A SAMPLE: HR MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY
HANOI SUPERBUY: HUMAN RESOURCE STRATEGIES
1. Introduction
This report is to outline a human resource management (HRM) strategy to improve the competitiveness of Hanoi Super buy. The HRM strategy is aiming at achieving employee support for increased competitiveness in an environment of change, In other words, it closely links to three main objectives of business strategy of Hanoi Super buy: Improving service quality to customers throughout the organization; cutting down the labor cost; managing change for dealing with market pressure.
2. Human Resource Management Strategy Outline
2.1. Outlining HRM strategy: According to Stone, a HRM strategy forms an integrated part of the organization’s overall business strategy, while being driven by strategic business objectives. The HRM strategy guides the actions of all HRM activities to be carried out (Stone, 2005: 19). The closer the HR strategy is linked to business strategy, the more likely that the business can gain competitive advantages so as to earn more profits (Stone, 2005). Therefore, at first, it is necessary to take into account Hanoi Super buy’s business objectives and how these objectives to be achieve. Secondly, based on comprehensive understanding of business strategy, the HR objectives are set up. What is next, all HRM activities will be carried out to realize the HR objectives by appropriate action plans as well as daily tasks at work. Consequently, a figure is established hereafter to summarize Hanoi Super buy’s HRM strategy and its main activities.
HANOI SUPERBUY: AN HUMAN RESOURCE STRATEGY
(Created on June 12, 2007)
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2.2. How the HRM strategy will achieve business strategy’s objectives As showed in the above mentioned figure, Hanoi super buy’s business strategy is to: Improve customer service quality; cut down labor cost; manage change. To achieve employee support, Hanoi super buy’s HR strategy aims to: Train and develop staff to work in a professional way; cut down labor cost by increasing sales per head as well as performance; urge staff to change. To be effective a HR strategy, all functions of HRM must be coordinate and perform as follows:
2.2.1. The first function of HRM is HRM planning.
Hanoi Super buy should well prepare all HRM plans at hand before doing any things, whereby “required number of employees” with “required knowledge, skills and abilities” are available when necessary (Stone, 2005: 45). HRM planning, of course, depends on business plans. For example, business plans are periodically built in short-term or long-term. From these business plans, number of appropriate qualified workers are calculated and scheduled. It is easy to put the numbers in annual HRM plans. However, when necessary, Hanoi Super buy still needs to recruit and select new staff quickly without any periodical HRM plans. Thus, HRM planning is not only a task of HR manager but also that of all managers (Stone, 2005: 45). HRM planning is also to forecast human resource demand and supply in advance by applying qualitative methods and quantitative methods, such as Delphi technique, trend projection, replacement, and so on. (Stone, 2005: 51-52). Moreover, Hanoi Super buy’s HRM planning also aims at coordinating and integrating all HRM activities or functions together with each other to create synergy strength for obtaining business strategy objectives (Stone, 2005).
2.2.2. Secondly, with the functions of recruitment and selection:
Hanoi Super buy should attract, select and appoint right people to right job at right time in accordance with HR planning. As Stone’ view, Recruitment is “the process of seeking and attracting a pool of qualified applicants from which candidates for job vacancies can be selected” and selection is “the process of choosing from a group of applicants the best qualified candidate”. Both strategic recruitment and selection should link to organization’s strategic objectives and culture (Stone, 2005). To obtain its goals, recruitment and selection should be carried out in a professional ways. Firstly, job descriptions and job specifications are analyzed, whereby criteria and predictors for job success are established. The strong relationship between criteria and predictors will result in good recruitment and selection (Stone, 2005). Secondly, HR manager is proactive. HR manager also must get power or authority and communicate well all HR plans, policies and activities to everybody throughout the organization (Stone, 2005). Thirdly, technology such as software, computer and so on must be utilized. Furthermore, recruitment and selection should follow standardized procedures and steps (Stone, 2005). Fifthly, job advertising should reach to targeted candidates or jobs are introduced by job consultancy centers. Last but not least, it should prepare thoroughly at hand materials of all types of tests and interviews by answering basic questions: what, where, when, why, which, how much and how many. Test and interview are carried out by experienced HR expert.
After selecting possible qualified candidates, according to Vietnamese labor code, Hanoi Super buy should sign labor contracts in short term of two-month probation time for new recruits (Nguyen P.D, 2003). Then, if new recruits show good performance, Hanoi should sign them contract.
2.2.3. Thirdly, for the functions of performance appraisal, pay, rewards and social welfare: Hanoi Super buy should motivate people to perform more effective. Motivation is defined as the processes that account for an individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal (Robbins, S.P. at al. 2007). Unfortunately, motivating people is an art far from an exact science. In fact, motivation can be individualized to each employee who works for. One employee may be motivated only by money. Another may appreciate personal recognition for a job well done. Still another may work harder if there is equity in the business or fair performance appraisal system and pay. Generally speaking, employee motivation can be boiled down to one basic ideal that finding out what your employees want and finding out how to give it to them or to enable them to earn it by clarifying away obstacles. In particular, we must do:
In term of pay, a basic salary system or grade is set up to ensure providing enough basic needs: food, cloth, housing and transport and telephone. According Vietnamese labor code, the common minimum salary is currently VND 450,000 (Dung N.T, 2006). Basic salary for sales personnel is recently about VND 800,000 on average. Therefore, Hanoi Super buy should set the first grade of pay system is slightly higher than the above average salary, approximately from VND 830,000 to 900,000.
With regard to rewards, Hanoi Super buy should reward staff in the ways that the better performance and the higher sales, the higher income staff will receive. For example, when sales are larger than the standard figure, a staff will get from 2% to 10% commission on everything a staff sells to customers.
As regard social welfare (including health insurance and social insurance and unemployment fund), Hanoi Super buy must provides more job security for regular staff as well as temporary staff, whereby any staff being unemployment, sickness, maternity leave, labor accident and so on will be paid pension or compensation in accordance with compulsory provisions regulated by Vietnamese’s Labor Code (Viet P., 2002). According to Law on social insurance and other Vietnamese legal documents, every businesses and organization must pay social and health insurance fees for staff working more than three months (Trong N.P, 2006). Therefore, Hanoi Super buy should obey the law first by selecting among current staff possible qualified employees to pay insurance fees and giving irrelevant employees the sack or else it will break the law leading to more serious problems later. In order to avoid lawsuit, when necessary, Hanoi Super buy should sign service contracts with the dismissal employees in stead of current temporary labor contract, if it still needs to someone do some temporarily jobs or work in low sales shop where it needs to keep these shop walking.
2.2.4. Fourthly, as regard the functions of training and development:
Hanoi Super buy should train not only new recruits after recruiting and selecting them but also regular employees as well as temporary employees how to work in a professional way, whereby customer serviced quality will be improve. As Stone’s view, training represents activities that “teach employees” the ways to “better perform their present job”. Also, training typically focuses on “intermediate improvements” in performing jobs via “the procurement of specific skills” (Stone, 2005: 335). On the other hand, “development is aiming at preparing the employee for the future job responsibilities through the acquisition of new experiences, knowledge, skills and attitudes” (Stone, 2005: 335). The higher skill and knowledge its staff are, the more likely Hanoi Super buy can be successful. If possible, therefore, Hanoi Super buy should choose and send their staff to study MBA somewhere in Hanoi, especially La Trobe University – Hanoi Campus.
Moreover, Hanoi Super buy should train staff on quality management programs applying to its shops and its supplier, such as ISO 9000 (a family of standards for quality management systems) or Total Quality Management (TQM) (Wikipedia). Whereby its staff are train to work for the joys of customers and ensure better quality management system for ensuring quality of product. According to Mitsutomi, TQM is “customer-focused activities to improve the quality of all aspects of work” (Mitsutomi T., 2004). By applying TMQ, it can build customer understanding for its product, gain customer acceptance for the product, attain customer satisfaction with the product and experience the joy of buying products and services (Mitsutomi T., 2004).
2.2.5. Fifty, with regards to ethics:
Hanoi Super buy should build up a cultural environment whereby, all people are trust and respect each other, salesmen or shop-girls are honesty. These things will create more value to business as well as to customers’ need. For example, some Vietnamese Dong cash notes of different values look like each other. Then, a customer mistakes VND 200,000 for VND 10,000 paying for a pen. If salesmen or shop-girls are honest, they will give the money back to the customer. Later, the customer will not only come back and buy other things but also tell friends and relatives about that. As a result, Hanoi Super buy will gain more than just VND 200,000.
To be ethical, Hanoi Super buy should establish its own code of ethics or governance in accordance with Vietnamese law and apply throughout the organization by training and propagandizing. Especially, it should apply directly in HR activities such as recruitment, selection, labor contract and so on. Moreover, code of ethics should cover all spheres of all activities of Hanoi Supper buy such as quality, sale service, HR, marketing, finance, and so on.
Finally, all the rest HR functions must involve in HR strategy to get full strength of HR department. Labor contract management should diversify types of labor contracts, whereby long-term contract will urge employee with shorter term contract to work harder to get longer term contract. Temporary workers will try their best to become regular workers. Occupation safety and healthy management should ensure everyone to be in good health to work without being absent.
2.2.6. Managing change
While we doing the above things, it means that we do change many things. When we change, it means that there are many forms of resistance to change, we can summarize those resistance as follows: lack of trust, fear of the unknown, change of routine, belief change is unnecessary, loss of confidence, loss of control, loss of face, too fast a pace of change, not understanding benefits, economic loss, group pressure and so on. Also there are many strategies to manage change such as: communication, participation, guarantee, certainty, counseling, negotiation, reward, coercion, etc (Robbins, S.P. et al, 2007). According to Lewin’s three step model, Hanoi Super buy should “unfreeze” first then change and at last refreeze again (Robbins, S.P. et al, 2007). Therefore, we can urge people to change in this following ways. Firstly, we must organize meeting with all people. Secondly, we tell them how much money they can receive from the new ways of HR management. We must also show them what to be change and why we change, how they can get the job done. We ensure that they will get job security better from labour contract system and social insurance system. They also can receive more commission by better performance. To motivate people to change, we also can apply Vroom’s expectancy theory by knowing three factors: Expectancy, instrumentality and valence (Stone, 2005:418)
2.3. How the success of the strategy can be determined:
This HR strategy should be evaluated how much it contributes to Hanoi Super buy’s strategic business objectives. According to Stone, some certain outcomes should be considered to evaluate HR performance (Stone, 2005). Therefore we can establish a check list as follows:
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Based on the above check sheet the success and failure of HR strategies can be determined. If the total mark is over 30 the strategy is acceptable. The higher the total mark is the more success the HR strategy is. 3. Conclusion From the above analysis, we can draw out conclusion that: In term of HRM, Hanoi Super buy can improve the quality of service offered to customers throughout the organization by: Training people to better perform; recruiting and selecting right people to the right job at the right time; fair appraisal system, contract system, pay and reward system and social insurance system are established to motivate all people to work harder whereby all people are treat differently to what they want; building code of ethics to improve service quality and transparency corporate culture. For cutting labor costs, Hanoi Super buy should base on the increase of revenue or sales per head. To increase sales, Hanoi Super buy must cut down some people who are not fit and recruit new people who can produce more benefit to the organization. To urge people to change is quite hard but we must do that to improve competitiveness. References: Diem N.V, Quan N.N (2004), Human resource management, Labor – Social Publisher, Hanoi, Vietnam Mitsutomi T. (2004), TQM advanced course introduction, 3rd edition, Honda Motor, Japan. Stone R.J (2005), Human Resource management, 5th Edition, John Wiley & sons Australia, Ltd Robbins, S.P and Judge T.A. (2007), Organisational Behaviour, 10th Edition, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ Available from website: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TQM), accessed on June 15th, 2007. Available from website: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9000), accessed on June 15th, 2007. Nguyen P.D (2003), System of legal documents: guidance on Vietnamese Labor code, Labor Publisher, Hanoi Viet P. (2002), Vietnamese Labor code (amendment law), National Politics Publisher, Hanoi Dung N.T, Government Decree No. 94/2006/NĐ-CP issued on September 7th, 2006 on the adjustment of common minimum basic salary, (http://www.luatvietnam.com.vn), accessed in private account, on September 10th, 2006. Trong N.P (2006), Law on Social insurance of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam No. 71/2006/QH11 issued on June 29th, 2006, (http://www.luatvietnam.com.vn), accessed in private account, on September 10th, 2006. |
