Unit 35 Developing Individuals, Teams and Organisations Assignment Sample

Unit 35 Developing Individuals, Teams and Organisations Assignments

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The report details out different aspects of developing individuals, organisations, and the teams associated with them. It discussed the importance of HR in managing the business operations was discussed. In addition to this, the report focuses on the skills, experience, and personality traits required in an HR manager. An analysis of personal skills to identify apt skills and knowledge for preparing a professional development plan have been done. Moreover, an analysis of the factors that are needed for implementing and evaluating sustainable business performance has been done. Before concluding the report, the knowledge to implementing the HPW and improvising the employee engagement have been discussed with context to Whirlpool.

LO1- Analyse employee knowledge, skills and behaviours required by HR professionals

P1) Determine appropriate and professional knowledge, skills and behaviours that are required by HR professionals

In the case of Whirlpool, the HR professionals are responsible for various tasks’ execution, attempting and developing strategic and organizational changes to sustain the company by restructuring the organisational operations. The company is in the crisis state and facing numerous competitive and technological challenges. HR managers structure the team according to the skills, experiences, and performance. This way a team can perform work in a faster, efficient, and effective way. It also increases the productivity and morale of the workers.

For the high-performance of the organisation, the HR managers aim at hiring and retaining star performers. For the selection purposes, the HR managers ensure that two individuals with complementary skills should be put together in a team (Albrecht, et.al, 2015).

Whirlpool is bringing a transformation in the organisational structure to promote the HPW processes in the functioning of the organisation. Therefore, the HR managers have to be decisive thinker. They should be capable of analysing and understanding information in a wink of an eye. They must be able to arrive at a common point of view quickly. They should be skilled influencer at all levels of organisation. HR should work collaboratively with colleagues, clients, teams, and departments within or beyond the organisational reach. They should understand that they are role model to their subordinates. Therefore, they should practice before they preach. They should be able to act inclusively and focus on providing the personal judgement in every condition. They must have a questioning and inspecting attitude along with the willingness to gain knowledge.

Skills and knowledge required in the candidate by HR at Whirlpool are given below:-

P2) Analyse a completed personal skills audit to identify appropriate knowledge, skills and behaviours and develop a professional development plan for a given job role

A personal development plan gives a framework that helps the employees in determining the areas of their strengths and weaknesses. This assists them to optimise their existing capabilities and skill set. In other words, it outlines a set of objectives and goals, thereby helping them in improvising their performance. It helps the businesses in alleviating a large amount of time from being wasted on monitoring and controlling the employee’s performance and development. Implementing an effective PDP can have many benefits for the businesses.

• PDP makes the objectives of businesses visible and employees can notice their impact within organisational objectives.
• It also help in making employees realise the implications of missing out the individual goals on the organisation.

Many a time it occurs that HR managers organise seminars and personnel training for skill development of the employee. This consists of identification of knowledge, skills, and behaviour of employees in the organisation. The need for personal skills audit is to identify the characteristics of the individuals and their performances that reflects the gap in the real and desired levels (Albrecht, et.al, 2015). The evaluated gap can be curbed through learning and development methods. Many companies make use of competency framework to identify the competitiveness and other crucial skills to fulfil the requirements of their role.

A professional development plans is provided for better understanding.

D1) Produce a detailed and coherent professional development plan that appropriately sets out learning goals and training in relation to the learning cycle to achieve sustainable business performance objectives

The purpose of the professional development plan is to make the employee realise where he/she stands in reference to the others. Also, it makes the workers aware of their contribution in the development of the organisational strategies and achieving the organisational goals. The learning cycle also focuses on sustainability point of view. The continuous learning helps the Whirlpool in increasing its productivity, improvising the team coordination, improving the employee retention rates, and making the employees happier than ever. Organisational learning is a process in which the main emphasis is paid on creation and transition of knowledge within the organisation as a whole. In this constraint, it is assumed that with the time, the company develops their standards and this experience is then further utilised to create the required knowledge.

PDP for HR employee

M1) Provide a detailed professional skills audit that demonstrates evidence of personal reflection and evaluation

Professional skills are defined as the combination of human, technical, and conceptual skills. They are necessary to communicate within the hierarchical order of the organisation. The skills needed vary with the type of industry. In the given scenario of Whirlpool, the company has to deal with people from different race and country. In addition to this, the clients are national and international. Therefore, the HR plays a significant role in here. The communication skills are quintessential as it is required to convey the management decisions and ideas and develop other technical skills. HRs are required to manage national as well international clients and employees. So they should be able to manage employee development programs. Time management is very complicated task and not everyone is best at managing it, so HRs should have a top-notch time management skills for scheduling meetings. In addition to this, organisations have a large data about clients and employee. This can only be managed by using important tools like MS office. Therefore, one should have excellent MS office skills for analysing the data.

They are essential to identify the crucial opportunities in order to improve the efficiency. This can be done by boosting worker’s zeal and performance. Another reason for developing the professional skills is that they will help in earning the respect within and beyond the organisational reach (Argote, 2012). Commanding respect from the subordinates is quite a difficult task and require blood, sweat, and tear from the individuals. In order to improve the professional skills, the managers can organise training sessions, seminars, and workshops that will make them technologically sound.

LO2 - Analyse the factors to be considered when implementing and evaluating inclusive learning and development to drive sustainable business performance

P3) Analyse the differences between organisational and individual learning, training and development

In the views of Kolb (2014), the learning, development and training which have been stated above are the essential elements of the inclusive learning. In the concept of inclusive learning, the main focus is kept on creation of such an atmosphere where all the participants in the learning process are comfortable in discussing their problems, management issues and ideas along with general question-raising. The main essence of the learning is that the learning style of each and every person is different in nature which is required to be analysed. It should also be noted that each and every employee tends to learn at their own pace (Kolb, 2014). It has been analysed that Whirlpool is a self-learning organisation as the company identifies its external environment and adapts itself accordingly. The main role in this is played by the organisational structure of the company which is flexible in nature.

It should be noted that the learning culture in the Whirlpool also includes the conventional practices and processes. These conventional practices such as motivational learning, classroom sessions, induction training etc. help the employees to increase their competency and knowledge. The process of learning and development in the company begins with the leaders of the company as they are the ones that initiate the learning and development activities in the company.

P4) Analyse the need for continuous learning and professional development to drive sustainable business performance

The continuous learning process is beneficial for both organisations and employees in order to thrive in the modern market place. Many companies are even providing financial assistance in order to educate their worker about the current technological reforms. Scholarships and stipends are being provided in order to promote the professional development. From the sustainability point of view, continuous learning helps the Whirlpool in increasing its productivity, improvising the team coordination, improving the employee retention rates, and making the employees happier than ever. In addition to this, many research work have reported that the continuous learning sessions lead to increase in loyalty among the employees. Workers feel that the management and their bosses care about them rather than focusing on just increasing the revenue of the organisation. Also, it has been found that companies that aims at providing continuous learning process are reaping the long-term profits. Every learning organisation can influence the business and employees success rate.

M2) Apply learning cycle theories to analyse the importance of implementing continuous professional development

In 1974, Kolb gave a learning cycle theory that argues that learning should be integrated with each organisational process. It also says that each stage should be mutually supportive and should feed in the next stage. However, for learning to effective, learners have to run all four stages of the Kolb’s model. Kolb argues that different employees have their unique style of learning and they are further influenced by factors, such as social, educational, environment, experiences, or psychological structure of the employee. Whatever the choice of learning style, everyone require an external stimulus for all types of learning styles.

Managers must first critically evaluate the impact of each stage of learning in order to develop some extra learning opportunities for the employees working at Whirlpool. The company is in the crisis state, therefore it has a lot to provide as learning experience to its workers.

Honey and Mumford Learning Style

This model identified four unique learning style, such as Activist, Theorist, Pragmatist, and Reflector. All of these are learning approaches that are naturally opted by the individuals.

Activist: These people learn things by doing. They enjoy involving in the task.

Theorist: These learners determine the logic behind the task to be performed.

Pragmatist: These people tries to figure out how learning can be brought into practical use.

Reflector: They believe in learning by observing things and determining what can happen from sidelines.

LO3 - Apply knowledge and understanding to the ways in which high-performance working (HPW) contributes to employee engagement and competitive advantage

P5) Demonstrate understanding of how HPW contributes to employee engagement and competitive advantage within a specific organisational situation

The High Performance Work System is developed to improvise the productivity of employees and their effectiveness as well. In addition to this, the implementation of HPW leads to cost reduction and helps the Whirlpool in the long run. HPW has a huge impact on the job engagement, organisational identity, creativity, and employee voice. Absence of high performance systems in organisation leads to creation of performance obstruction, creativity, proactive behaviour, communication, etc. By implementing the HPW practices in the business functioning, Whirlpool is moving towards a flatter hierarchical structure. People will start to coordinate and work as a team rather than individuals (Aarons, et.al, 2014). Moreover, HPW leads to higher autonomy in the working environment, thereby making things favourable for every employee.

Advantages of HPW

• It establishes an overall leadership throughout the company in order to pace up the momentum.
• It helps in decentralisation of the decision-making process to constantly re-evaluate the decision at all levels.
• Support the existing systems and culture of Whirlpool by implementing performance operations and personnel management tasks.
• HPW helps in building trust based relationships in both internal and external environment.
• HPW also provides a vision for the whole organisation which focuses on increasing the consumer value by inducing the uniqueness in the product or services.

M3) Analyse the benefits of applying HPW with justifications to a specific organisational situation

In many studies, it has been found that implementation of the HPW is triggered by economic imperatives. Also, the adaptation of the performance management measures is more in high profit-earning firms. Those organisations where exist the dynamic environment usually shift risks on workers via variable compensation systems. Since Whirlpool has adopted a differentiation strategy instead of cost leadership strategy, it is more likely to implement the HPW practices within the organisation. The benefits of making Whirlpool a HPW organisation are many that are discussed in this section.

• It directs the HR practices to motivate employees, skill development, and optimising the resources.
• Improves the employee relations with the organisation by building trust, bringing loyalty, and developing the identity.
• It consists of some high involvement tasks that focuses on creating various opportunities for making the employee engage.
• It improvise the existing practices and culture in Whirlpool

LO4 - Evaluate ways in which performance management, collaborative working and effective communication can support high-performance culture and commitment

P6) Evaluate different approaches to performance management (e.g. collaborative working), and demonstrate with specific examples how they can support high-performance culture and commitment

In the case of Whirlpool, the performance system is crucial for ensuring fairness, tracking the current trends, and meeting the legislative criteria. It is a well-known fact that high performance does not rely on the process, but depends on the encouraging the high-performance environment and building up some psychological conditions that keep motivating the employees to perform at their potential. There are numerous approaches to evaluate the performance of the employees, each of them have their advantages and disadvantages (Cummings and Worley, 2014). Choosing an approach depends on the type of the strategic goals. Performance management helps in taking administrative decisions on the aspects, such as salary appraisals, layoffs, terminations, etc. The types of approaches are discussed below:-

• Comparative Approach: In this approach the performance of one employee is compared to that of others. The ranking is prepared based on the rating provided to the workers within a work groups. Ranking are of 2 types: Simple ranking and alternative ranking (Armstrong and Taylor, 2014).
• Attribute Approach: In this approach, the characteristics and traits of employees are directed towards the organisational success. The traits of an individual that are evaluated are leadership, initiative, and competitiveness.

• Behavioural Approach: This is the conventional method of measuring the performance of employees. It comprises a chain of vertical scales to measure various aspects of job. One of such type is Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) that consists of 5 to 10 vertical scales.

• Results Approach: It based on a straight-forward theme in which company measure the employees’ performance based on some rating. The ratings are given after assessing an employee on four perspectives:- 1) Learning and growth 2) Internal and operations 3) Customer 4) Financial

• Quality Approach: This approach focuses on assessment of both system factors and workers in order to measure the performance. In addition, the management and the workers sit together to resolve any performance related issues. It incorporates both external and internal consumers in defining the standards and performance measurement.

In the Whirlpool case, the organisational structure is being restructure in order to emphasise the performance measurement. The main aspects to be covered under performance measurement are:

• Mutual Respect and Solidarity.
• Shared Commitment to the Company Vision and Extraordinary Goals,
• Transparent Communication,
• Shared Accountability for Results,
• Constructive Conflict,

M4) Critically evaluate the different approaches and make judgements on how effective they can be to support high-performance culture and commitment.

In context of Whirlpool, the performance management helps the managers and employees to coordinate and plan the work together, monitor, and review workers’ overall performance. Performance managements approaches are used in order to set business objectives, providing training and coaching, and getting feedback to make sure that employees are working up to their potentials.

The comparative approach can assist in setting up the priorities in case of conflicting demands. On the other hand, if priorities are already clear, then this method cannot be used. The behaviour method targets the behavioural characteristics of employees but developing this method is difficult. The attribute method analyse the capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses and it focuses on future goals instead of past. The only problem is that it emphasises short-term goals only.

D2) Provide valid synthesis of knowledge and information resulting in appropriate judgements on how HPW and mechanisms used to support HPW lead to improved employee engagement, commitment and competitive advantage.

In the following case of Whirlpool, the interrelationship between HPWS and organisational factors, such as proactive behaviour of employee and organisational identity elucidates the significance of HPWS in an organisation. Many studies have shown that there is a crucial relationship between HPW and job engagement. It helps in motivating the employees and establishes an appraisal system for them. HPW plays a significant role in improving the level of creativity, hence inducing the element of innovation in the business functioning. In addition to this, the improved creativity helps in maintaining the quality standards (Aarons, et.al, 2014).

On the other hand, implementing HPW in operational management and personnel development is time consuming. Managers have to provide an overall feedback to each employee and this eats up a large amount of time. Many employee may not like the implementation of HPW. This may lead to discouragement among the staff. Even if HPW is a structured and well-oriented process, it can have biases too. Manager who access the performance management may face such discrepancies.

Conclusion

In the course of this report, the importance of HR in managing the business operations was discussed. In addition to this, the skills, experience, and personality traits required in an HR manager had been detailed out in here. An analysis of personal skills to identify apt skills and knowledge for preparing a professional development plan was done. Moreover, the factors that are needed for implementing and evaluating sustainable business performance had been analysed in brief. Later part of the report, discussed the knowledge to implementing the HPW and improvising the employee engagement.

References

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