IMPROVING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Most firms faced with the need to increase their profits focus their energies on rigid control of finances. Implicit in this strategy is the belief that the greatest opportunities for increased effectiveness lie in tightening up budgetary control procedures and in the reallocation of budgets to areas yielding the most immediate payoffs. This often has unpleasant side effects for staff, increasing pressure on them to perform and forcing organisational change. The increased complexity of the job, frequently brought about by the need to cope with the realities of budget reductions, coupled with attempts to meet increasingly wider requirements with no additional resources, may foster dissent. This can lead to a deterioration in staff morale and commitment, fewer opportunities for promotion, staff training and salary increases. The net result may be that key staff seek jobs elsewhere and that those who stay may withdraw their goodwill. An alternative approach is the one proposed by Likert (1973). He suggests that the greatest opportunity for increasing the effectiveness of an organisation/division of a company frequently lies in harnessing the talents and skills of people. An approach based on the implementation of this strategy has been demonstrated to yield between 20 and 40 per cent in increased performance. However, one of the problems of seeking to implement this strategy is that senior management often does not possess sufficiently objective information about the ‘softer’ areas of employee performance upon which to base decisions. Reliable information on staff with regard to how they feel about their present status, job and the firm may be difficult to obtain. Staff may be unwilling to reveal their attitudes and prejudices to insiders in the firm directly. Nevertheless, this information may be vital for increasing performance. Furthermore, senior management's lack of sensitivity to these issues, can serve to accentuate and further reinforce this lack of communication. Hence management may be faced with a somewhat intractable problem, of how they can determine the current state of health of the human resources under their control. Current management thinking stresses the need to design in effective feedback channels of communication between those at higher and lower levels in the organisation. In addition, mechanisms often need to be built in to the system to tap the potential of staff‐generated ideas and suggestions. Frequently this dynamic element fails to have the impact that it deserves because senior levels of management may be unaware of the importance of being willing to listen and act on suggestions from lower levels. They may even actively suppress potentially good ideas, because they are unwilling to change existing procedures. The team carrying out the study examined in this paper was faced with the problem of providing senior management of a brewing organisation with this ‘soft’ information about the surveying staff in the maintenance management division and, further, making recommendations on a strategy which could be implemented to correct any imbalances found. The study was carried out by members of the Department of Surveying, Liverpool Polytechnic.

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