Fundamentals of Human Resource Management Study Set 11

What HRM functions could an organization provide through self-service? What are some of advantages and disadvantages of using self-service for these functions?

At many organizations, goals include improving performance through people by relying on knowledge workers, empowering employees, and assigning work to teams. How can HRM support these efforts?

How is the employment relationship typical of modern organizations different from the relationship of a generation ago?

When an organization decides to operate facilities in other countries, how can HRM practices support this change?

WHAT BOUNDARIES SHOULD EMPLOYERS SET FOR SOCIAL MEDIA? As more and more millennials enter the labor force, more of an organization's employees will have grown up with the Internet and social media. These employees are unlikely to comprehend being separated from their mobile devices or Internet access. They expect to be able to send a quick text, post a status update (a tweet) on Twitter, or reward themselves with a funny video after wrapping up a report. And as these technologies become mainstream, more of their older colleagues share this attitude. Employers, in contrast, have tended to greet each new social-media application as a new form of time wasting. Organizations are under intense pressure to improve their performance month after month, and the thought of employees checking out photos on Face-book while at work horrifies many managers. In this view, most uses of social media amount to theft of time from employers, not a reasonable break or a valuable way to stay connected to co-workers and customers as well as family and friends. Recently, the Ethics Resource Center added to managers' discomfort with a study showing that employees categorized as "active social networkers" are much more likely than their co-workers to say they experience pressure to compromise ethical standards. And when asked about ethically questionable actions, such as taking home company software or keeping personal copies of confidential company information for future career use, the active social networkers are more likely to say these actions are acceptable. How much time on social media is reasonable at work before it becomes time wasting or a theft of the employer's time? Does your answer depend on whether the employee has met his or her goals? Does it depend on how many hours he or she has worked?

We Thought Everyone Liked Group Projects When trainers prepare classroom training programs, they often include group exercises and activities as a way to encourage teamwork. They expect that participants will get to know one another and help one another learn. Ideally, these exercises break down cultural barriers. In some cases, though, trainers haven't taken full account of how people from different cultures will react to these activities. Following one training program that took place in the United States, a Japanese participant noted that she dreaded the times when the instructor asked everyone to break up into teams. This trainee felt uncomfortable inviting herself into a group and even more uncomfortable waiting for others to invite her to join a group after it formed. In another U.S. training program with Asian participants, the trainer held a competition in which the teams were assigned to list major events in the economic history of the United States. Later, an Asian trainee mentioned that the experience felt awful because his lack of knowledge on the subject made him a burden to the team. The team members ignored him while they raced to complete the task. If you were leading a multicultural group that would divide into teams, how would you ensure that everyone felt equally included? SOURCE: Based on Wei-Wen Chang, "Is the Group Activity Food or Poison in a Multicultural Classroom?" T + D , April 2010, pp. 34-37.

How HR Helps Newell Rubbermaid Navigate Change Newell Rubbermaid's 22,000 employees produce and market a variety of consumables, including hardware, home furnishings, and office supplies. After the company went through rounds of acquiring and divesting businesses, employees came to think of their employer mainly in terms of its product lines, including Rubbermaid kitchen supplies, Levolor blinds, Goody hair products, and Sharpie markers. The brand focus gave employees no sense of common mission. Newell Rubbermaid decided to chart a more strategic course. It would become less of a diversified manufacturer and would focus on understanding consumers' everyday frustrations and offering products targeted to unmet needs. It outsourced more of its manufacturing, eventually making only about half of its products. The changes meant that Newell Rubbermaid would need employees with new kinds of skills. Instead of production and marketing experts specializing in particular product lines, Newell Rubbermaid would depend more on people who can learn from consumers and apply what they have learned. Newell Rubbermaid's HR managers were involved in this strategic change from early on. They decided their role would be "agents of change." In the spirit of the new strategy, they committed themselves to serving the various departments by being part of their everyday planning and operations. For example, when the strategy change was still being planned, leaders of the HR department sat down with the chief marketing officer to identify what processes and roles would need to change. They studied successful companies and interviewed business unit leaders to identify new marketing processes and roles associated with high performance. For example, they learned that the company had been focusing new-product development only on North America, whereas best-in-class companies consider demand globally. They reviewed the results with each business unit leader to identify areas where that group needed to improve most, and this analysis formed the basis of action plans for each group. They also discovered that employees feared the change, so they pressed the leadership to ensure that the change process would build a culture that was ethical and supportive. Especially given the resistance to change, an essential part of HR's role was to plan how the HR department would communicate the changes to employees. The HR leaders determined that transparency was essential. They not only described what would be different, but also expressed why the changes were important to the company's future. They started with the leaders of marketing and the business units and then delivered this information to every employee. The HR department also prepared all the managers to talk about the change and the company's new cultural values one-on-one with each employee. The HR department used the information it had gathered about best-in-class companies in other ways. It developed training programs on how to carry out more effective global marketing. Marketing employees were educated about brand strategy, consumer research, pricing strategy, and financial management. Also, the action plans that result from comparing the information against current practices have been used every year as the basis for business unit leaders' performance reviews with the chief executive officer and chief marketing officer. Within the HR department itself, the company's new strategy meant HR employees had to shift their efforts toward building marketing skills throughout the company. They identified the job capabilities required at each level, rewrote job descriptions, and drew up a career ladder for each position. The career ladder is a kind of flow chart that shows how an individual can take on positions of greater responsibility as he or she gains specific types of skills and experience. They created a training program to teach the skills required for the job descriptions and for progress up the career ladder. The career ladders and training were innovative: in the past, managers often left because they had gone as far as they could within a division and no talent management occurred across divisional lines. When the HR department began training hundreds of Newell Rubbermaid employees, the effort had immediate credibility because everyone could see what was expected and participate in the development programs they needed. Now a new question facing the company is how it will maintain employees' morale and commitment as it continues to press on toward greater efficiency. Newell Rubbermaid recently announced that it was reorganizing into a simpler structure and would be laying off 500 employees, mostly white-collar workers. Would you say Newell Rubbermaid is moving toward being a high-performance work system? Why or why not?

What Internet applications might you use to meet the challenges in Question 4?

WHAT BOUNDARIES SHOULD EMPLOYERS SET FOR SOCIAL MEDIA? As more and more millennials enter the labor force, more of an organization's employees will have grown up with the Internet and social media. These employees are unlikely to comprehend being separated from their mobile devices or Internet access. They expect to be able to send a quick text, post a status update (a tweet) on Twitter, or reward themselves with a funny video after wrapping up a report. And as these technologies become mainstream, more of their older colleagues share this attitude. Employers, in contrast, have tended to greet each new social-media application as a new form of time wasting. Organizations are under intense pressure to improve their performance month after month, and the thought of employees checking out photos on Face-book while at work horrifies many managers. In this view, most uses of social media amount to theft of time from employers, not a reasonable break or a valuable way to stay connected to co-workers and customers as well as family and friends. Recently, the Ethics Resource Center added to managers' discomfort with a study showing that employees categorized as "active social networkers" are much more likely than their co-workers to say they experience pressure to compromise ethical standards. And when asked about ethically questionable actions, such as taking home company software or keeping personal copies of confidential company information for future career use, the active social networkers are more likely to say these actions are acceptable. Why do you think the heavy social-media users surveyed by the Ethics Resource Center were more likely than other employees to believe employees are justified in making personal use of company software and confidential data? How would you respond to that attitude if you were a human resource manager?

P G's Purposeful Growth Procter Gamble is famous for its brands of household products, including Tide, Pampers, Gillette, and Head Shoulders, sold in more than 180 countries. Since the company's founding in 1837, it has been admired for its marketing creativity. But since Robert McDonald became chief executive officer in 2009, P G has sought greater success built on a sense of purpose. McDonald wants P G's employees to be unified by the company's Purpose Statement: "We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers, now and for generations to come." Implied are commitments to quality and sustainability. This purpose assumes that when P G meets those standards, consumers will see value and buy from P G, thus rewarding the company and its shareholders for doing the right thing. In a nutshell, P G is aiming for "purpose-inspired growth." To get employees dedicated to the vision of purpose-inspired growth, P G urges them to think about how P G can "touch and improve more consumers' lives in more parts of the world … more completely." The company is especially interested in what this vision can do in high-growth developing nations. When employees think about how consumers' lives can be improved in India or Brazil, they are helping people while opening up huge areas of new growth. In India, P G employees noticed that when men needed a shave, about half would go to a local barbershop. Often, a barber would save money by taking double-sided razor blades and breaking them in half, so they could use them for twice as many shaves. Then they would use the same blade on as many customers as they could. As a result, the customers risked infection. P G responded by analyzing razors to identify their most essential features, creating an ultra-simple razor, and figuring out how to produce it at minimal cost. In West Africa, P G established a purpose-related performance measure: Each employee is graded on how many lives P G has touched. One effort aimed at this kind of performance was creation of Pampers mobile clinics. To improve infant mortality rates and health, these vans, each staffed with a physician and two nurses, travel around the region. At every stop, the professionals offer baby checkups, lessons in postnatal care, and referrals to local hospitals for follow-up care and immunizations. Mothers can sign up for mVillage, a program that sends text messages with health tips and answers to their questions. (In West Africa, even many poor people have cell phones.) Finally, each mother receives two free Pampers diapers. The experience of serving the community gives P G employees a sense that their work is making life better for families even as West Africa becomes one of P G's fastest-growing markets. This goal-directed behavior is not just warm and fuzzy; the company is quite serious about performance management. Each employee has a personalized "cockpit," a display on the employee's computer screen that shows the employee's goals and a range of tolerances for each goal. If the employee's performance veers outside the tolerances, then the computer issues an alert. Employees and their managers are expected to investigate any discrepancy to find out what must change for the employee to meet his or her goals. The constant monitoring and feedback lets the company react quickly, rather than waiting for a quarterly or annual review to find out that, say, the employee lacked necessary resources, or goals were too pessimistic. A related HR challenge for P G is to find and keep people with the necessary technical skills. To ensure that the global giant is staying up-to-date on techniques for analyzing data, P G's chief information officer tracks talent needs in terms of the essential technical skills-for example, knowledge of computer modeling and simulation. Executives also identified the computer and analytic skills required at each level of the organization, so talented people can receive the right training to advance. That's essential for a company that prides itself on promoting from within. All of its CEOs started out as entry-level workers, and management development routinely includes a stint running operations in a foreign nation. Finally, in China, the company established an R D facility. The goal is to position the company to recruit from China's growing ranks of scientists and engineers, who can provide a close-up perspective on consumers' needs in Asia. What aspects of P G's HR practices are positioning the company well for international expansion?

How does each of the following labor force trends affect HRM? a. Aging of the labor force b. Diversity of the labor force c. Skill deficiencies of the labor force

Merging, downsizing, and reengineering all can radically change the structure of an organization. Choose one of these changes and describe HRM's role in making the change succeed. If possible, apply your discussion to an actual merger, downsizing, or reengineering effort that has recently occurred.

We Thought Everyone Liked Group Projects When trainers prepare classroom training programs, they often include group exercises and activities as a way to encourage teamwork. They expect that participants will get to know one another and help one another learn. Ideally, these exercises break down cultural barriers. In some cases, though, trainers haven't taken full account of how people from different cultures will react to these activities. Following one training program that took place in the United States, a Japanese participant noted that she dreaded the times when the instructor asked everyone to break up into teams. This trainee felt uncomfortable inviting herself into a group and even more uncomfortable waiting for others to invite her to join a group after it formed. In another U.S. training program with Asian participants, the trainer held a competition in which the teams were assigned to list major events in the economic history of the United States. Later, an Asian trainee mentioned that the experience felt awful because his lack of knowledge on the subject made him a burden to the team. The team members ignored him while they raced to complete the task. If you were planning team projects for an international group, how would you ensure that everyone was prepared to participate fully? SOURCE: Based on Wei-Wen Chang, "Is the Group Activity Food or Poison in a Multicultural Classroom?" T + D , April 2010, pp. 34-37.

Why do organizations outsource HRM functions? How does outsourcing affect the role of human resource professionals? Would you be more attracted to the role of HR professional in an organization that outsources many HR activities or the outside firm that has the contract to provide the HR services? Why?

P G's Purposeful Growth Procter Gamble is famous for its brands of household products, including Tide, Pampers, Gillette, and Head Shoulders, sold in more than 180 countries. Since the company's founding in 1837, it has been admired for its marketing creativity. But since Robert McDonald became chief executive officer in 2009, P G has sought greater success built on a sense of purpose. McDonald wants P G's employees to be unified by the company's Purpose Statement: "We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers, now and for generations to come." Implied are commitments to quality and sustainability. This purpose assumes that when P G meets those standards, consumers will see value and buy from P G, thus rewarding the company and its shareholders for doing the right thing. In a nutshell, P G is aiming for "purpose-inspired growth." To get employees dedicated to the vision of purpose-inspired growth, P G urges them to think about how P G can "touch and improve more consumers' lives in more parts of the world … more completely." The company is especially interested in what this vision can do in high-growth developing nations. When employees think about how consumers' lives can be improved in India or Brazil, they are helping people while opening up huge areas of new growth. In India, P G employees noticed that when men needed a shave, about half would go to a local barbershop. Often, a barber would save money by taking double-sided razor blades and breaking them in half, so they could use them for twice as many shaves. Then they would use the same blade on as many customers as they could. As a result, the customers risked infection. P G responded by analyzing razors to identify their most essential features, creating an ultra-simple razor, and figuring out how to produce it at minimal cost. In West Africa, P G established a purpose-related performance measure: Each employee is graded on how many lives P G has touched. One effort aimed at this kind of performance was creation of Pampers mobile clinics. To improve infant mortality rates and health, these vans, each staffed with a physician and two nurses, travel around the region. At every stop, the professionals offer baby checkups, lessons in postnatal care, and referrals to local hospitals for follow-up care and immunizations. Mothers can sign up for mVillage, a program that sends text messages with health tips and answers to their questions. (In West Africa, even many poor people have cell phones.) Finally, each mother receives two free Pampers diapers. The experience of serving the community gives P G employees a sense that their work is making life better for families even as West Africa becomes one of P G's fastest-growing markets. This goal-directed behavior is not just warm and fuzzy; the company is quite serious about performance management. Each employee has a personalized "cockpit," a display on the employee's computer screen that shows the employee's goals and a range of tolerances for each goal. If the employee's performance veers outside the tolerances, then the computer issues an alert. Employees and their managers are expected to investigate any discrepancy to find out what must change for the employee to meet his or her goals. The constant monitoring and feedback lets the company react quickly, rather than waiting for a quarterly or annual review to find out that, say, the employee lacked necessary resources, or goals were too pessimistic. A related HR challenge for P G is to find and keep people with the necessary technical skills. To ensure that the global giant is staying up-to-date on techniques for analyzing data, P G's chief information officer tracks talent needs in terms of the essential technical skills-for example, knowledge of computer modeling and simulation. Executives also identified the computer and analytic skills required at each level of the organization, so talented people can receive the right training to advance. That's essential for a company that prides itself on promoting from within. All of its CEOs started out as entry-level workers, and management development routinely includes a stint running operations in a foreign nation. Finally, in China, the company established an R D facility. The goal is to position the company to recruit from China's growing ranks of scientists and engineers, who can provide a close-up perspective on consumers' needs in Asia. What other trends described in this chapter could help P G meet its goal of purpose-inspired growth? How could they help?

Top 10 Occupations for Job Growth The following graph shows the occupations that are expected to add the most new jobs between 2010 and 2020. These jobs require widely different levels of training and responsibility, and pay levels vary considerably. Which of the positions in this graph would you describe as "knowledge workers"? Why? SOURCE: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employment Projections, 2010-20," news release, February 1, 2012, http://www.bls.gov/emp.

How HR Helps Newell Rubbermaid Navigate Change Newell Rubbermaid's 22,000 employees produce and market a variety of consumables, including hardware, home furnishings, and office supplies. After the company went through rounds of acquiring and divesting businesses, employees came to think of their employer mainly in terms of its product lines, including Rubbermaid kitchen supplies, Levolor blinds, Goody hair products, and Sharpie markers. The brand focus gave employees no sense of common mission. Newell Rubbermaid decided to chart a more strategic course. It would become less of a diversified manufacturer and would focus on understanding consumers' everyday frustrations and offering products targeted to unmet needs. It outsourced more of its manufacturing, eventually making only about half of its products. The changes meant that Newell Rubbermaid would need employees with new kinds of skills. Instead of production and marketing experts specializing in particular product lines, Newell Rubbermaid would depend more on people who can learn from consumers and apply what they have learned. Newell Rubbermaid's HR managers were involved in this strategic change from early on. They decided their role would be "agents of change." In the spirit of the new strategy, they committed themselves to serving the various departments by being part of their everyday planning and operations. For example, when the strategy change was still being planned, leaders of the HR department sat down with the chief marketing officer to identify what processes and roles would need to change. They studied successful companies and interviewed business unit leaders to identify new marketing processes and roles associated with high performance. For example, they learned that the company had been focusing new-product development only on North America, whereas best-in-class companies consider demand globally. They reviewed the results with each business unit leader to identify areas where that group needed to improve most, and this analysis formed the basis of action plans for each group. They also discovered that employees feared the change, so they pressed the leadership to ensure that the change process would build a culture that was ethical and supportive. Especially given the resistance to change, an essential part of HR's role was to plan how the HR department would communicate the changes to employees. The HR leaders determined that transparency was essential. They not only described what would be different, but also expressed why the changes were important to the company's future. They started with the leaders of marketing and the business units and then delivered this information to every employee. The HR department also prepared all the managers to talk about the change and the company's new cultural values one-on-one with each employee. The HR department used the information it had gathered about best-in-class companies in other ways. It developed training programs on how to carry out more effective global marketing. Marketing employees were educated about brand strategy, consumer research, pricing strategy, and financial management. Also, the action plans that result from comparing the information against current practices have been used every year as the basis for business unit leaders' performance reviews with the chief executive officer and chief marketing officer. Within the HR department itself, the company's new strategy meant HR employees had to shift their efforts toward building marketing skills throughout the company. They identified the job capabilities required at each level, rewrote job descriptions, and drew up a career ladder for each position. The career ladder is a kind of flow chart that shows how an individual can take on positions of greater responsibility as he or she gains specific types of skills and experience. They created a training program to teach the skills required for the job descriptions and for progress up the career ladder. The career ladders and training were innovative: in the past, managers often left because they had gone as far as they could within a division and no talent management occurred across divisional lines. When the HR department began training hundreds of Newell Rubbermaid employees, the effort had immediate credibility because everyone could see what was expected and participate in the development programs they needed. Now a new question facing the company is how it will maintain employees' morale and commitment as it continues to press on toward greater efficiency. Newell Rubbermaid recently announced that it was reorganizing into a simpler structure and would be laying off 500 employees, mostly white-collar workers. How well did Newell Rubbermaid empower employees? What else would you recommend? How might the HR department prepare for a strategic shift concerned more with efficiency?

Suppose you have been hired to manage human resources for a small company that offers business services including customer service calls and business report preparation. The 20-person company has been preparing to expand from serving a few local clients that are well-known to the company's owners. The owners believe that their experience and reputation for quality will help them expand to serve more and larger clients. What challenges will you need to prepare the company to meet? How will you begin?

P G's Purposeful Growth Procter Gamble is famous for its brands of household products, including Tide, Pampers, Gillette, and Head Shoulders, sold in more than 180 countries. Since the company's founding in 1837, it has been admired for its marketing creativity. But since Robert McDonald became chief executive officer in 2009, P G has sought greater success built on a sense of purpose. McDonald wants P G's employees to be unified by the company's Purpose Statement: "We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers, now and for generations to come." Implied are commitments to quality and sustainability. This purpose assumes that when P G meets those standards, consumers will see value and buy from P G, thus rewarding the company and its shareholders for doing the right thing. In a nutshell, P G is aiming for "purpose-inspired growth." To get employees dedicated to the vision of purpose-inspired growth, P G urges them to think about how P G can "touch and improve more consumers' lives in more parts of the world … more completely." The company is especially interested in what this vision can do in high-growth developing nations. When employees think about how consumers' lives can be improved in India or Brazil, they are helping people while opening up huge areas of new growth. In India, P G employees noticed that when men needed a shave, about half would go to a local barbershop. Often, a barber would save money by taking double-sided razor blades and breaking them in half, so they could use them for twice as many shaves. Then they would use the same blade on as many customers as they could. As a result, the customers risked infection. P G responded by analyzing razors to identify their most essential features, creating an ultra-simple razor, and figuring out how to produce it at minimal cost. In West Africa, P G established a purpose-related performance measure: Each employee is graded on how many lives P G has touched. One effort aimed at this kind of performance was creation of Pampers mobile clinics. To improve infant mortality rates and health, these vans, each staffed with a physician and two nurses, travel around the region. At every stop, the professionals offer baby checkups, lessons in postnatal care, and referrals to local hospitals for follow-up care and immunizations. Mothers can sign up for mVillage, a program that sends text messages with health tips and answers to their questions. (In West Africa, even many poor people have cell phones.) Finally, each mother receives two free Pampers diapers. The experience of serving the community gives P G employees a sense that their work is making life better for families even as West Africa becomes one of P G's fastest-growing markets. This goal-directed behavior is not just warm and fuzzy; the company is quite serious about performance management. Each employee has a personalized "cockpit," a display on the employee's computer screen that shows the employee's goals and a range of tolerances for each goal. If the employee's performance veers outside the tolerances, then the computer issues an alert. Employees and their managers are expected to investigate any discrepancy to find out what must change for the employee to meet his or her goals. The constant monitoring and feedback lets the company react quickly, rather than waiting for a quarterly or annual review to find out that, say, the employee lacked necessary resources, or goals were too pessimistic. A related HR challenge for P G is to find and keep people with the necessary technical skills. To ensure that the global giant is staying up-to-date on techniques for analyzing data, P G's chief information officer tracks talent needs in terms of the essential technical skills-for example, knowledge of computer modeling and simulation. Executives also identified the computer and analytic skills required at each level of the organization, so talented people can receive the right training to advance. That's essential for a company that prides itself on promoting from within. All of its CEOs started out as entry-level workers, and management development routinely includes a stint running operations in a foreign nation. Finally, in China, the company established an R D facility. The goal is to position the company to recruit from China's growing ranks of scientists and engineers, who can provide a close-up perspective on consumers' needs in Asia. How does the company's commitment to sustainability support that effort?