Introduction
The success of any organization is directly influenced by the management strategies that the organization utilizes. The importance of sound human resource management can not be under estimated. Organizations with a vision for both short term and long-term success attach great importance to efficient and effective management strategies.
Unfortunately, The Den appears to be stumbling in the dark without these strategies. The organization is ailing badly and immediate attention is required for it to restore the trust of its employees, clients and funders. Most of the problems that Den is experiencing are directly attributable to poor management strategies to a point where its employees are skeptical about its future.
When the staff is appreciated, then their output increases and the clients are satisfied. Satisfaction of the people that an organization serves is the most important ingredient of success. This satisfaction can only be realized if the staff of the organization is satisfied.
Furthermore, The Den relies on funding to meet its staff and running costs therefore presenting a challenge for the organization’s management to please the funders. Therefore, the new head of center will adopt a strategy that seeks to guarantee client, staff and funder’s satisfaction through engagement of the staff.
Strategic approach to human resource management
Employees at Den are obviously unsatisfied by the organization. Their productivity is therefore compromised because the organization his not motivating them. The employees work longer hours at no extra pay not to mention that their pay is low and uncompetitive (Pfeffer 1994, p 5).
This ultimately has had a profound impact on the organization. Den needs to quickly salvage itself from this precarious position and establish an efficient approach to human resource management.
Accountability at The Den seems alien. The employees do not seem disturbed by the consequences of their actions. However, the human resource department is entirely to blame for this. Therefore, the human resource management strategy at The Den will be focused on alignment.
This will allow participation of the staff and accord responsibility to managers for their decisions. It will demonstrate that The Den Arts Center is committed to staff empowerment as well as the achievement of the organization’s objectives.
The Den seems to have lost focus of where it is going. The organization seems to be undertaking projects without a clear vision of the future. Strategic planning is a requirement for any organization whose management is objective.
In this breadth, the organization will adopt a strategic plan on human resource management by setting goals, strategies and stipulating the resources needed, the performance of employees will be appraised and finally the degree of achievement of the organization’s objectives will be reported (Paauwe 2009, p 23).
Members of staff are expected to deliver and explain the reasons for their failure in event that they fail to meet the expected results. Every employee will be required to align himself/herself with the organization’s objective (Becker and Gerhard, 1996, pp. 79-80)
Achievement of the organizations objective will obviously come with a price. The organization has continued loosing its employees due to poor pay. Funding has posed a major challenge for The Den.
That notwithstanding, the future of The Den is bleak according to the employees. The credit crunch and funding difficulties have taken toll on the organization to the point that the employees’ faith in the organization has been greatly compromised.
This has resulted to high employee turnover; a trend that has negatively affected the organization’s performance thus undermining the funder’s faith in the organization too. The management of the organization will embark on a faith restoration mission by addressing these biting problems.
The cause of these problems lies in the problem itself. The problem is lack of faith in the future of the organization. For Den to secure funding, the management will get back to the drawing board and formulate objectives of the organization.
Employee turnover costs organizations a lot and affect financially organizations. This has complicated the financial woes of Den by causing direct costs to the Centre in terms of recruitment and induction process of new members of staff. Indirectly it has affected the company by causing an increased workload for the employees impacting on their productivity and morale.
The organization will therefore seek to address this problem by providing motivation for its existing employees as well as offer competitive remuneration package that has a focus on employee development. This will also go along way in attracting potential employees (Armstrong 2006, p 6).
Recruitment and development of employees
The recruitment process is an expensive process in terms of time and money. An organization cannot afford to hire the wrong person. In that case, this process must be undertaken carefully to ensure that an organization ends up with the best person for the position the organization.
However, if the organization is not competitive in the job market then chances are that it will always end up with the wrong people. Furthermore, even if the organization hires the right person, the person may later move to other organizations that are competitive and more mindful for their employees.
To that extent, it is the prerogative of an organization to ensure that it is attractive to potential employees. The Den is one such company that has disregarded employee satisfaction leading to high employee turnover.
Hiring new employees is a costly exercise especially when the new employees do not stay for long in the organization. An organization must therefore strive to retain its employees by offering attractive employee compensation package. An organization must hire the right people to succeed and ensure that the potential employee has their career development objectives inline with the organization objectives.
The organization must follow up the hiring process by developing the careers of the employees, which is an on going process that never ends. Many organizations have in the recent past found it difficult to retain their employees. This employee turnover is costing the organizations a fortune thereby impacting on the organization’s finances negatively.
There are direct costs associated with employee turnover include recruitment, training and the time wasted in the process. Indirect costs are increased workloads on the remaining employees and the resulting overtime compensation for overtime not to mention the reduced productivity of the employees.
Employees leave organization for varied reasons some of which are controllable while are others are beyond management control. Factors like compensation, stress poor working conditions, monotony, and poor employee training can be controlled by proper employee management strategies (Rose and Nabil 2002, pp. 442-453).
An organization seeking to manage employee turnover must develop a sound employee retention strategy while considering the following strategies. First, the organization must be aware of the current employee turnover for it to plan effectively. Turnover is calculated by dividing the number of employees that leave the organization annually by the number of employees that in the workforce.
An organization can compare its turnover with the average turnover rate that is 14.4 per cent. Even if the organization has provided everything that motivates its employees, it is logical for it to plan for some amount expected turnover.
For Den to effectively, manage the turnover problem, the organization will start by hiring the right people and give them an opportunity to develop their careers. The organization will begin with investing in the careers of its employees to secure its long-term goals.
This approach will be complemented by hiring people whose career objectives are in line with the organization’s objectives. This will guarantee employee loyalty and retention.
The open door policy will also be adopted to ensure employees full participation in the realization of the objectives of the organization. Micro managing the employees is counter productive, thus it should be discouraged at all costs.
Rewarding the employees intrinsically is critical by making the employees believe that their contribution is being appreciated in the organization. The organization’s approach in cultivating trust and loyalty must realize that it is a two-way traffic that involves both the employee and organization trusting each other.
A strategic compensation package will go along way in ensuring employee retention. The package should not include only base and variable pay scales, but also incentive compensation on a long term basis which addresses the welfare of the employees (Gerard, 2007, pp.60-72). This will ultimately ensure that The Den is competitive on the labor market with more people expected to express interest in working for the organizations.
The employee welfare mindfulness is the ultimate magnet of employee to an organization since employees value organizations that are concerned with there welfare. If the Den encourages flexible working by embracing alternative working schedules, then productivity of the Den Arts Centre will be greatly increased.
Employee compensation should not be on cash basis only rather it should be non-cash since these seemingly small things such as events tickets can have far-reaching impact on employee positive performance.
Employee development must fair to prevent employee animosity. Promotion from within is good method of encouraging employees to strive for excellence. Organizations rely on outside employees who work on a contractual basis to meet employee shortage.
Unfortunately, these external employees are paid more than the permanent employees of the organization are not to mention they are not loyal to the organization. This demoralizes employees resulting negative performance (Prahald and Hammel 1990, p 12).
Legal and ethical dimension
Workforce diversity is a strategic initiative. Human resource managers are required to transform global diversity strategically to make it an organizational asset. Diversity at the workplace is a moral and ethical issue that must be addressed accordingly.
The thoughts that come into our minds when we speak of diversity are racial diversity. It is important to note that diversity is more than that and includes aging employees, the handicapped just to name but a few. World’s increasing globalization calls for interaction of different cultures and different backgrounds.
Diversity involves not just how people perceive themselves but also how they perceive others. Workplace diversity is focused on differences and similarities. Its definition is broad and includes dimensions that are specified legally and affirmative action and non-discrimination statutes.
Diversity involves learning from people who are not like us. It is about respect, dignity, and promoting this culture into our organization culture. Diversity impacts on the organization as it is the one that makes people different.
An organization that has a workforce from different background allows the organization to utilize many ideas in achieving its main objective. An organization that supports diversity at its workplace improves employee satisfaction ultimately improving productivity.
Every workplace has its legal and ethical obligations. It is important that the employees and the employer learn what is right or wrong. The right thing to do is based on moral principle while it may be argued that it depends with the situation but ultimately it depends with the individual.
Organizations manage their workplace policy by establishing a workplace ethics program. The ethics program is charged with the responsibility of conveying corporate values of the organization by using codes of conduct. Two broad areas of business ethics may be identified the first one being managerial mischief, which entails questionable practices of managers.
The second broad area entails morals of the management and encompasses various ethical problems that the managers are obliged to deal with in the workplace in the day-to-day operation of the organization (Berenbein, 1992, pp. 77-80). These issues may include conflict of interest, mismanagement of contracts and misappropriation of organization resources. This is an issue that has impacted greatly at Den as workers embezzle organization funds with impunity.
Diversity brings a lot of advantages to the organization. However, it presents a lot of challenges too. There are three organizational types that focus on employee diversity on the cultural basis, multicultural organization, monolithic organization and multicultural organization.
The law has been protecting the minority for a long time, and has enhanced legal diversity at the workplace. Age discrimination is one of the spheres of discrimination that the law focuses on. Employees who have aged on their jobs are protected by the law.
The law prohibits age discrimination. It also bans excluding people over forty from participating apprenticeship programs, job advertisements and denying them from accessing health benefits.
Likewise, employees are also protected legally by prohibiting employers and fellow employees from discriminating them at the workplace. The disabled are accorded equal opportunities as the able-bodied people therefore allowing them to compete on a level playing ground. Before the advent of this law, the disabled with conditions such as cerebral palsy, visual disorders and attention deficit disorders were generally excluded from employment.
It is also an ethical obligation for organizations to protect the rights of the disabled and deal with employees who deny the disabled these rights. The society and the workforce should be educated on the rights of the minority since most employees overstep the rights of the employees without even knowing.
Sound management of business ethics has many benefits. In the past, there was not much consideration and appreciation of diversity at work. Employees were overworked the disabled were discriminated and even children were employed in various industries a practice that is now gone.
This is courtesy of the society demanding that organization respects its workers rights and institutes fairness at the workplace. Consequently, ethics have played a major role in ensuring that moral course is maintained even during turbulent times such as times of non-profit and complex conflicts. The benefit of consistent morality is a result of cultivated teamwork and productivity (Carrol, 1990, pp.21-23).
Ethics programs seek to align employee behaviours by modifying them to match the desired values of the organization. However, it is common to experience a disparity between the preferred organizational behavior and the actual behavior of the employees at the workplace.
Therefore, a sound management builds trust and openness and gradually aligns the behavior of the employees to that expected by the organization. The ultimate result of this approach is strong motivation of the employees which directly leads to high productivity (James, 1996).
Ethics at the workplace also have an impact on employee development by assisting employees face reality. This is attributable to the fact the employees already know what is expected of them. Furthermore, ethics programs serve as an insurance policy by ensuring the policies are legal.
In the recent past, there have been an increased number of lawsuits concerning employee matters. Ethical principles are often based on legal matters which are applied to current ethical issues to make them legislations. High ethical adherence at the workplace is directly related to the amount of attention paid to ethical policies.
Criminal acts of omission can be avoided by adherence to the ethics programs. The programs detect violations of ethics at an early stage allowing sufficient time for them to be addressed accordingly. An organization can be charged with a criminal act by not reporting potential violation to the authority hence attracting a hefty fine unnecessarily. But if the organization has made sufficient effort to curb the violation in good time this fine can be considerably lowered.
Quality management values, strategic planning and diversity management is made easier by the presence of an ethical program in and organization. Ethical programs, involves recording of values, policy development and alignment of the workforce values to with the preferred organizational values (LaGuardia 2002, p123). This process works hand in hand with other management programs in the organization such as strategic planning programs.
Most importantly ethical programs promote public image enhancing trust of the public to the organization. Although ethical programs should not be undertaken solely with the view of pleasing the public, it is undeniable that a strong positive public image is the objective of any organization.
The public values organizations that value employees more than profit. As a matter of fact, properly applied ethical values are the fundamental in establishing a socially responsible business and a commercially successful enterprise (James, 1996, pp.77-90).
The Den Arts Centre is faced with major issues concerning funding and high employee turnover. Fortunately, these are management issues that can be taken care of by sound management practices. The organization’s lack of direction will be addressed by strategic human resource management.
This will go a long in improving the public image thus attracting more attention to the shows that the organization organizes. Consequently, the organization will raise sufficient revenue thus cutting reliance on public funding. Employee motivation both monetary and non-monetary will ensure that employee turnover is reduced to manageable levels at the same time improving productivity of the employees and the ultimate success of the Den.
The diversity of the staff at the Den needs to be addressed to ensure that the employees are equally appreciated and rewarded accordingly. The Den Arts Centre will be back on its feet with a strong human resource management strategy that will result into success.
References
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