Human Resource Management is adopted by numerous organizations because of the benefits that are achieved from it. Sometimes various issues as well as challenges might emerge to the human resource department’s manager while they perform their duties. In order to prevent the obstruction caused by the issues and challenges, HR needs to work on the issues as well as challenges and find ways to avoid them (Rane, Sunnapwar and Rane 2016). Various fields where HR might face issues and challenges include recruiting new employees, retention of employees, health and safety, training, productivity, payroll, globalization, technologically discipline advancement, workforce diversity, managing of data and many more. HR of different organizations face different HR issues depending on the field were organization works. In this assignment, the HRM issues faced by an organization would be discussed in details. The organization chosen is Toyota.
Toyota is a MotoCorp company which manufactures numerous vehicles for different categories of customers (Sparrow, Hird and Cooper 2015). Toyota offers a good corporate citizen that is trusted by most of the associated stakeholders as well as creates a very affluent society. It does the contribution with the help of its business operations. It also strives in creating an earth friendly product in order to maintain sustainable growth. Toyota honours various cultures as well as customs of all the nations. Toyota has faced various HRM issues, these include rewards and recognition, training, hiring and many more (Aklamanu, Degbey and Tarba 2016). These issues are defined in details in the discussion part of the assignment.
HR processes include numerous steps that should be followed in order to carry out a successful HRM process. In case any of the processes are not carried out efficiently, the whole process has a chance to fail (Almeida et al. 2018). Similarly there are various reasons for which the HRM process of Toyota failed to succeed and became the reason of downfall of the company. According to a paper named “A Think Piece: How HR Caused Toyota to Crash”, is the major reason that contributes to the failure of Toyota is the weak management of its people. A reason for which the Human Resource Management of the company is blamed for the downfall of the company is that the various mechanical defects which have caused recall to occur, existed by the leaders of the company for a specific time period before any action was taken to rectify the problem (Gollan, Kalfa and Xu 2015). In fact, instead of attempting to solve the problems, the company was blamed to hide their issues claiming that they had problems with the mechanics of the vehicles.
The actual reason for which these managers took these actions were that of the rewards system that was set up by the company. This system rewarded managers for their level of cost containment. The company did not reward them for the sustainability of the quality of vehicles. Toyota Motor Corporation chose to reward and continued to reward the managers on the basis of that contains different categories of prices in an corporation (Song, Kim and Kim 2016). According to “the purpose of any corporate reward process is to encourage and in cent the right the gathering of information about problems. It’s equally important to reward employees who are successful in getting executives to take immediate action on negative information”
Various HR processes that should be suspected as a contribution to the downfall of Toyota include
Rewards and recognition: Rewards and recognition is a way by which the organization rewards various hard working employees. This is done by rewarding them with materialistic things, a certificate or gift vouchers and many more (Sadgrove 2016). The rewards and recognize help the organization recognize its potential employees and reward them for their hard work. It also encourages the employees to increase their efficiency and keep up their honesty and loyalty to the company (Hiley 2017). The actual purpose of this purpose is to encourage as well as in cent the ones who behave right and to discourage the ones who do not behave well. For reward process, it is an important factor to gather the problems regarding data. It is very important for every organization to reward their employees that succeed in getting various executives who take instant action on the negative data. In Toyota the rewards and lean cost cutting recognition was ongoing and succeeding to such an extent that the company faced an unstoppable growth (Song, Kim and Kim 2016). This growth provided numerous error free results; these results removed the HR’s attention from various obvious errors.
Overall corporate culture: A problem that took place in the company and can be held responsible for the downfall of the company is the corporate culture. This problem also recalls the manufacturing defects that have occurred in the company (Marchington 2015). This has caused due to the low level managers as well as various personnel were complaining regarding the deteriorating quality of vehicles manufactured by the company. They have been complaining from a lot before than when the company actually realized it. The management of the upper level did not find the complaints legitimate and they found no such reason to consider the complaints of the lower level management regarding the quality of their products seriously. This sort of corporate culture in an organization where the upper management is allowed to ignore the concerns of its lower management proves to be very dangerous for the organization, it should be considered that the lower level management is closer to the production floor whereas the high level management is quite far from it, so the issues faced by the production floor in manufacturing of the products would be recognized by the lower level management (Aoki and Wilhelm 2017). Along with these, the lower level managers had fewer chances to receive bonuses in exchange for their hitting of targets regarding cost cutting. The upper level management receives all the bonuses. Bonuses would have helped them to be more aware regarding various problems with the manufacturing as well as security as well as safety issues.
Training as well as supervision of the personnel: Another human resource additional issue that had been involved in the organization. These issues had many recalls including improper training that are given to the personnel(Turner 2016). After recruitment of employees, they are provided with training where they are made aware with the operations of the company, they are made to practice the operations and prepared such a way that they contribute in well-being and improvement of the company. The corporation had experienced a huge level of growth in the past few years; this distracted them from the topic of training that is provided to the employees. They were unable to keep up with the training of employees.
The factors mentioned before has resulted in a lack of knowledge in the new employees. The company allowed new employees to join their respective teams as soon as they were shortlisted. This has resulted in numerous mistakes that were caused due to the incomplete knowledge in them (Bailey et al. 2016). The employees did not have proper knowledge or skill to perform various job functions at the optimum levels. Lack of workforce planning has led to this problem. Along with the fact that the company failed in providing proper training to the employees because of the rapid growth, the company also failed in supervising the employees because it was busy to achieve the heights by neglecting the quality of products. The main job of human resource management is to make sure that the correct number of employees is recruited in correct positions with the appropriate level of skills in order to supervise the ones who work for the enterprise. Growth that Toyota faced became a major reason for its downfall; the fail had caused due to the failure of human resources (Charlwood and Hoque 2017). They failed in having the right people in right position in for performing their function.
Risk management: One of the major reasons for which the company had faced downfall is the identification of its risks cause due to working principles and implementing risk management strategies in order to get the risk of the risks and challenges (Gelei, Losonci and Matyusz 2015). This has resulted in the recent failure of the company. according to “What really happened to Toyota?” an article that identified the risks faced by Toyota and analysed the reasons for its failure, one of the major purpose of risk management is to identify problems as soon as possible and undertake measures to eliminate them. The risks are supposed to be eliminated before they peek into various significant issues in a way similar to Toyota. A series of recalls which followed demonstrated was practical according to the corporation. The corporation considered it would be able to maintain the quality in present competitive market of vehicles especially automobiles. These are to be done along with high paid salaries as well as lucrative bonuses in order to keep down the costs (Matsuo 2015). They did not maintain a specific department for controlling the quality of the vehicles manufactured by the company.
To implement proper risk management strategy of human resource in an organization is an important factor (Bailey et al. 2016). As per “HR’s Role in Effective Risk Management”, human capital risk management has four pillars. The four platforms include operational risk, strategic risk, compliance risk and the financial risk. The concept of human resources have failed in two among all the four parts of the events which took place and had led huge recalls for ensuring the company. All strategic risks or the ones that are imposed by company ethics, the culture and the strategy of human capital had made the corporation to fail because the notifications of various defects were completely ignored (Aklamanu, Degbey and Tarba 2016). The notifications were ignored because they were received from the low level managers and not from the upper level managers. Whereas, operational risk management include decision making, this concerns if the organization is recruiting at enough pace in order to meet the present needs.
The department of human resource management has the duty of accessing if the recruitment and hiring practices of the company are suitable in meeting the enterprise’s current as well as future needs (Chung, Verabian and Kamouri 2016). The human resources department of Toyota has failed in making a proper assessment of various risks that the company faced due to insufficient employees with proper training in the right positions so that the company works fluently and efficiently. Usually the Human Resource Management plays an important role in smooth processing of a company and helps it to gain success. If a human resource department of a company misses out any point which would contribute to the betterment of the company, the company would be at a great loss and same happened with Toyota.
Hiring: The main purpose of good hiring is bringing out top performing individuals with all knowledge and skills that they need for the job (Sisson and Elshennawy 2015). The employees are hired after testing their capabilities and skills that would help them to handle complex problems. If assessment and recruitment elements are not designed properly, the hiring process might cause problems. This would result in recruitment of wrong or less capable people, they would not be able to initiate decision making properly nor can they tackle numerous problems faced by the company (Gelei, Losonci and Matyusz 2015). Toyota faced a similar situation; it did not have a properly designed process for hiring that would allow the company to hire various individuals who were inexperienced in the necessary technique of constructive confrontation.
The company failed in fulfilling the basic criteria to recruit employees and hence failed in the step which provides more benefits to the organization. Toyota was so much busy in increasing its growth that it did not concentrate on providing training to the new employees regarding their working operations; this has led in numerous activities that proved to be the reason of Toyota’s downfall (Bhasin 2015). The employees also did not have any interest in learning the working principles; they acted according to their wishes and made the company work inefficiently.
Performance management process: The main function of the performance management process is monitoring as well as appraising the performance of the employees from time to time (Sekhar, Patwardhan and Vyas 2017). This helps the management to identify various problems in behaviours before they go out of control. Toyota did not have any performance measurement system which would include performance factors for measuring the responsiveness towards negative data. This has resulted in the turmoil of the company. The employees worked for increasing the growth of the company and neglected the aspect of quality in the vehicles (Aoki and Wilhelm 2017). The performance management did not monitor the performances of the employees and neither did they access their performances to find out the risks that were approaching towards the company.
The performance monitoring and performance appraisal were so poor that they failed in identifying and reporting groupthink type of errors. The HR failed in developing sophisticated metrics which would have helped them in producing alerts for warning various senior managers against different monitoring problems before they goes of control (Stern, Ardoin and Powell 2017). If the company would have had a department that would access the performances of employees, recognize the risks and take steps to mitigate them, the company would not have faced downfall.
Leadership development as well as succession: The actual aim of succession and planning processes of leadership development is to make sure that a company has enough number of leaders with appropriate and necessary skills as well as the ability of decision making. These factors are placed in the position of key leadership (Sekhar, Patwardhan and Vyas 2016). Toyota failed in selecting able leaders who can confront various difficult problems and take proper decisions in the most difficult times. The leadership process in Toyota was much backdated that it had produced a wrong type of leaders who had outdated competencies. These leaders were not able to operate successfully in the rapid changing industry of automobiles (Pinho and Mendes 2017). The leaders that were selected for various teams present in the company were inefficient and could not perform well. They failed in managing the teams properly and hence led to the downfall of the company.
Retention: The main purpose of organizing retention program is identifying as well as keeping all the top individuals and performers with various skills that are mission critical. The company Toyota’s retention program ignored the problems that brought various problems into the company (Saengchamnong and Chokechaiworarut 2017). As a result, the whistleblowers usually leave because of enormous frustration. The company did not take actions to monitor the employees, who were the trouble makers and did not warn them for their deeds, this has led to the downfall of the company.
Turnover rate: The poor performance of the company in the motor corporation industry has led the loyal and honest employees to leave the organization. This is a major reason for the downfall of the company (Patel and Thakkar 2014). Employees have left the company for their various personal reasons as well as problems faced by them in the workplace.
According to Business Week, Toyota lost almost $155 million in each week which was a result of the recent recall. After that it had lost nearly about $30 billion in the valuation of stock (Rane, Sunnapwar and Rane 2016). There are long term impacts that causes problem to the current situation of the company. The problem faced by Toyota is not an outcome of a particular individual making a specific mistake; it was actually the result of a series of mistakes that were interrelated. Numerous corporation functions were involved which included government relations, customer service, PR and vendor management (Gelei, Losonci and Matyusz 2015). These are damages where no one can help but attribute the crash occurred in Toyota.
Conclusion
From the above mentioned points, it can be concluded that the problems faced by Toyota Motor Corporation including the manufacturing problems which has resulted in numerous recalls in recent time have helped to demonstrate the ways by which failure of human resources might lead to the failure of Overall Corporation. Till numerous years, Toyota has been a model of excellence in terms of quality compared to many other corporations. Recently the top managers who had received bonuses as well as rewards for keeping the costs less at corporation had ignored various warnings that had been received from lower level management. The warnings were regarding the quality of vehicles manufactured by the company. These complain were ignored by the high level management because they felt keeping the prices low would be beneficial for the company. This made them avoid the quality of products. The warnings were neglected until they had snowballed to a certain level where the massive recalls were necessary. Along with this the company disbanded a specific force of tasks that were put together in order to access various risks in the corporation of numerous defects occurring. This is because the company had claimed that they ensure the fact that quality was maintained in their corporate environment. As a result they did not find it important to separate the departments in changing the quality.
The move of the company regarding not dividing the departments failed to carry out the required function of risk management and assign required people for functioning properly. The result of this particular move was that the vehicles that were being manufactured by the company at this time were defective and these defects had resulted in huge recalls as well as damage to the reputation of the company that was irreparable. The main lesson that should be learned by other corporations from the failure faced by Toyota is that HR should periodically audit as well as test all the processes going on in the corporation. The testing and audition would prevent this sort of error to occur which can cause the downfall of the corporation.
References
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