Enhancing Organizational Performance through Strategic HR Management

Human Resource Management Initiatives at PwC Australia: Performance, Culture, and Engagement

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Human resource management is the backbone of every organisation that runs a business. The following report will highlight the role of HR management in an organisation. The report will highlight one performance-related initiative in PwC Australia and a way to measure its success. PwC Australia is the prominent professional service organisation in the down under. It provides assistance to other organisation to improve their modus operandi of carrying out business tasks. Currently, it employs more than 223,000 employees in 157 countries around the world. Moreover, the culture-based initiative will also be discussed along with the identification of culture prevalent within it. In addition to this, the report will highlight the engagement-related efforts taken up by the organisation and its success. The report will end by providing some recommendations for the same.

Performance-related initiatives

PwC believes that solid processes, strategies, and technology are not sufficient alone for delivering the best results. Successful business depends on the ability to execute and strategic agility. In the constantly changing environment, getting the things done in a best way from people at all levels is the key to success and business sustainability. PwC has determined certain factors that are directly or indirectly associated with the performance of employees and organisation. These include data-driven decisions, skill gaps, biases, tech-savvy HR, flexible talent, workload, advanced workforce planning, career model, adaptability, and ecosystem of workspaces (Cole, et.al, 2012).

However, the management of PwC believes that adaptability and data-driven decisions have great influence on the performance of the employee. The manager makes use of advanced analytics and big data to make workforce-related decisions. In addition to this, the organisation implements the best talent practices and processes, such as secondments, job rotations, training and coaching, etc., to nurture workers’ adaptability and agility (Seddon, 2018). Providing employees an opportunity to exchange or rotate roles and responsibilities of one or more position can be a great way for employee development. This way they can learn and develop different skills while working with the company. In addition to this, coaching and mentoring can also be a great opportunity for PwC to train its employees and arm them with certain necessary skills that could result in improvement in quality of work, communication, and problem-solving. During coaching and mentoring, PwC provide direct access to the e-learning of various topics including software training, project management, and technical skill. In addition to this, the organisation also provide certain reimbursement for the workers to go and learn some professional certificate course externally.

To measure the success of aforementioned performance-related initiative, the company can collect and analyse the employee retention data. It has been seen that high turnover is the major concern of the organisation that can cost organisation a lot of resources. With some performance improvisation efforts taken up by the organisation, employees will feel empowered and carry out task efficiently and effectively (Wheeler, 2013). This would increase their satisfaction and ultimately, the employee retention rate increases.

Culture-related initiatives

The management of PwC believes that culture is as important as and all of them should be well synced. A healthy and competitive organisational culture enables, enhances, and energises human behaviourwhen it is utilised in wise manner. In addition to this, it can sustain and accelerate business results (Sethi& Stubbings, 2015). PwC understands that a poor organisational culture can lead to underperformance and unachieved organisational goals. The reason why PwC emphasises on developing a healthy culture is because it can help in achieving the competitive advantage. It can be a secret weapon for making complex things happened.

PwC harness a competitive and growth-centric culture by emphasising on formulating and setting behavioural norms, promoting long-standing beliefs and attitudes.These are necessary to change how employee think, feel, and believe that shape their daily behaviour (Kumar and Pansari, 2016). The behavioural norms can be formal or informal guidelines of code of conduct that are necessary for conformity to team activities. These promote a healthy team environment and establishes a teamwork culture. The predictability of a particular behaviourmay result in an increased degree of cohesiveness within a team (Sturrock, 2012). It can be helpful in reducing the chaos, conflict, and ambiguity.

To measure the success of the culture-related initiative which in this case is setting up the behavioural norms within an organisation. This can be measured by quantitative research in which a survey is taken from the employee in which questions regarding the changes they have experienced in themselves while working as a team and how they can be benefitted by it will be asked (Parmenter, 2015). The success factor is establishment of teamwork culture in the environment by making use of behavioural norms.

Engagement-related initiatives

The management of the PwC believes that an engaged employee provide and additional fifty seven per cent effort to the company. The employee engagement depends on HR strategies and their relationships with the colleagues. They require a feeling of belongingness in the working environment. In order to make sure that organisation attracts, engage, & keep its best talent retained for a longer duration, it is necessary to structure the company with appropriate capabilities and leadership to implement the right HR strategies. For employee engagement, the organisation needs to figure out the effective strategies that result in employee’s growth and development (Bohrahl, 2014). In addition to this, the company should provide some support to itsmanagers also to understand their subordinate’s issues and manage them.

PwC applies the ‘talent management’ approach in order to keep its employee engaged. In this HR initiative, it develops strategies that makes sure that right talent is assigned the right role. The manager benchmarks, aligns, and fosters the maturity of the various talent management practices and their outcomes. Furthermore, the management assesses various capabilities, skills, and trends that result in high performance. Last but not the least, the HR manager establishes clear responsibilities and strategic goals for succession planning. However, in order to keep a note of the success of the aforementioned talent management approaches, there are certain success factors that need to be taken care of as per the “Integrated Theory of Employee Engagement”. These include internal consistency, alignment with strategy, management involvement, and cultural embeddedness (Albrecht, et.al, 2015). According to the theory, levels of employee engagement vary with different psychological factors (safety at work, meaningfulness at work, and availability of time). PwC has also given some ways to implement its TM strategies for employee engagement. The first and foremost is to embed organisational values and vision. Give necessary coaching and support to the leaders to improvise their decision-making skills. Influence employees and shape their behaviour for effective business outcomes, such as improved sales, customer centricity, compliance, collaboration, performance and productivity.

To support employee engagement and TM strategies, PwC emphasises on assessing and measuring the current organisational culture. It provides behavioural observations, simulations, and risk & safety culture assessments. The success factor to measure the effectiveness of the talent management approach as a strategy to promote employee engagement is to measure the employee satisfaction level through face-to-face interviews or feedback (Bohrahl, 2014).

Recommendations

• While implementing job rotation, PwC should first decide the end goals. It can different for different employee. Some might want the promotion while other might be looking it as a way to avoid boredom (Cole, et.al, 2012). For either of them, the job rotation plan will differ. In addition to this, the planning will be carefully done by keeping in mind the skills that are needed to be developed at each stage of the job rotation.
• To establish and promote the organisational behavioural norms for a healthy teamwork culture, PwC should first determine the group norms and make a list of them. All this can be done after a thorough discussion. The main focus while formulating the group norms should be given to conflict resolution and management, open communication, responsibility sharing, and member participation. This way the culture-related initiative can be a great success for a longer duration.
• The organisation should understand that talent management strategy is directly linked to employee engagement. It should appreciate employees while they are putting their talent in carrying out organisational operations, projects, and assignments. It has been seen that greater the appreciation, higher the one’s commitment to carry out task with more zeal and enthusiasm. Such employees are ready to walk an extra mile for their company. They keep seeking opportunities to grow and develop themselves for the achievement of personal as well as organisational goals. Company need not to put extra effort on them as they are self-learners.

Conclusion

Here, three crucial organisational factors have been elaborated in context of PwC Australia, namely employee’s performance, culture, and employee engagement. Along with this, the success factors to measure each one of them were outlined. The report ended with some recommendations that should be considered by PwC while implementing the strategies for aforementioned factors.

References

• Albrecht, S. L., Bakker, A. B., Gruman, J. A., Macey, W. H., & Saks, A. M. 2015. Employee engagement, human resource management practices and competitive advantage: An integrated approach.  Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance,  2(1), pp. 7-35.
• Bohrahl, .T(2014).[Online] Accessed on: Nov 30, 2018Retrieved from https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/Strategyand-Perspective-on-Organizational-Culture.pdf
• Cole, M. S., Walter, F., Bedeian, A. G., & O’Boyle, E. H. 2012. Job burnout and employee engagement: A meta-analytic examination of construct proliferation.  Journal of management,  38(5), pp. 1550-1581.
• Kumar, V. and Pansari, A., 2016. Competitive advantage through engagement.  Journal of Marketing Research,  53(4), pp.497-514.
• Parmenter, D., 2015.  Key performance indicators: developing, implementing, and using winning KPIs. John Wiley & Sons.
• Seddon, N. (2018).[Online] Accessed on: Nov 30, 2018 People and Organisation. Retrieved from https://www.pwc.com.au/people.html
• Sethi, B., & Stubbings, C. (2015). [Online] Accessed on: Nov 30, 2018 Retrieved from https://www.pwc.com.au/publications/pdf/pwc-preparing-for-tomorrows-workforce.pdf
• Sturrock, J. (2012). HR transformation.[Online] Accessed on: Nov 30, 2018 Retrieved from https://www.pwc.com.au/people/hr-transformation.html
• Wheeler, P. (2013).[Online] Accessed on: Nov 30, 2018 Transform human capital. Retrieved from https://www.pwc.com.au/consulting/human-capital-hr.html