-74.
McDermott, J., 2016. Exploring how and why the front line manager impacts employee attitudes and behaviours in the context of a high performance work system (Doctoral dissertation).
McDonald, P. and Cathcart, A., 2015. 13 A manager-centred perspective on organisational work–life agendas. Handbook of Research on Managing Managers, p.245.
McFarlin, D. and Sweeney, P.D., 2014. International management: strategic opportunities & cultural challenges. Routledge.
Sharma, T. and KU, K., 2013. Training Process–An Overview; Role, Responsibilities and Challenges to Training Manager. Lecture Materials for Training and Development Course in the Deaprtment of Commerce.
Townsend, K. and Kellner, A., 2015. 6 Managing the front-line manager. Handbook of Research on Managing Managers, p.104.
?ukowski, P. and Gudowski, J., 2014. Competence dimensions of manager–contemporary challenges. Journal of Modern Science, p.121.
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