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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The future demand and supply for workers

1. THE FUTURE DEMAND FOR WORKERS If current trends are maintained we can expect to see continued increases, year on year, in the number of jobs being created by British organisations. In 2006 there were 37.1 million people of working age in the UK, of whom 30.8 million were in work. Around 1.5 million

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Future contractual arrangements

While there is general agreement among commentators about the nature of the work we will be carrying out in the coming decades and the profile of the workforce that will be employed to carry it out, there is considerable disagreement about the types of contract (both legal and psychological) that will be prevalent. For

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The concept of organizational culture

THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: WHY BOTHER? Culture is an abstraction, yet the forces that are created in social and orga­nizational situations deriving from culture are powerful. If we don’t under­stand the operation of these forces, we become victim to them. Cultural forces are powerful because they operate outside of our awareness. We need

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Organizational Culture: An Empirically Based Abstraction

Culture as a concept has had a long and checkered history. Laymen have used it as a word to indicate sophistication, as when we say that someone is very “cultured.” Anthropologists have used it to refer to the customs and rituals that societies develop over the course of their history. In the past several

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Organizational culture definition, content and process of socialization or acculturation

1. Culture Formally Defined The culture of a group can now be defined as a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the

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