Strategic Human Resource Management: A Guide to Action

(Rick Simeone) #1

As the managing director of Megastores said, ‘You cannot fully maximize
business opportunities unless you have the proper management structure to
create them.’


Teamworking


At Mercia Systems the background to the work on team building was the
demolition of traditional hierarchies over the last two to three years. In
manufacturing and engineering there are never more than three layers
between team members and the director. In 80 per cent of the engineering
teams there are now only two layers – the team manager and the engineering
manager. It is believed that these changes have had far-reaching effects on
flexibility and performance and have contributed significantly to the
achievement of better coordination in manufacturing and engineering.


Performance


A performance strategy will be based on an analysis of the critical success
factors and the performance levels reached in relation to them. Steps can
then be agreed as to what needs to be done to improve performance by
training, development, reorganization, the development of performance
management processes, some form of business process re-engineering, or
simply ‘taking cost out of the business’. This is how a cost reduction strategy
works in one of the key divisions of ABC Distribution as described by the
managing director:


We know that over the next three years we have to take more than £10 million
worth of cost out of the business. So our personnel director sits down with the
business head of the division and they identify the areas we need to focus on. It
could be productivity enhancement; it could be changing work practices; it
could be making sure that we have no anomalies round the depots in terms of
payment; it could even be taking tea breaks out. A three-year strategy is agreed,
targets are set and then they get on with it.

The approach at Loamshire Council was described by the director of
personnel as follows: ‘We have a general strategy of performance meas-
urement and management from which grew our performance appraisal
system, which has worked extremely well. We spent a lot of time ensuring
that people understood that this was a development process and it was
about not just their competence but also the ability of the organization to
achieve what it wants to achieve.’
The strategy for improving performance at Megastores involves the use of
a performance management system, which was introduced, as the director of
personnel explained, ‘because we didn’t have any mechanism through


Strategic HRM in action l 99

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