Current employment experiences of socially defined minority groups

CIPD (2006a) notes that the UK labour force has gradually become more diverse par­ticularly in terms of gender, age, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and political and religious beliefs. In choosing these groups we have clearly been selective, and indeed British Telecom have identified as many as 12 aspects of difference between employees (Liff

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Different approaches to equality in HRM

1. DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO EQUALITY There has been a continuing debate concerning the action that should be taken to alleviate the disadvantages that minority groups encounter. One school of thought supports legislative action, which we considered in detail in the previous chapter, and this approach is generally referred to as the equal opportunities, or

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Grievance and discipline in human resource management

1. THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENTS WITH OBEDIENCE Obedience is the reaction expected of people by those in authority positions, who pre­scribe actions which, but for that authority, might not necessarily have been carried out. Stanley Milgram (1974) conducted a classic and controversial series of experiments to investigate obedience to authority and highlighted the significance of

Grievance and discipline processes as framework of organisational justice

1. THE FRAMEWORK OF ORGANISATIONAL JUSTICE The organisation requires a framework of justice to surround the employment relation­ship so that managers and supervisors, as well as other employees, know where they stand when dissatisfaction develops. An illustration of this is in Figure 25.2. 1.1. Organisation culture and management style The culture of an organisation

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Reward strategies in human resource management

While employers have been paying employees with money for centuries, it is only quite recently that organisations in the UK and in many other countries have begun to develop identifiable ‘reward strategies’ which seek to help achieve defined organisational objectives and priorities. The reason, as was explained in Chapter 20, is that until the

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Salary structures in human resource management

1. SALARY STRUCTURES Most organisations of any size have in place some form of grading structure which is used as the basis for determining the basic rate of pay for each job. Moves towards per­son-based and performance-related reward in recent years have tended to be used to determine the level of bonus or progression

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Job evaluation and Employee participation

1. JOB EVALUATION One of the main tasks associated with the administration of weekly or monthly salary payments is setting the differential gaps. It is necessary always to juggle the three factors of performance, market rate and equity. It is rarely possible or wise to pay people only according to their performance or contribution,

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The legal framework for pay and reward

1. Equal value One of the major reasons for the growth in job evaluation in recent years has been the development of equal pay law. When assessing the validity of equal pay claims, tribunals employ the principles of job evaluation as a starting point, appointing a job analyst to undertake a comparison of the

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Incentives

1. BASIC CHOICES While incentive payment systems are common in the UK, there are millions of employees who do not receive this kind of reward and many employers who use them only in a limited way (often in the remuneration of senior managers). It is thus perfectly possible, and some would argue desirable, to

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Payment by results schemes in HRM

1. PAYMENT BY RESULTS SCHEMES Historically, the most widely used incentive schemes have been those which reward employees according to the number of items or units of work they produce or the time they take to produce them. This approach is associated with F.W. Taylor and the phase in the development of personnel management

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Performance-related pay, Skills-based pay and Profit sharing

1. PERFORMANCE-RELATED PAY Arguments about the advantages and disadvantages of individual PRP have been some of the most hotly contested in recent decades. The topic has formed the basis of numer­ous research studies and remains one which attracts much controversy, as was shown in recent debates about the introduction of PRP for teachers working

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Pensions and benefits in human resource management

Employee benefits commonly used to be known as ‘fringe benefits’, suggesting a periph­eral role in the typical pay packet. The substantial growth in the value of most benefits packages over the past ten or twenty years means that the title ‘fringe’ is no longer appropriate. An increasing proportion of individual remuneration is made up

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Ethics and corporate social responsibility

1. THE ETHICAL DIMENSION Human resource management has always had an ethical dimension. In Chapter 1 we defined the first phase of its evolution as a preoccupation with social justice, and when the second phase of preoccupation with developing bureaucracy began it was the development of humane bureaucracy. The odd thing is that practitioners

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Work-life balance

1. DRIVERS FOR WORK-LIFE BALANCE Much of the pressure for work-life balance policies originates from the changing demographic make-up of our potential workforce, changing social roles, the changing responsibilities of organisations and legislative pressure. Increasing numbers of women in the workforce wishing to combine family and work responsibilities is an obvious driver for what

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Benefits, Barriers to, and problems with, work-life balance

1. BENEFITS OF WORK-LIFE BALANCE Work-life balance practices have been shown in some instances to reduce absence (espe­cially unplanned absence), raise morale and increase levels of job satisfaction. Murphy (2006) reports that organisations in an IRS survey found flexible working had a positive impact on retention, recruitment and absenteeism, and these perceptions were shared

Analysis of HR roles and structures

The personnel/HR function has developed considerably since its earliest welfare role, through a range of different incarnations. There is a long history of the specialist func­tion analysing its role in the organisation and promoting the way in which such roles need to develop in order for the function to gain greater power and credibility.

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Outsourcing human resources

HR administration, for example pensions, payroll and recruitment, has typically been outsourced. But more specialist aspects have been subject to outsourcing too, such as training and legal work. IDS (2003) argues that the delivery channels for outsourcing HR administration involve e-HR and HR service centres. We will deal with these separ­ately, while recognising that

Human resource shared services

Some organisations argue that a better alternative to outsourcing is to use an HR service centre or shared service centre (see, for example, Pickard 2002). Shared service centres are sometimes referred to as partnership service centres or insourcing, depending on the circumstances. For example the Window on practice shows how Rotherham Borough Council has

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The contribution of technology to effective and efficient HR provision

There is a wide range of ways in which technology can contribute to the HR function and we have discussed many of these so far in this text, for example the use of techno­logy to enhance recruitment and selection activities and to widen the range of learning experiences, and a broad summary of the

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Measuring human resource and human capital

1. MEASURING HR AND HUMAN CAPITAL The research referred to in previous chapters (especially Chapter 11 on Strategic aspects of performance) has a very clear focus on identifying and measuring a range of best practices in terms of workforce organisation and management (such as self-managing teams, high training spend, reduced status differentials) and relating

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