HR to the Rescue

Edward M. Mone, Manuel London, Ph.D.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781136397790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

By looking over the shoulders of fourteen forward-thinking, proactive HR professionals, you will gain a lifetime's worth of experience. These experts reveal how you can demonstrate your value to your organization by offering human resource solutions to organizational problems. Find out how these practicing human resource professionals went beyond their traditional HR roles and actually helped shape the futures of companies such as:
* Thermo King
* Colgate-Palmolive
* Swiss Bank Corporation-Warburg
* Den Danske Bank
* Oticon
* Berlex Laboratories'HR to the rescue' tells you in complete detail exactly how the fourteen practitioners helped their companies achieve their strategic business objectives. You will see how they diagnosed the situations, determined what HR could contribute, designed new programs and processes to drive and sustain behavior change, and worked with organization leaders to ensure the success of their change management efforts.These insightful cases provide you with a true-to-life perspective. They illustrate what really happens in this imperfect world of organizations, where things rarely go as planned.Learn the lessons these practitioners have to share - and then step in, both affirmed and refreshed, to rescue your business with effective, integrated HR solutions.

1

Human Resource
Development and
Organizational
Transformation

EDWARD M. MONE AND MANUEL LONDON, PH.D.

Human resource functions, such as selection, placement, and compensation, are essential ingredients to organizational success. Human resource development in relation to changing demands is vital for organizational growth. Employees and managers need to understand how their competencies match the organization's requirements and what competencies need to be strengthened (or new competencies acquired) to succeed in the future. Thus, individual and organization development support each other. Individual development contributes to maximizing the organization's capabilities, and changing organizational opportunities provide direction for individual development.

This book shows the supportive linkages between human resource and organization development. In particular, cases from a variety of organizations demonstrate how the human resource function in general, and human resource development in particular, contributes to organization transformations that allow the organization to thrive in an ever-changing, continuously demanding environment. Human resource development is a significant and necessary tool for supporting organization change.

The Strategic Role of Human Resources

People sometimes think of human resource functions in the abstract—as stand-alone policies and programs that are not driven by changing organizational needs. Indeed transactional aspects of human resources, such as managing the payroll and benefits systems, are fairly stable. Sometimes human resource functions follow from regulatory requirements, such as equal employment opportunity legislation and judicial rulings. Other human-resource-related initiatives, such as methods for task design, group functioning, and quality improvement, arise because they support new technologies. Companies adopt these programs because other companies are using them, not because of a profound belief that the programs can meet the organizations’ specific needs.

However, an organization can tailor its transactional, regulated, and popular functions and programs to meet its strategies. For example, it can tie its compensation system to organizational goals and team functioning or can create a heterogeneous work force because it is good business, not because it meets the letter of the law. Total quality management or re-engineering can be designed in a way that incorporates best practices from other organizations and meets the specific current needs of the organization.

Human resource management must be transformational and strategic. Human resource managers’ value to the organization derives from helping make the organization successful. Human resource managers are likely to be successful when they keep abreast of where the business wants to go by paying attention to the strategies set by top executives, the emergence of new technologies, and evolving market conditions. To understand where the business wants to go, HR managers must carefully analyze strategic business objectives and determine how human resource functions operate in relation to each other to support those objectives. These steps will ensure an integrated, systemic approach to human resource management.

On the other hand, human resource managers who work as if they are in a vacuum are likely to be disappointed when the company does not adopt their ideas or their programs have a minimal life. Human resource programs that are developed independently of other human resource functions and separately from organizational objectives are likely to fall flat and waste valuable resources. To guard against this, human resource functions may need to be redesigned in recognition of changing business goals and the need to have mutually supportive HR functions.

An example will help explain this philosophy. If businesses are moving to a process-quality environment, what are the implications for human resources? A process environment means people across departments work on interrelated functions in support of a business process, such as order tracking. The generic goal of any process is to provide service to customers in a way that is responsive to the customers’ needs rather than to the corporate structure. So the needs of the customers drive the business. Human resource managers give careful thought to the best ways HR functions and processes can support process management. They should think about how the organization sets goals, what kinds of performance feedback systems they should put into place, what skills would be important as a basis for selecting new employees and developing all employees (such as skills needed to lead and participate in a quality improvement team process), and how to reward group as well as individual performance.

The Changing Nature of Work

Ilgen and Pulakos identified the following eight major changes in how organizations structure and accomplish work [1], The following list considers and analyzes the implications of each of these changes for individual behaviors and skills, group characteristics and activities, and organization strategies and change.

1. Employees increasingly work in process teams. As a result, individuals will need to hone such skills as listening, group problem solving, resolving conflict, negotiating, leading a group, and cooperating. They will need to move from one team to another and serve in different roles, such as team leader, member, and/or facilitator. Organizations will need to give attention to team composition, structure, and development (effective and efficient teamwork). Teams will need to develop alliances with other teams, integrate newcomers, and focus on improving member interaction to minimize or overcome process losses because of member incompatibility. To be competitive and adaptable, organizations will need to identify their customers and their customers’ needs, invest in quality improvement teams, empower individuals and teams to learn and develop, promote team interaction with outside constituencies, and measure and reward performance at the team level as well as individual level.
2. Companies organize jobs around projects, not functions. As a consequence, employees and managers must understand customer-supplier relationships. Work groups need flexible roles, effective and efficient work flows, and highly flexible structures. These groups need to encourage opportunities for participation, allegiance to team and work process as well as function, and the pursuit of a consensus after an argument. Organizations need flexible organization structures not tied to functions (such as matrix designs).
3. Companies are integrating new technologies. Individuals must know of, manage, and use diverse information; apply technology to control and monitor work processes; use technology to learn (gain information, observe others, and learn through simulated exercises); and communicate through a variety of technological media. Groups can use technologies to track their performance, share information within groups and with other groups, and do their work (for instance, by participating in remote group interaction through computer networks next door or around the world). The organization can benefit from simultaneous direct communication with all organization members as well as goal setting and feedback though technological media. All employees can receive timely information simultaneously. Systems designers can create, manage, and make data bases available organization-wide.
4. Higher performance standards and complexity is another trend. Individuals need feedback so they can compare themselves to standards. They need to understand performance dimensions (such as timeliness, quality, cost, and efficiency) and expected performance requirements. Groups require standards for performance. Members need to understand how they contribute to their groups’ performance. The organization must ensure it communicates changing standards along with the reasons for the changes (for example, shifting customer demands). The organization must identify multiple constituencies and track their needs and level of satisfaction.
5. Today's performance includes preparing for tomorrow. Employees need to do the following: seek information to identify skill gaps, recognize areas in need of performance improvement, keep up with advances in the profession, and anticipate how changes elsewhere in the firm and the industry may affect work demands and skill requirements. Groups can seek benchmark information from other organizations and groups to develop more competitive standards of excellence. Groups can also foster teamwork for continuous quality improvement, through participative, highly involving processes based on information about customer needs and team capabilities. The organization (that is, the organization's human resource function) needs to communicate changing opportunities for learning and career development, assess changing skill requirements for different types of jobs and at different levels of the management hierarchy (such as comparing the changing roles of low-, middle-, and high-level managers), revise curricula, and design new programs for development based on changing organizational needs.
6. Multiple constituencies have different expectations. This suggests employees have to balance diverse time demands and have to do more to manage themselves, including developing themselves in relation to the expectations of different constituencies as well as self-management and self-regulation skills. Also, they need to resolve role conflict and ambiguity, and seek and integrate feedback information from multiple sources. Groups need to develop intergroup networks and alliances and to value diversity within and between groups....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Human Resource Development and Organizational Transformation
• 2 Applying Human Resource Technologies in Support of Strategic Driven Transformational Change at Thermo King
• 3 Surveys and Survey Feedback: Essential Ingredients in Organizational Change
• 4 A Close Look at Organizational Transformation: What Works and What Doesn't
• 5 Developing the Next Generation of Leaders: A New Strategy for Leadership Development at Colgate-Palmolive
• 6 Creating a Global World-Class Investment Bank Through Transformational Human Resource Development
• 7 Transforming Human Resources to Create a Global World-Class Investment Bank
• 8 Career Dynamics in a Major Commercial Bank Exposed to Downsizing and Strategic Reorientation
• 9 Today's Special: Career Development in a Spaghetti Organization—Think the Unthinkable in a Dynamic Network Organization
• 10 Transformation in the Pharmaceutical Industry: HR's Prescription for Success
• Index