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

Employee involvement in human resource management

It is quite possible to run a successful business without involving employees in manage­ment activities to any meaningful extent, but the chances of sustained sucess are higher when employees are involved. The same is true of organisations in the public and volunt­ary sectors. Objectives are more effectively and efficiently achieved if employees have some

Health, safety and welfare in in human resource management

There is always a conflict between the needs of the employer to push for increased out­put and efficiency and the needs of the employee to be protected from the hazards of the workplace. In the mid-nineteenth century these tensions centred almost entirely on the long hours and heavy physical demands of the factory system.

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Managing welfare in human resource management

1. MANAGING STRESS AND EMOTIONAL WELFARE Workplace stress is the welfare topic which has received the most coverage in recent years. It is also a source of litigation which has led to particularly high amounts of dam­ages being paid to those who have sustained illnesses brought on directly as a result of work-related strain.

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Discrimination in human resource management

1. DISCRIMINATION ON GROUNDS OF SEX OR MARITAL STATUS The two major Acts of Parliament that govern sex discrimination matters in the UK are the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. Both originally came into effect more than thirty years ago, and have been subsequently amended in important ways. Sex

Part-time, Fixed-term workers and Ex-offenders

1. PART-TIME WORKERS Discriminating against a female part-time worker has long been taken by the courts to constitute indirect sex discrimination because the vast majority of part-time workers are female. Since 2000, however, it has not been necessary for part-time workers (of either gender) to use sex discrimination law to protect themselves. The Part-time

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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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