Staff retention and Turnover

The last three chapters focused on the processes used to mobilise a workforce: activities which are often expensive and time consuming. It is estimated that the costs associated with recruiting and training a new employee average between half and one and a half times the annual salary for the post in question, depending on

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Turnover analysis and Staff retention strategies

1. TURNOVER ANALYSIS AND COSTING There is little that an organisation can do to manage turnover unless there is an under­standing of the reasons for it. Information about these reasons is notoriously difficult to collect. Most commentators recommend exit interviews (that is, interviews with leavers about their reasons for resigning), but the problem here

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Ending the HR contracts: dismissal and Notice

In the last chapter we looked at situations in which employees decide to end their con­tracts of employment by giving their employers notice. Here we focus on circumstances when the contract is brought to an end by the employer through a dismissal of one kind or another, something that over a million employees experience

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Strategic HR aspects of performance

In our opening chapters we described the shift in emphasis away from the contract of employment towards the contract for performance. Even before the development of Taylor’s scientific management methods a century ago, getting the most out of the workforce has always been a predominant management preoccupation, and the manage­ment literature is full of

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Human resource management and organizational performance

1. HOW DO HR POLICIES AND PRACTICES AFFECT PERFORMANCE? If we accept that there is sufficient evidence to claim that HR policies and practices do affect company performance (although some studies, for example Lahteenmaki and Storey 1998 do not support this) then we need to understand better the processes which link these HR practices

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Organisational performance and learning

There was a time when performance was seen primarily in terms of individual motiva­tion and performance. The focus has now shifted to emphasise performance of the organisation as a whole. While some performance variations are the result of individual differences, ultimate organisational performance can also be significantly affected by systems, processes, structures and culture.

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Knowledge management in HRM

1. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Knowledge and its perceived value Knowledge is increasingly viewed as a critical organisational resource which provides competitive advantage, and as Gourlay (2006) demonstrates, it has a particular import­ance for multinational companies (MNCs). As the speed of change gets faster organisa­tions increasingly need innovations, new ideas and new ways of doing things

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Employee performance management

Managing individual performance in organisations has traditionally centred on assess­ing performance and allocating reward, with effective performance seen as the result of the interaction between individual ability and motivation. Increasingly, it is recognised that planning and enabling performance have a critical effect on individual performance, with performance goals and standards, appropriate resources, guidance and

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Leadership in management and Leadership styles

1. LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT Northouse (2006) suggests that there are four components that characterise leadership: that leadership is a process; it involves influence; it occurs within a group context; and it involves goal attainment. This corresponds with Shackleton’s (1995) definition, which we shall use as a working definition for the remainder of the chapter:

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Leadership and change

1. DO WE REALLY NEED HEROES? A different approach to understanding leadership is transformational leadership, which focuses on the leader’s role at a strategic level, so there is a concentration on the one leader at the top of the organisaton. There is a wide range of literature in this vein, most of it written

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Managing absence in organization

1. THE NATIONAL CONTEXT The CIPD (2006) found a level of 3.5 per cent sickness absence (defined as the percent­age of working time missed, and often referred to as the headline rate) from a survey they carried out in early 2006 with responses from 1,083 public sector and private sector organisations. This represents eight

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Managing for attendance

The complex interrelationship of the causes of absence needs to be taken into account in its management. Many organisations have introduced policies for managing absence that focus on minimising short-term rather than long-term absence. The role of sickness in long-term absence has been given little priority in the past, as has the issue that

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Strategic aspects of HR development

There seems to be general agreement that training and development is a good thing, and that it increases productivity, but the question is ‘how much?’ It is even difficult to show a causal link between HR development and organisational performance, partly because such terms are difficult to define precisely, and partly because the payoff

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The nature of learning and HR development

There has been a considerable shift in the way that individual development is under­stood and characterised. We have moved from identifying training needs to identifying learning needs, the implication being that development is owned by the learner with the need rather than by the trainer seeking to satisfy that need. This also has implications

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Learning and development of human resources

1. METHODS OF LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT 1.1. Off-job methods: education and training courses Educational courses undertaken during a career are frequently done on a part-time basis leading to a diploma or master’s degree with a management or business label, and/or qualification for a professional body. It is considered that such courses provide value for

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Definitions and importance of career development

1. HOW AND WHY ARE CAREERS CHANGING? Many writers over the past decade have provided a picture of dramatic change in the nature of careers that are possible in today’s society. The traditional career within a single organisation, characterised by hierarchical progression, managed on a planned basis by the organisation, is gone, it is

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Individual career management and Organisational support

1. INDIVIDUAL CAREER MANAGEMENT If we identify a career as the property of the individual, then clearly the responsibility for managing this rests on the individual, who should identify career goals, adopt strateg­ies to support them and devise plans to achieve the goal. Many research studies highlight the role of luck in relation to

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Strategic aspects of employee relations in human resource management

When we surveyed the activities and priorities of HR specialists in the early 1980s, there was no doubt about the pre-eminence of employee relations as being the activity on which they spent most of their time and as being most central to the human resource function (Mackay and Torrington 1986, pp. 149, 161). Only

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Labor union recognition and derecognition

The single most important strategic decisions that managers may have to take in the employee relations sphere concern trade union recognition: Whether or not to recognise a trade union, and if so about what form the recognition should take. Whether or not to resist a trade union campaign for recognition. Whether or not to

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Studying employee relations in human resource management

1. THE STUDY OF EMPLOYEE RELATIONS The profound changes in the employee relations world outlined at the beginning of this chapter have had, and continue to have, important implications for those whose job it is to study and conduct research into this area of organisational life. Until recently most of this work continued to