Strategic Human Resource Management For Modern Competitive Business – Myer Case Study

Company vision and strategy

Discuss about the Strategic Human Resource Management for Modern Competitive Business .

In the modern competitive business environment, human resource management is the vital aspects of the management because the performance of an individual in a corporation largely driven by the work culture or work atmosphere that prevails the workplace.  According to Armstrong and Taylor (2014), human resources are not just mobilizing the workforce, but it also stimulates the capabilities of each employee of an organization. To secure integration of individual and groups in securing organizational effectiveness, managers are ready to maintain high moral and good human relation within the organization (Purce 2014). In this context, managers are in process to plan the strategic human resource. This process will identify the current and future human resource needs for an organization to accomplish its goals.

This researcher will develop a human resource plan for Myer. The company has been engaged in departmental retail store business in Australia. This report will critically discuss the key strategic HR issues which make the entire organization difficult to deliver their regular operations and many conflicts are identified during the recent times. The researcher will be taken an approach to resolve those identified issues. Here Mayer would like to incorporate “12 month human resource management plan”. In this plan, the researcher will highlight several areas such as management of performance, training and development, promotion and succession planning, change management, culture of the staff and so on. Here the purpose of the report is to identify key areas of human resource planning so that organization can resolve their key strategic issues and establish a healthy employer-employee relationship within an organization.

Myer is the iconic name of the history of the retail business of Australia. The founder of Myer, Sidney Myer has long been remembered as a visionary of the retail industry. Under his philanthropists’ leadership, the company welcomed consumers to experience amazing departmental stores, known for its international service offerings and merchandise. Myers aim at providing the highest standard of service and ensure the consistency to accomplish and exceed the shopping expectations (Myer 2016). Myer’s future dynamic vision is to being an international class retail business providing inspiration to everyone (Myer 2016). Underpinned a well-structured strategy, the company has been expanded their business in seventy five stores in Australia. However, there some issues have been identified within their workplace because clients have been less satisfied receiving the end service from their departmental stores.

Key Strategic HR issues

The researcher have identified that the company faced problem in the diversity management work culture into their workplace. Since the business has been concentrating to expand their ranges of products, employees are facing immense pressure from the upper management. Though the company visualizes providing best quality services to their consumers, Meyers has been struggling to diversify their work culture and thus deteriorates the employee-employers relationship.

Since its inception, Myer has been delivered ranges of products and accomplishes maximum consumer’s expectations. To sustain the competitive retail position, the company incorporated the diversified culture within their workplace which emerges a lot of issues and major challenges related to discriminatory actions taken by the coworkers. The major issues are related to the strategic human resource management in relating to the HR decision making that make its strategic implementation so difficult. Some of the identified strategic human resources are as follows:

Issues regarding the adapting to a rapidly changing worker profiles: Being the Australia’s biggest retailer, the consumer expectation is really high and this is the main driving force workers are working with handling huge pressure. While consumers in southern states had tightened their purse strings in recent months, Myer has found Queensland a strong spot for the company and expand their business in 2008 (Myer 2016). Since then the human resource department has shifted one worker’s profile to another for allocating employees to the company’s diverse location. After these strategic decisions have implemented, the employee productivity has been reduced. Now the company has been facing challenges because many experienced employees are departing the workforce, leaving a leadership void.

Understanding the subtleties of worker’s qualifications: Due to having a huge competition in the retail market, Myers instigates their employees to perform better and generate more consumer responses, however the ranges of skills that employees need to have not being updated by the provided educational systems of the company (Myer 2016). As the business expands and hire beyond borders, the human resource department of Myers was required to collaborate with other functions of the organization. Here the adequate management training sessions needs to be incorporated but not included by the management of Myers. Strategic vision and the ability to handle complexity were cited to be the most difficult skills to find among serious executives, managers of Myers (Bamberger, Biron and Meshoulam 2014).

Retaining and engaging a challenging workforce:  Mayer has a longstanding history of local community support and engagement, but the management is in concern because that long lasting support has been missing in the worker’s engagement activities. To accomplish the vision of the company, Myers has been extensively expanded their businesses and diversified products but failed to enhance employee’s benefit during the diversified business operation. Most of the employee’s complaints that HR of Myers failed to understand that employees are the most imperative part of their retail business. This results de-motivated employees and high rate of retention within the workplace. The most challenging part for the management of Myer is to retain those valuable employees and sustain the employee’s productivity.

Human Resource Plan (12 months)

Aligning best practice technologies to global management strategy:  Improved technology has been applied by the management to enhance competitive advantages in the market which definitely help to sustain the leading position in the market, however, this global management strategy raised many issues related to the operational filed of the management (Ulrich 2013). This has expanded the cross cultural diversity and communicational excellence within employees but the company has less potential labor market position which has limited access or non-adequate technological literacy (Shields et al.2015)

Diversified team maintenance: Due to operating under diversified market, the organization promotes their products in the cross border or remote locations. However this has become challenging for the management of the organization to manage cross border teams. Furthermore, the organization realized that there are some obvious practice obstacles in running the virtual team.

To resolve the above mentioned key strategic issues of Myer, the company needs to develop a human resource plan for a specified period. The researcher has ensured that the planning will be served as a link between human resource management and the entire strategic plan of Myer. Here the researcher will strategically implement this plan by following key initiatives. The rationale will be justified the choices of the initiatives. Furthermore the research will evaluate the success measure after identifying its impacts on the employees.

Key initiatives:

As per the top management team’s collective view the following strategic programs will be incorporated to address the identified HR issues:

i) Performance Management:

Rationale: Myer can’t just hire employees to assume that they will do well. There are some specific guidelines, oversights and periodic reviews to let the human resource management know what he/she going to be achieved and to make sure they deliver their best performance. For this, Myer will development a performance management programs to enhance productivity, recognize the top performers, motivate employees for working hard (Storey 2014). However, this can be ensured by the HR department that such program must align with hiring and talent development plans. The following steps of Performance management are as follows:

Step 1: Identifying the role-based competencies and behavior for every employees

Step 2: Assess the performance improvement on monthly basis

Step 3: Performance review by the upper management

Step 4:  Acknowledge the performance

ii) Training and development:

Rationale: Training and development initiatives need to be incorporated for employees which will enhance employee productivity, accelerated employee motivation, performance excellence and so on (Budhwar and Debrah 2013).

Key initiatives

Step 1: Access needs for training: The top management needs to identify the needs of the training program. Here the training module needs to be assessed on priority basis. This program must align with the organizational strategic objectives.

Step 2: Set the firm’s objectives: At the employee level, the proposed training module needs to be matched with the areas of improvement.

Step 3: Develop training action plan: Based on the learning theories, a comprehensive training action plan needs to be developed. Here the participant’s learning style must be assessed by the HR department.

Step 4: Collect feedbacks: Once the training program complete, the company needs to collect feedbacks from the participants and record advises for the enhancement of the training program.

iii) Promotion/Succession planning:

Rationale: Succession planning is the efforts to enable the “right people in the right place at the right time” to get the desired results (Jiang et al. 2012). To enhance the employee effectiveness, the organization needs to initiate promotional or succession planning. This plan should be incorporated by monthly basis. However this plan would be successful if Myer provide stability in their leadership. This planning program consists with five steps:

Step 1: Critical position identification: The projection data of workforce is significant to identify risk areas. Succession planning effort should be specified by identifying the risks of the organization.

Step 2: Define competencies: A clear understanding of the employee capabilities needs to be assessed on frequent manner. This plan needs will assess the future competencies of each employees. This data gives the clear idea about the key responsibilities of the position and qualifications of the employees.

Step 3: Strategies for effective succession planning: In this section, the critical position has been identified and this has been implied for competencies. Later the organization will chose the suitable HR strategies such as “internal talent pools”, “on boarding”, and recruitment to address succession planning”.

Step 4: Document and execute succession plan:  After the identification of strategies, Myer will develop the action plan. This action plan provides a clear allocation of role, responsibilities of employees along with defining timelines for the same.

Step 5: Employee effectiveness evaluation: This planning program must be evaluated systematically and Myer must evaluate the gathered data and make required adjustment.

iv) Change management:

Rationale: If Myer feel that the employee management plan needs to be developed freshly or to renovate to some extent  then change management plan needs to be developed by the top most executives of Myer. This is suitable for the HRM because new demands or priorities may be incorporated in the change management plan (Bratton and Gold 2012). The following steps required to be followed:

Step 1: Justify and identify the decision to change such as gap of the performance, new technologies and so on.

Step 2: Identify the stakeholder’s support before the implementing this strategic decision

Step 3: The change management plan must be developed by communicating with all stakeholders

Step 4: Development of communication plan: Communicate with all employees, shareholders to develop better employee-employer relationship.

v) System of Acknowledgment

Rationale: Mayer needs to develop performance acknowledgement program to motivate employees.

 Method: Providing benefits like incentive, bonus, and yearly performance appraisal will be given to acknowledge key performers of the organization (Hoque 2013). This gives the motivation and encourages employee to perform better. This kind of efforts develops a long term relationship between employees and employers.

vi) Manpower planning

Rationale: Manpower planning or human resource planning consists of putting suitable people at the right places in the appropriate timeframe (Buller and McEvoy 2012). This is a significant aspect in order to maintain the industrialization. However, if such planning is carried out following the systematic procedure, then this program would be considered as an effective human resource management program.

Step 1: Step the objectives of the manpower planning: By this process, Myer will fit the employee’s ability to the requirement of the organization. This plan may be developed for short term or long term basis.

Step 2: Ascertain future manpower plan: The organization will estimate the organizational structure for the specific time.

Step 3: Audit the human resources: Future human resource must be estimated to ascertain the present manpower supply of Myer.

Step 4: Analysis of job: The organization will analyze the recorded details of training, qualifications, skills, abilities, past experiences and so on.

vii) Recruitment

Rationale: This is one of the vital steps for developing human resource plan. The fair, transparent recruitment process must be developed by the HRM of Myer. This will definitely accelerate the effectiveness of the employees within the workforce (Purce 2014). 

The management will give priority to the people’s skill, knowledge, previous experience and lastly the future potentiality. For this, Mayer will arrange face to face interview, psychometric test for assessing the ability of reasoning and decision making and so on.

vii) Management of Information

Rationale: Consumers have ever increasing expectations in terms of the quality, speed and other resources (Hill, Jones and Schilling 2014). Therefore, the recorded information and relevant data can help Myer to handle the complexities through achieving efficiency and cost savings, making the best use of assets and exploit opportunities or taking advantages. For all these reasons, Mayer needs to maintain management information for better control of the organization. The systematic process is as follows:

Step1: Developing a data inventory to identify the types and location of the data of Myer

Step2: Data will be secured to provide right and authentic information to their stakeholders

Step 3: Classify and scheduling such recorded data will be maintained by retention policy.

Step 4: The organization will provide clear guidelines for internal and external users of the organization to reduce the costs and risks.

All these programs must be prioritized as per the requirement of Myer for the twelve months plan:

Activity (Program)	Priority	Time frames	Success measure
Recruitment	1	For 12 months	Transparent recruitment process accelerate employee productivity
Manpower planning	2	Two plans for 6 months each	Employee’s work satisfaction acquiring the right position
System Acknowledgement	3	End of the last month of year	Encourage and satisfy employees and motivates to work harder
Change management	4	Once	Provide employee a flexible work culture
Performance Management	5		Makes effective recruitment process and suitable employees get employed
Training and Development	6		Developed skills, knowledge which enhanced performances
Succession planning	7	Once	Enhance employee effectiveness

(Source: Created by author)

Conclusion

This report has clearly discussed the importance of human resource management plan in an organization. The chosen company, Mayer has been struggling with some strategic HRM issues which can be resolved if the organization maintain a structured human resource programs. Such program must be developed by the top management people after assessing the requirement and expected benefits of employees.

References:

Armstrong, M. and Taylor, S., 2014. Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers.

Bamberger, P.A., Biron, M. and Meshoulam, I., 2014. Human resource strategy: Formulation, implementation, and impact. Routledge.

Bratton, J. and Gold, J., 2012. Human resource management: theory and practice. Palgrave Macmillan.

Budhwar, P.S. and Debrah, Y.A. eds., 2013. Human resource management in developing countries. Routledge.

Buller, P.F. and McEvoy, G.M., 2012. Strategy, human resource management and performance: Sharpening line of sight. Human resource management review, 22(1), pp.43-56.

Hill, C., Jones, G. and Schilling, M., 2014. Strategic management: theory: an integrated approach. Cengage Learning.

Hoque, K., 2013. Human resource management in the hotel industry: Strategy, innovation and performance. Routledge.

Jiang, K., Lepak, D.P., Hu, J. and Baer, J.C., 2012. How does human resource management influence organizational outcomes? A meta-analytic investigation of mediating mechanisms. Academy of management Journal, 55(6), pp.1264-1294.

Myer. (2016). Myer. [online] Available at: https://www.myer.com.au/ [Accessed 31 May 2016].

Purce, J., 2014. The impact of corporate strategy on human resource management. New Perspectives on Human Resource Management (Routledge Revivals), 67.

Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P., Johns, R., Robinson, J., O’Leary, P. and Plimmer, G., 2015. Managing Employee Performance & Reward: Concepts, Practices, Strategies. Cambridge University Press.

Storey, J., 2014. New Perspectives on Human Resource Management (Routledge Revivals). Routledge.

Ulrich, D., 2013. Human resource champions: The next agenda for adding value and delivering results. Harvard Business Press.