Cirque du Soleil is a Canadian based company that deals in the organization and staging of entertainment events. The company hosts its events in different countries in the world.
Due to its international inclination, Cirque du Soleil ought to create an inclusive and accommodating environment for all its employees and stakeholders in order to enhance its reputation.
The main question to ask is how a company can effectively adopt human resource practices in order to be in a position to manage diversity. The main issue in this case is the problem of managing diversity in Cirque du Soleil.
The employees of the company are drawn from different countries, which depict a lot of diversity in terms of the corporate culture (Pawar 2). There was also the problem of accommodating employees with medical conditions, as is the case of discriminating against an HIV positive performer in the company (Pawar 2).
As mentioned in the preceding part, Cirque du Soleil was facing main issues in the structure of its human resource practices to capture the dynamics in the company. The dynamics in the company were necessitated by the expansion of operations of the company into other regions of the world.
The nature of the operations of the company makes it exposed to different work environments with diverse conditions. This requires the change in human resource policies to capture the managerial diversities that feature in these environments.
This called for the development and implementation of strategic management policies. Such policies are often desired as they help a company to respond to human resource issues amicably. From the look into the case, it has come out that the company is facing issues to do with managing diversity in human resource (Pawar 6).
This called for major changes in human resource practices of the company. These changes were to be developed by the human resource department, in liaison with the top management of the company. These are the two main parties in finding a solution to issues of management diversity in Cirque du Soleil.
The first and perhaps the most critical step in solving human resource problems within the organization is the appreciation of the fact that a problem exists in the organization. This is one of the key responsibilities of top organizational managers (Armstrong 112).
Concerning the issue of discriminating an employee on the grounds of his status of health, the Vice President of Human Resources was sorry about the incidence and noted that the company had a set of anti-discrimination policies that needed to be revised (Pawar 2).
The position of the company’s management was that the company needed to come up with better human resource policies and practices that could help it deal with the issue of human resources management that it was facing.
The position of the human resource department was that the company needed to ensure that its human resource operations were flexible in order to capture the human resource needs in each destination where the company staged its performance (Pawar 6).
The principle that underlies this position is that each region in the world is governed by human resource policies and legislations that may differ with the culture of human resource management in the company.
Therefore, the company has to set corporate headquarters in different regions in the world, which could help them set human resource policies to govern their events in those regions.
Concerning the issue of recruitment, Gagnot noted that the company needed to embrace the recruitment of young and inexperienced people in order to encourage creativity (Pawar 6).
The stakeholders of any company are often termed as the main determinants of the success of the company. In this case, the main stakeholders to the issues facing the company are:
- The top management of the company
- The human resource department of the company
- The employees and,
- The spectators, who are also the customers of the company.
The primary stakeholders to the issues that are presented in this case are the employees, the top executive of the company and the human resource department. The company faces a crisis in the the formulation and implementation of human resource policies and practices.
The employees are directly affected by the human resource practices in the company, such as was the discrimination against the employee who was discriminated on health grounds.
Due to the fact that the employees of the company performed in different regions of the world, their remuneration was also affected by the diversity of human resources policies in different regions (Pawar 6).
The top management of the company, with the help of the human resource department, is charged with the key responsibility of ensuring that they devise strategic policies for managing employee issues in the company.
In strategic human resource management, employees are often taken as the key resource in any given company. The management of Cirque observed that the goodness of the company depended on its employees (Pawar 6).
All the human resource policy improvements in Cirque du Soleil were to be developed and enforced by the human resource department. This makes the HR department of the company the central player in the issues that were facing the company.
The HR was responsible for creating a favorable work environment for the employees (Pawar 8). On the other hand, the customers are considered as the second stakeholders in this case.
Most of the developments in the company were geared at enticing more spectators in the event of the company, thereby attracting more earnings (Pawar 5).
The company has to embrace strategic principles amidst the efforts to streamline the human resource practices in Cirque du Solei. This is noted in the manner in which the company’s human resource department embraced changes in the employee management process.
The company has to compromise most of the cultural practices that had been utilized for a relatively long period of time. For instance, the company changed its policy in recruitment by choosing to employ young and inexperienced artists and training them to perfection (Pawar 7).
As part of initiatives to attend to the needs of its employees, the company was forced to pursue an open human resource policy that encouraged feedback from the employees.
This is attributed to the fact that employee feedback is critical in determining the positives and negatives of any new HR policy that is introduced in the organization (Pawar 11). Failure to listen to the employees often results in a smoldering crisis in the company.
As observed in the case, Cirque du Soleil, juts as many other companies, was affected by problems of managing employees due to diversity in the company. Whenever a company is faced with an issue of management, the management ought to appreciate the existence of such a problem.
This gives room for policy change, thus the devise of solutions to the challenge (Dessler 2). This is what happened in Cirque du Soleil; the recognition of the presence of discriminatory policies in the company by the Assistant President in charge of human resource in the company.
This same line of actions is utilized in the company throughout the sustenance of the various stages of human resource management in Cirque du Soleil. This implies a high level of application of strategic HR practices in the company.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Michael. Strategic Human Resource Management: A Guide to Action. London: Kogan Page, 2008. Internet resource.
Dessler, Gray, and Biju Varkkey. Human Resource Management. Delhi: Pearson, 2011. Print.
Pawar, Manasi. Cirque du Soleil’s Human Resource Management Practices. ICMR Center for Management Research: India, 2007. Print.