Introduction
British Petroleum (BP), headquartered in St. James’s, City of Westminster, London, is ranked number three among the largest energy companies in the world. Founded in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the company has grown to be a multinational oil company and it is listed in the London Stock Exchange (British Petroleum, 2010, para. 1). Since it is the largest corporation in the United Kingdom, it forms part of the FTSE 100 index.
In 1998, the company came out of a partnership with its American-based counterpart, Amoco, and it has now established business operations across six continents. The core activities of the company are “exploration and production are exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas; refining, marketing, supply and transportation; and manufacturing and marketing of petrochemicals” (BP, 2010, para. 1). This paper analyzes the current issues in the company’s HR department.
The Human Resource Department is endowed with the task of assisting the organization it is representing in attaining its goals and meeting the needs of its workers. This department is the hub of the company acting as a liaison between all the parties concerned with the aim of improving the performance of the organization.
The efforts of the HR Department are increasingly being recognized as an essential element in organizational success; therefore, a major focus of the department’s interventions is an effort to influence the behavior of the employees. It is important to note that providing the workforce with the necessary expertise and behaviour is able to make an organization to realize its objectives. Therefore, the HR Department plays a pivotal role in influencing the behaviour of the employees in an organization.
BP’s Human Resource department strategies
BP’s HR department has implemented a number of strategies aimed at encouraging positive employee behaviour. The Board of Directors, who makes important decisions that affect the running of the activities of the international corporation, manages the company.
The company’s mission statement reads, “In all our activities we seek to display some unchanging, fundamental qualities – integrity, honest dealing, treating everyone with respect and dignity, striving for mutual advantage and contributing to human progress.” While its vision statement reads, “to be the world leader in transportation products and related services” (Man on a Mission, 2005).
In a traditional organization model, a hierarchical structure is usually observed. In this case, a president or executive is usually regarded as the top most official followed by vice presidents or the position of senior managers. After this, different levels of management follow. Most of the employees are usually found at the bottom of the hierarchy and jobs are grouped by function into various departments (Ansoff, 1965).
Before major transformations were done, this was the case at BP. The company was categorized into various autonomous automakers, which functioned separately and competed with one another. However, the rivalry and absence of centralization within the company proved to be an expensive affair for the company.
Therefore, as a major HR strategy, BP adopted the transformed organizational model, which is centralized and cohesive than the traditional model. Regardless of its size or complexity, the company has been able to arrange its diverse workforce coming from different parts of the world to ensure that its operations are run in a streamlined manner.
All the company’s employees are now working towards a common goal and running the company has been more cost effective. In its transformed structure, BP lacks many different departments. Most of the company’s departments are performing the same tasks with related requirements. Thus, this centralized organizational structure makes more sense than the traditional one.
The adoption of the transformed organizational model has made BP to have centralized staff functions. The change that was carried out radically changed its diverse workforce, including its management, since they had to learn central set of skills.
For instance, before the adoption of the transformed model, the different regions in the company were using different computer software for carrying out their operations. This resulted in miscommunication between its different departments in the regions. The diverse workforce at BP was to be taught the basics of a central software program which resulted in easier inter-corporation communication.
The large undertaking also made the company’s production team to centralize their operations and learn from one another’s methods of design and engineering, which has resulted in a more productive and easier communication among them. Currently, the diverse workforce at BP communicates and embraces teamwork when working. They no longer work as individuals in completing a particular piece of the puzzle.
The transformed organizational model enabled the British company to merge its different brand operations. The traditional model made various operations in the automotive company to be redundant. This led to the wastage of resources and time. This is because its employees were duplicating work that had been already performed by another of the company’s different brands. The traditional model plagued the operations at the company for years.
The transformed organizational model adopted by the HR Department has made the employees of GM to work on the same page. All of them are working towards realizing the same objective of preserving the core competence of the company of innovation.
Because of this initiative, the turnover of the company has dramatically increased in recent years. Its dominant position in the energy industry is largely attributed to the innovative culture that it has embraced in its transformed organizational model. Focus on innovation has also made the company to re-assess the market that it has been striving to approach. For a long time, the company had embraced a traditional outlook for energy production.
However, with the changing tastes and preferences of its customers, BP has taken a step back to examine critically its position in the market. To maintain this innovative culture, all the heads of the regional operations hold frequent meetings to assess the progress of the company. Global offices usually attend these meetings via phone; therefore, the CEO is able to monitor the progress of the company.
Employee development
The transformed organizational model ensures that employee development within the company is encouraged. At BP, the management ensures that the workers are doing a commendable work. Achievement of this is by making the workers realize that their input in the organization is important, not just to be salaried at the end of the month.
The quality of the work usually disintegrates when employees fail to recognize the value of their input in the organization. At BP, the workers are encouraged that the place of work forms their second home and that they add value to the success of the organization. Individuals most of the time react better to a surrounding where their emotional well-being is properly taken care of. That is why the company’s HR department usually gives rewards to the most motivated employees to act as an encouragement to them.
In BP’s business environment, managers engage in employee development by motivating the workers, first by example. The managers or the supervisors of its various departments are often self-motivating. When an individual has the capability of being self-motivating, it becomes uncomplicated to pass this trait to others (Banfield & Kay, 2008).
An individual with good leadership qualities, who has the capability of inspiring others, can play a vital role in the development of the employees. Sometimes it becomes difficult when a manager is indolent and does not posses motivation skills (Chandler, 1962). In a situation when a well-inspired individual controls the business enterprise, it depicts the aim of the organization and its ultimate success.
For example, when the manager maintains punctuality to the place of work in order to get things started on time, he or she sets a good example to the people under her or him. This attribute is most of the times past automatically to the subordinates. At BP, no one can be heard saying, “I do not feel like going to my place of work today,” since there is no person who intends to be left behind when things are done in a definite way. No worker would like to stray away from the norms of the company.
When employees make efforts to strike the right balance between their lives at home with their lives at the place of work, a number of them often are stressed and worked up (Lewin, 1951). This may lead to increased cases of absenteeism and decrease in the level of productivity. Having a career is different from having a life.
Since most organizations have employees who are married, it is important to ensure that they have occasions when they can be outside the place of work and spend some quality time with their families. Griffin and Moorhead (2002, p.182) have proved that recognizing the needs of the employees outside work is an important aspect of realizing their dedication when undertaking various duties. BP has successfully implemented this in its organizational structure with the aim of encouraging the development of its workforce.
To encourage personal development within the company, communication with one another is usually encouraged within the company. Effective communication is the key to optimal day-to-day running of an organization (Werner & DeSimone, 2009). BP managers or supervisors adhere to good communication skills when addressing their subordinates.
Undertaking various tasks requires efficient communication. Communication involves keeping the workers conversant with the activities taking place behind the scenes in addition to rendering a listening ear to their needs. Communication spurs personal development because workers generally respond well to an environment that cares for their emotions.
Employee’s relations and grievance handling
BP’s HR department tackles issues various issues dealing with employee’s relations and grievance handling. In the company, uncomfortable employees are usually known through observing their body language.
An example of the lack of a good relationship between an employee and a manager occurs when a manager is standing too close or if the employee is feeling uneasy with the presence of the manager behind him or her. An employee can even lose his or her train of thought when having a conversation with the manager. After recognizing the problem of lack of good relations, the department usually seeks for ways of addressing it.
Most of the duties within the company require one to have a good interpersonal relationship with others in order to do them better (Baker, 1985).
Effective performance of the tasks requires an excellent understanding of others and even the employee’s own interpersonal skills. To handle grievances, which are an everyday occurrence within the company, the HR department usually advises the employees to posses the ability to compromise for a win-lose outcome and strive at best for a win-win outcome or at the very least, an acceptable result.
In achieving this, the employees must be able to recognize the needs and perspectives of other people. For one to change his or her behavior in BP, and hence improve in his or her personal relationship with others, one is usually advised on establishing a goal and a method of assessing the current realty against this goal. One is also encouraged to have a method of measuring that reality and the technique of getting feedback on the progress of the change of behavior.
Training
An important aspect of realizing a good organizational behaviour is to institute the correct career processes for career advancement of the employees. This aspect is vital in retaining the most experienced workforce. Any job that an employee has strived to accomplish within the set standards ought to be recognized and rewarded accordingly by the leadership (DuBrin, 2009). Doing this makes the employees to work even harder in realizing the set targets as they have tangible incentives when they accomplish particular tasks well.
The success of the organization depends on the treatment accorded to the employees towards their career advancement. Managers ought to realize and give workers what they may require. They reciprocate this by delivering quality service to their employers. This is the reason why BP is engaged in efforts of training its workforce so as to sharpen their skills.
Many organizations are concerned about whether or not their workers are satisfied with their employment. Satisfied workers are generally more productive on the job. Employee dissatisfaction is capable of bringing the whole organization back to zero. It is within the mandate of an organization to institute candid ways of achieving employee satisfaction through training its workforce. Work performance relates directly to job satisfaction.
Presently, a number of organizations are having problems with retaining their workforce. Many of the workers enter a company with little experience and they leave the organizational after they have gained useful skills in the job.
However, the employee training programs that BP is involved in has resulted in increased benefits. Some of these are increased job satisfaction, increased employee motivation, increased innovation in strategies and products, enhanced company’s image, increased efficiencies in processes, resulting in financial gain, and increased capacity to implement technologies and various methods within the company.
Recommendations
In order to improve its performance, as a major HR strategy in the competitive energy industry, the company should be involved in efforts to streamline further its organizational structure. This strategy can lower unnecessary complexity and align resources towards increased growth. Ultimately, the company can regain the market share that it has lost to other major providers of energy around the world.
For a long time, critics observed that brands within the company, such as BP, ampm, Aral, ARCO, and BP Connect, were competing with one another in the market. However, the company can counter this by having very differentiated brands in order to avoid the conflict.
In training its workforce, BP should ensure that its expenses are not increased, especially when trained workers quit their positions since new people have to be trained to undertake the same duties. The leadership of the company should study the level of satisfaction of the employees as failure to do this makes them search for better opportunities that may crop in.
In spite of the salary that the employees take home, if the employees are not satisfied with their current employment, leaving in search of greener pastures becomes the next resort. By studying the employee behaviour, the company’s leadership would be able to learn vital skills in making the employees happy in the place of work, hence limiting their possible exit.
BP is under constant threats due to a variety of factors. These include environmentally unfriendly policies that most of the time result in toxic oil spillage, which is expensive to clean, sporadic explosions of refineries that cause widespread destruction, and lawsuits that are constantly being filed against it concerning its unsound ecological activities.
Some of these incidences are the the Prudhoe Bay oil disaster that resulted in the toxic spill of over one million litres of oil (Roach, 2010, para.1), and the recent deepwater horizon spill that took place on April 20, 2010 (Nudd, 2010, para.1). However, encouraging employee development and adequately training of its workforce are initiatives that can reduce the occurrence of these unfortunate incidences.
To improve employee relations within the company, the HR department should ensure that the new behavior learnt is put into practice. More over, employing feedback for fine-tuning should be encouraged as a commendable starting process in acquisition of new interpersonal skills.
To ensure that the skill last long, they must incorporated into the employee’s usual lifestyle. For example, an employee should be encouraged to practice good communication skills most of the times until he or she embraces it as a positive habit. This good interpersonal relationship should be regarded as a lifelong habit once it is programmed it into ones system, hence ones social life in the workplace will dramatically improve.
Importance of HRM practices to organizations
The use of HRM practices can assist an organization in achieving its corporate objectives in several ways. First, providing the employees with the necessary skills and behavior is able to make a company achieve its corporate objective.
Since the behaviour of the workforce is influenced by several complicated factors, identification of these factors is able to able to assist the HR department to devise programs that are able to influence the behaviour of the employees (Kemp, 1995). An example of a company that embraces this strategy is SAS Institute.
This has made it to appear in the Fortune 100-Best companies list for a number of years now (SAS Institute, 2010). Second, forces found in the external working environment, for example, the state of the economy, regulations endorsed by the government, actions of business rivals, or developments in science, influence the behaviour of the employees.
External influences, as was the case in General Motors, can bring a negative consequence on the activities of an organization (Alisher, 2006). This can be more prevalent in an organization with a stable internal work environment and certified tenets of employee behaviour. Therefore, the adoption of appropriate HR practices can reduce this impact.
Third, in some occasions, some external factors force organizations to lower the number of their employees with the intention of reducing on the costs.
For example, AT & T is likely to lay off 10,000 out of its 310,000 employees as a cost reduction strategy (Daily Finance, 2010). However, it is important to note that the practice of downsizing is able to reduce the satisfaction of workers, hence the overall productivity of the organization. This is because the employees remaining would generally develop the fear of being the next potential targets.
Practicing downsizing retards the development of human resource in an organization. This implies that HR practices can play a critical role on the efficiency of downsizing. This can be achieved when the HR departments adopts initiatives that would challenge or redirect possible organizational downsizing and focusing on programs of training the workers who have not been downsized to ensure that the remaining employees are not discouraged.
Fourth, forces within the work environment also affect the behavior of the employees, which ultimately affect the goals of an organization. The recent increase in productivity in the online company, Google, is attributed to its innovative culture of cultivating employee satisfaction.
Since a number of internal factors interact to give yield to a given behavioural characteristic in an employee, evaluation of these factors has enabled Google’s HR department to devise strategies for influencing the employee behaviour (Furnham, 2005). Fifth, personal or organizational outcomes result from certain behavioural characteristics of the employees. Personal outcomes, such as increased benefits or recognition, are directly related to an individual.
On the other hand, organizational outcomes such as the strength of teamwork, productivity, or product quality are directly related to the culture of the organization. Therefore, as exemplified by Amazon’s organizational culture, it is of essence to note that an organization should attempt to fulfill these outcomes by means of the collective efforts of every employee within the organization. The outcomes that employees either like or dislike determine their ultimate behavior, which can be influenced by HRM practices.
Sixth, studies have discovered that employees are more likely to fulfill tasks in which they can reap increased benefits. This implies that the presence of a carefully designed reward system, propagated by the HR Department, can yield to increased satisfaction amongst the employees.
When the HR department understands the reward system of the company it represents, that is, what it is meant to do, its application, and how to address the employees response to it, it can be a strong control mechanism for influencing the behaviours of the employees. For example, Edward Jones recorded increased profits when it implemented a reward system for its employees in its 12,615 offices (Edward Jones, 2010).
Seventh, as is the case in Nugget Market company, the HRM practices can be designed in such a way that they uphold the culture of the organization since an organizational culture, which consists of a set of values, beliefs and norms, affect the behaviour of the workers. Workers who are aware of the culture of an organization will most of the time behave in ways that reflect that particular culture. The department can also be affected by the organization’s culture in terms of its significance and acceptance.
Eight, job design is a practice in which an employee’s job description is modified for enhancing productivity as well as his or her quality of work life. This is the situation in UK-Shell. When the components of a particular job are altered in such a way that factors that fulfill employees’ development are included, an organization would be able to attain its objectives because of the resulting increase in productivity (Lerbinger, 1997).
This implies that the HR Department can construct its jobs in such a way that the employees remain more satisfied and more productive. Nine, workmates play a significant role in influencing the behaviour of the employees within an organization.
Most of the time, they dictate a number of the outcomes valued by the associates. As a result, they are able to capitalize on the outcomes with an intention of influencing the behaviour of their colleagues. This often results in positive or negative employee behaviour. For instance, if an employee behaves positively, the coworkers may reinforce that behaviour by offering friendship and recognition; however, if he or she behaves negatively, they can punish the employee through insults, or threats.
Norms or informal rules found in team situations provide a guideline on the type of behaviour accepted; therefore, employees are likely to behave according to these set principles. Since most development programs are usually carried out within work groups, the Ernst & Young HR department comprehends the influence of group dynamics on employee behaviour.
Its HR professionals monitor potentially destructive dynamics and act accordingly in order to avoid negative employee behaviour. Moreover, they pay increased attention to manipulative behaviours fostered by employees.
Ten, understanding the concept of motivation is essential for the success of the HR Department in influencing the behaviour of the employees in fulfilling the goals of an organization. Hewlett Packard practices motivation strategies as an essential ingredient for influencing employee behaviour.
As a result, the company is able to generate and channel voluntary actions that are goal directed. Since the motivation to work controls almost every behaviour found in the workplace, employees’ behaviour is an indication of the perceived results of their actions even in instances where they are forced to accomplish a task.
Eleven, it is important to note that motivation centers on numerous processes that influence behaviour such as applying effort to one behaviour over another or making a decision to either continue or stop performing a given behaviour. Because of the unique differences from individuals, motivation at the workplace is often viewed from individual basis, which the HR department of companies such as IBM and Adco (UK) limited practices (Bruce & Pepitone, 1999).
Twelve, the impact of most HR Department programs is based on whether the person is encouraged to utilize what he or she has learnt for enhancing performance at the workplace. For example, an individual may attend a training exercise but does not apply the techniques learnt because he or she was not motivated. Therefore, as exemplified by Bostik Findley Limited, the HR Department should develop relevant programs that are aimed at motivating the employees.
Thirteen, the HRM practices can develop strategies to help in setting the vision or mission for the organization and establishing long-term aims of the business. Strategies for the Allen and Overy Company (UK) have assisted it in implementation of decisions as well as providing integrity standards and accountability to the public.
The company has benefitted from strategies in terms of setting the key product mark, quality, resourcing and targets arising from long-term aims. Fourteen, as is the case in Associated British Foods, the department can assist an organization to achieve its goals by developing appropriate team structures and staff to ensure that they function both effectively and efficiently.
And lastly, the department can tailor programs that are aimed at motivating the employees by increasing the frequency of a behaviour through either following a positive behaviour with a pleasurable consequence, or seeking to lower the frequency of a negative behaviour through the introduction of an adverse consequence immediately after the behaviour. The Abb Alstrom Power Holdings (UK) HR department has implemented this as one of its strategies.
Conclusion
To this end, it is evident that the HR department in any organization plays a critical role in its well-being. Employees are not to be treated as moneymaking machines. It is high time managers come to terms with the fact that employees are fundamental to the success of an organization.
For that reason, the HR department turns into the very culture that any business enterprise draws its practices. The running of a business experiences a significant progress in its development when a good organizational behaviour, centered on good HR practices, is enacted. In summary, the HR department is vital to any business, and if it is not present, rampant confusion sets in.
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