Essay For Work Design Challenges: Importance Of Human Resource Management In A Flexible Work Model

The Strategic Role of Human Resource Management

Write about the Essay for Work Design Challenges.

Flexibility and innovativeness are key fundamental factors that most businesses in various industries have underutilized in their daily executions. Organizations need to move away from traditional way of doing things the same way, embrace innovativeness and come up with new ideas that enhance profitability by benefiting both the business and the employees as seen in Justitia’s flexible work model. Establishing flexibility and innovativeness in the business is fundamental but it is only going to succeed when perfectly supplemented by strategic human resource management (SHRM). Human resource management is an important factor which determines the course and fate of the business performance, and without it the business is directionless (Burma, 2014).

In an environment which gives much freedom to the employees as seen in the flexible work model, individual monitoring is essential in ensuring that the job performance is not undermined. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are important in this case for determining the whole organization’s performance as well as individual output at the workplace. The use of human resource management will ensure that there is hiring of the appropriate personnel who are willing to fit in to the model at work.

Apart from ensuring the hiring of the right employees who would fit perfectly in the organization, human resource management also ensures smooth transition of the workers in to their new environment of operation, monitoring and evaluating the employees’ performance through performance appraisal among other roles (Burma, 2014) 

Most businesses are driven by the urge of generating more profit, growing in size and outperforming their close rivals in the same industry. But behind all these motivations, there lies a crucial factor which is strategy. Every business sets its goals to be achieved and lays down a well formulated strategy to achieve those goals. Therefore human resource management department comes in as the major player in any organization in terms of aiding the firm to attain its set goals.

According to (Alnaqbi, 2011), businesses should concentrate on developing those HRM strategies and policies that fulfills the roles of recruitment, training of the staff and the employees’ performance appraisal that is in line with organization’s acceptable set of beliefs and cultural practices. Furthermore all these HRM functions should aim at one major goal of maintaining good relationship between the employees and the top management.

While most businesses use HRM for achieving external goals, some organizations see it as a perfect tool of employee management within an organization. Other firms use HRM strategically by implementing those HR practices and policies that curbs unwanted employee turnover within an organization (Kacmar, Andrews, Rooy, Steilberg, & Cerrone, 2006).

The Importance of HRM in Justitia’s Work Design

Within an organization, HRM serves various purposes. (Sava?, 2006), highlighted the objectives of HRM key among them being determining workforce and their cost in relation to the organization’s budget, determining salary norms, employee career development and their effectiveness to the organization. Therefore, it can generally be concluded that organizations sets up HRM departments to deal specifically with their important areas of their interests.

Justitia as a firm employed business strategy based on flexibility. The firm formed an innovative and flexible work design that suited both the employer and the employee. The business partners behind its formation emphasized on a work design independent from the normal, traditional organizational approaches, which valued part-time working, with a team work approach, and quality service delivery.

However, this work model required efficient and effective human resource management to succeed. The Justitia partners understood the implication brought about by allowing employees too much time and freedom. Therefore the setting up of the HRM department was an appropriate step in tackling some of the issues regarding employee-organization work relationship. In regard to this work model, human resource management is an important factor in evaluating the employees’ performance on an individual level, as well as the whole teamwork using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In addition, the HRM would serve as a regulating unit in charge of controlling the workers’ conduct, set goals and imparting the set organizational cultural practices, and make sure all the rules and regulations are adhered to.

Furthermore, Justitia’s “whole firm” approach meant that with a collective approach to the set goals, some workers would just joyride within the group without significant returns. To reduce on ‘passenger workers’ menace, human resource management would ensure full participation at individual level within the group. Transparency, worker-worker cooperation and client satisfaction are one of the major results the firm would gain from a well organized human resource management. It was imperative for Justitia firm to device an effective HRM department to ensure smooth operation within the business towards the set goals.

Everything comes with its negative side regardless of the measure. The Justitia’s flexible model was always going to have its flaws. With the flexible approach, it gave too much freedom to the employees which was a dangerous move. Despite its flexibility, it is important to note that the model was new to the business industry, and the one very few organizations are willing to implement. Secondly, human resource management would only be important in this model if it directly enhance management practices that contribute to competitive advantages by reinforcing right skills, right attitudes and behaviors that result in reduction of the costs and service differentiation (Burma, 2014).

The Challenges of Justitia’s Flexible Work Model

Another notable point is that this model is so difficult to implement in a much larger firms where mostly work and roles are specialized. From Justitia’s case, there is a well coordinated team work and apparently easy management of every individual and their work output, which explains why workers are allowed to work part-time and have some time for their personal interests. In larger businesses, with thousands of workers specialized within different roles, flexibility becomes difficult. Monitoring of the worker progress and individual employee’s evaluation would also become a difficult task. The difficulty of mobilizing hundreds of workers with different work specification to work on part-time basis toward achieving the same goal makes this work model typically suited for small-scale firms.

According to (Taylor & Stern, 2009), for the employees to like the organization’s culture, they should be well rewarded fairly for their contributions and their efforts recognized. They should also be trained to improve their skills and develop a talented workforce. With the increase in the size of the firm, these roles eventually overwhelm the HRM department.

It could easily be concluded that most organizations rarely use flexible work models. They encourage innovations within their traditional organizational set ups. But despite all this, the model is still very much applicable in a very busy and complex work environment. The viability of this model also depends with industry of application and also the organizational set up. For instance in the media industry, big media news corporations such as BBC and CNN may have a good organizational set up for work flexibility. In this case employees such news anchors could only work on part-time basis such that, the news anchor only reports at work during the hour of his/her role, such as news bulletin hour.

Similarly, academic institutions such as CQUniversity in Australia may have a flexible working model for their lecturers such that, the lecturer will only report and attend his classes and upon completing the session successfully; he/she could leave for other personal interests as long as the teaching work is effectively completed and students have the required academic content. Furthermore some academic institutions have devised plans of hiring teaching professionals on part-time basis to meet the high education demand in the market. 

 It is also noticeable that this flexible model can be applicable in bigger organizations as part of their programe rather than entirely using the whole design. This model is mostly used by bigger and complex organizations to supplement their workforce need, and as a strategic way of achieving organizational goals. The activity of human resource outsourcing (HRO) by bigger organizations is another good example of flexibility in workforce within bigger organizations. It can be perhaps argued that Justitia’s flexible work model may not be popular in every firm, but it is clearly apparent that itat least plays some part most complex firms.

Conclusively, the flexibility in the job market may not be popular all over the world, but wherever it is employed, it works effectively to the advantage of both the employer and the employee. In addition, human resource management (HRM) plays a very fundamental role in facilitating the success of this work design, through monitoring of individual employee performance, and general team performance.

References

Alnaqbi, W. (2011). The relationship between human resource practices and employee retention in public organisations : an exploratory study conducted in the United Arab Emirates. Edith Cowan University.

Burma, Z. A. (2014). Human Resource Management and Its Importance for Today’s Organizations . International Journal of Education and Social Science , 85-92.

Kacmar, M., Andrews, M., Rooy, D., Steilberg, C., & Cerrone, S. (2006). Sure everyone can be replaced… but at what cost?: Turnover as a predictor of unitlevel performance. The Academy of Management Journal , 133-144.

Sava?, A. (2006). Eleman Seçiminde Yetkinlik Bazl? Mülakat Teknikleri . Istanbul: Anka Matbaac?l?k.

Taylor, J. C., & Stern, G. M. (2009). The Trouble With HR: An Insider’s Guide to Finding and Keeping the Best Talent. New York: American Management Association.