CompuLearn Case Study Analysis: Human Resource Management
Task: Prepare a report for the Human Resource Director of CompuLearn giving advice on the HRM problems of the company and advising on a new and appropriate HRM strategy.
Introduction
Every business organization or company has different internal organizations, having a variety of functions. The internal organizations that comprise the whole business are interrelated and are working together to ensure the company’s success in profiting from the market. The more functions each of the organization perform; the better is the performance of the company as a whole. This gives each of the companies their corresponding advantages and benefits from the market and their consumers.
One of the company’s basic internal organizations is the Human Resource Management team, which is highly responsible with the maintenance of the company’s employees. The Human Resource Management team does a variety of tasks and functions, and is crucial in its objective concerning the work and interests of the employees in the company. Oftentimes, we encounter the team working for the Human Resource Management during job interviews or job openings. The people behind this team are performing various activities such as recruitment, training, rewards, performance appraisal, and with the health and safety of the employees of a certain business firm or company. Likewise, the Human Resource Management team is also crucial for the CompuLearn Company, for it will be responsible for the training and development of its staffs, and promoting effective interrelationships within the company.
However, being a crucial team in a company, it is also essential that they promote the development of the employees, not only in relation to job performance, but in relation to effective communication and interrelations as well. This paper intends to make proposals or suggestions regarding the overall human resource strategy of CompuLearn, to support the company’s growth and expansion. Short-term and long-term elements of the strategies will be proposed, including recommendations on how these strategies will be exhibited. Moreover, human resource practice needs will be introduced or existing human resource practices will be proposed for improvement to enable the strategies to be successful.
Brief History of CompuLearn
CompuLearn is based in the United Kingdom, which is a private sector provider of teaching and learning programmes to a growing international market. The company provides IT based learning packages in business and management, and works in partnership with UK universities, which help validate its programmes, for students to obtain a recognized, UK based qualification on the successful completion of their study.
Based in Preston, Lancashire, it employs 50 staffs, with the majority working in the Preston Headquarters office. Several functions include Programme Development, Customer Service, Human Resource, Marketing, Finance, Sales, IT support, and Quality Assurance. Offices are also present in main trading areas, including in Nairobi, Mumbai, and Dubai. Its main market is in the Middle-East, Asia and Africa, and operates through and with 200 education centers in 30 countries.
The company’s mission is to be the market leader in e-learning delivery of university-validated programmes, and to become the foremost learning company in the world.
Its newly identified business strategy is to extend this education to 500 education centers in 60 countries within three years.
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Current Strategy Problems of CompuLearn
From the given case study of CompuLearn, it has been reported that its employee base is relatively small, given its market share and influence in the world. In relation to its human resource and IT section, there is a high turnover, which HR has not yet been able to address. It is being affected by the employment of the whole United Kingdom, as new staffing the UK often leaves the company within the first month of employment, in seeking for “greener pastures”.
Moreover, training and development in CompuLearn is very limited, where the trend for a number of years has been to recruit highly trained IT and other specialist staff rather than provide in-house training and development opportunities. At present, this problem has become severe, as the managers in CompuLearn have very limited management skills, despite their technical expertise. In some occasions, arguments have broken out within the office accommodation between staff and line managers. This incident is frequently being sparked by a line manager criticizing an employee in public for a mistake made, or an instruction not followed. In addition, the company does not have an appraisal system in place for any employees.
Furthermore, the total training budget available to staff has been spent on training for sales staff only, who are regarded as ‘the jewel of the company’ by the Managing Director, who originally came from a sales and marketing background himself. Many of the Preston HQ staffs do not have a particularly comfortable relationship with the UK university staffs, in turn, HQ staffs find academic staffs to be ‘unrealistic’ and ‘not living in the real world’.
In relation to the Human Resource Director, she has already been in the company for ten years, knows everyone in the company, and is efficient in managing the personnel records, giving advice to staff and managers about policies and procedures. However, she has no particular expertise in devising long-term plans for the management of people within the company. With this, she realized that she needs external help and advice.
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By identifying these problems, the company’s Human Resource Consultancy Company will be providing advice on an appropriate human resource strategy to support the growth of the company, and the changing emphasis of its mission and vision.
Human Resource Management
It has been reported that HRM or Human Resource Management is the term increasingly used to refer to the philosophy, policies, procedures, and practices related to the management of an organization’s employees, and is particularly concerned with all the activities that contribute to successfully attracting, developing, motivating, planning systematic approaches, and maintaining a high-performing workforce that result in organizational success ( 2002, ). In addition, it gives an increasing emphasis on the personal needs of the organization and its members, where the challenge is to create an organizational environment in which each employee can grow and develop to his or her fullest extent. In the desire of the Human Resources to make successful organizations, it aims at developing strategies for the total organization focused on clarifying an organization’s current and potential problems and developing solutions for the. They are oriented toward action, the individual, the global marketplace, and the future, giving emphasis that nowadays, it is difficult to envision any organization achieving success without efficient HRM programs and activities ( 2002, )
In maintaining and implementing balance between the employees’ aspirations and the objectives of the business firm, the company must generate the highly effective and efficient Human Resource Management team. For the Human Resource Management team to contribute to the profitability, quality and other organizational goals of the company, it should be able to closely integrate careful planning and decision-making. This is possible through planning and implementing short-term and long-term strategies, in accordance to the improvement of the Human Resource Management team.
Short-Term Strategies
In the business context, strategies are the vehicle that will take a company from its current position to where it wants to be, and short-term key performance areas will support each of the strategic areas to be discussed. These five strategic areas include leadership, people, policy, partnership, and resources (‘’ 2003).
Leadership – The problem with leadership lies on the fact that CompuLearn’s Managing Director lacks the skills in devising long-term plans for the management of people within the company. Due to this incapability, the whole Human Resource team is also affected. With this problem, several proposals can be given for the improvement of the skills and knowledge of the company’s Managing Director.
- The company must ensure that their Human Resource leaders have the skills, knowledge, confidence and support to fulfill their responsibilities
- The company must ensure that leaders develop and deploy the organization’s corporate objectives thru departmental plans and engage in a process for measurement, review and improvement of performance at an organizational, team and individual level, to encourage leaders to review and improve the effectiveness of their own leadership.
- Promote effective communication between members, managers and employees with opportunities to challenge in both directions, and to communicate and consult with leaders on issues that affect them.
- Research and promote best management practice and to ensure that this is reflected in all policies and procedures.
People – Problem with the employees of the company lies on the fact that they lack training and knowledge on their job, including their unpleasant attitude towards their managers. Strategies of the company must include:
- Achieving access to training and development opportunities for all employees to help them meet their targets identified as part of their key issue exchange
- Develop, achieve and maintain quality systems incorporated into performance management within the departments and other organizations
- Encourage greater flexibility to meet the service demands through rewards and incentives and frameworks for career and personal development
Policy – The overall policies of CompuLearn must be improved and must encompass several aspects, including training and development of employees and managers, allocation of training budget, and employing and recruiting of the Human Resource team.
- It must ensure the health, safety, and welfare of all employees through a clear policy framework based upon legislative requirements, guidance and promotion of best practice.
- Ensure that all policies, procedures and guidelines are communicated clearly, understood, and followed at all levels of the organization.
- Monitor and review the effectiveness of all policies and procedures to ensure that they support the delivery of quality and efficient services to the community and the achievement of national and local performance targets.
Partnership – This includes establishing a pleasant and effective relationship and communication with the company’s suppliers and partners. This includes:
- Developing and maintaining the company’s employment policies and report on the resultant findings and implications.
- Supporting departmental and corporate initiatives intended to improve access to services and employment by members of disadvantaged and minority groups.
- Developing a clear policy to balance the changing needs of a diverse workforce with service priorities including a commitment to review work-life balance initiatives
Resources – CompuLearn must be able to allocate their resources effectively and adequately, in accordance to the needs of each of its internal organization. This includes strategies such as:
- Identifying the requirements and priorities for all functions in line with corporate objectives, the corporate plan and the departmental service plans of all departments
- Establishing qualitative and quantitative performance targets and indicators to continually improve standards.
- Promoting the role and continuously developing the employees engaged in service delivery, supporting and enabling them to deliver quality and cost effective services
- To work with trade unions and to seek to maintain effective employee relations and in doing so produce a clear statement of shared values between the management and the representatives of the workforce
Long-Term Strategies
In response to CompuLearn’s new business strategy, which is to extend this education to 500 education centers in 60 countries within three years, several long-term plans must also be made. Long-term strategies must include:
- Implementation of new information systems
- Identify service or product innovations and resultant change
- Development of multi-skilled, multi-disciplined employees
- Provide technology-oriented skills upgrading
- Provide counseling and employee assistance to address issues, complaints and concerns
- Promote healthy living both on and off the job
- Translate desired culture into specific employee behavior
- Examine alternate scenarios, long-term projections and future staffing by watching demographic shifts and economic trends
- Provide information in newsletters, emails, coffee breaks and meetings
- Knowing several languages (incorporation in curriculum)
- Improvement, development and innovation of infrastructure of all education centers
Recommendations
The company can strategically implement the enumerated short-term and long-term plans through specific goals and objectives. By identifying all the possible problems arising in the company, a Human Resource Manager can think of some solutions and in turn boost the morale of their employees to regain their trust for the company, and therefore, maintain the company’s good reputation. An employee’s motivation serves as the key when it comes to his or her performance in a certain business firm or company. Thus, it is involved in the willingness of an employee to exert high levels of effort toward organizational goals and outcomes, where this effort gives a positive or a negative impact by the effort’s capacity to satisfy individual needs and life interests, and the person’s ability to make the effort and achieve the outcome (, and 2006). The productivity of an employee depends on his or her motivation, which in turn depends on the leader’s efforts in giving the employees direction and training. It involves the ability of the employee, his or her values and life interests, which affects his or her work and attitude towards his or her performance. To improve the motivation of the employees of CompuLearn including their managers, the Human Resource team must be able to conceptualize and implement incentives and rewards, which would help motivate them. In addition, the team must have effective employee appraisals to help gauge the work performance of the employees. Knowing their problems and dilemmas regarding their work would be easier for the company to develop, improve and delegate work for their employees. This is possible thru the effective and efficient mediation of the Human Resource Management team. Moreover, the HRM team can also implement and schedule employee trainings and development to help them know more about the nature of their job and better understand their responsibilities.
The enumerated strategies can also be implemented and achieved properly through job redesigning. Sometimes employees become tired of doing the same tasks repeatedly, which leads them to lack interest on the job and decrease their productivity. This leads to the demotivation and alienation of the employee. For this matter, the concept of Work Design or the Job Characteristics Model was devised, which is the process of linking specific tasks to specific jobs and deciding what techniques, equipment, and procedures should be used to perform those tasks to improve motivation and performance (, and 2006). This process includes scientific management, job rotation, job enlargement and job enrichment, which are approaches to improve motivation and performance. Job rotation is periodic shifting from one job to another, which promotes the motivation and productivity of an employee through a variety of jobs where he or she can learn more. It somehow reduces boredom and increases motivation through diversifying the employee’s activities. Another approach is job enlargement, which entails in providing more tasks to employees and work becomes more interesting. It aims at understanding the employee’s life interests, provided, that the additional tasks have the same level of difficulty and responsibility, or commonly called the horizontal job loading. This also gives the employees a variety of job responsibilities, useful in acquiring more knowledge and improving the skills of the employee. The last approach is job enrichment, which enables the employee to gain more control over his or her job and thus increase his responsibility. The concept of vertical job loading is applied, which gives more autonomy and set of goals to that are motivating (‘’ ).
Moreover, with proper motivation, the HRM team can effectively implement other projects and plans for the development of the whole company. With motivation, the Human Resource team can improve better communication within all internal organizations of CompuLearn, including the staffs from other international offices. In this way, it is easier for the team to initiate leadership trainings and employee development sessions. With these strategies, both the directors of the company and the employees themselves have equal opportunity to gain knowledge and further training from the company. Through this, the allotted training budget can be allocated properly, and not only used to train the sales people. In addition, the managing directors can also put her knowledge into use, during trainings.
In addressing all the other problems of the CompuLearn, it would be better for the Human Resource Management team to focus their time and energy on developing and improving the communication of its employees. With good communication, the company will be able to solve conflicts and problems easily. This is in response to the problem of the CompuLearn on conflicts between employees and bosses. However, along with the use of effective communication is the improvement of the attitude of the employees through employee training and self-improvement sessions. In this way, the managers and his or her subordinates can have a time and a chance to develop and bond, through activities that will help get to know each other. By knowing each other, the managing director can come up with ways in dealing with them and at the same time, the employees can improve their attitudes toward their managing director. Moreover, through this, the company can also have the chance to expand and increase the number of their employees. With their plans of extending to many more countries, they should try their best to improve on their policies, leadership and employee management to be able to handle more individuals in the future.
In line with their new business strategy, CompuLearn must also try to develop new information systems to enhance their technology and communication. With the use of the new developed information systems, CompuLearn will be able to function more effectively. First, they can effectively introduce their products and services to the public by developing their website. Through their website, they can make transactions with their clients around the world. Second, effective technology also enables the company to use efficient advertising, which will contribute to their sales and profit. Third, each employee of the company can successfully communicate with other employees and relate to them regarding their work and other matters, and lastly, with the use of the new developed information systems, CompuLearn will be able to cope with the competition from other companies offering the same products and services. With these proposed strategies, CompuLearn will be able to provide better services to their customers and to their employees as well. They can maximize their resources, improve on communication, and resolve conflicts.
Conclusion
The case study of CompuLearn is one example of a company that should focus on the improvement and development of their Human Resource Management team in order to contribute to establishing success for the whole business organization. With the proposed short-term strategies, CompuLearn will be able to focus more on employee development, policy development, communication improvement, and resource allocation. With the proposed long-term strategies, CompuLearn will be able to focus on further and continuous improvement and the increase of their sales and profit. With the use of these proposals, the company should be able to use them in their advantage and improvement. CompuLearn must also maximize its use of technology, to cope with the changes happening in the society nowadays, and be able to reach a wider coverage of market. This would in turn, contribute to the increase in the sales and profit of the company, with retaining loyalty and customer satisfaction.
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