Are your managers locked into hr management practices or intiatives that sounded good or seemed to work well in other organisations but just do not produce tangible results in your organisation?   Despite managers’ time and effort, you do not see progress towards achieving your service or business goals.  Common causes are:

• those practices are not suited to your organisation’s context;
• hr initiatives are taking managers’ focus away from operational issues;
• some hr practices are pulling in different directions and compouding the situation.

HR Practices May Focus on the Wrong End

There are many aspects to managing people which require effective processes and decisions and taking the occasional risk.
Yes risk taking is required in hr management to ensure that the processes and actions help to balance the needs of the individual and the organisation.

You can have the ‘required’ strategies and processes but are they focusing individuals and teams on the right goals, the key steps and behaviours to deliver the ends required?   Can you see improvements and the way in which those initiatives reinforce key goals and objectives?

The Effectiveness of HR Practices Decays Over Time

Conditions within an organisation are changing constantly and that means hr management practices decay in the sense that they no longer produce the desired outcomes.   Examples are:

• Reward schemes continue to legitimise actions that are no longer appropriate or helpful;
• Suitable applicants are glossed over by out of date or ‘safe’ selection criteria [1];
• Pay structures become distorted by market pressures or roles that have to be shoe horned into the existing method of evaluating jobs;
• Terms of employment do not continue to reflect the nature of the organisation and so leave managers exposed when incidence arise.

Because hr management aspects are intertwined it can be difficult to know where to start without creating more problems.

One way is to step back for half an hour and assess whether you could save time and money and improve the outcomes by changing the emphasis of what is being done or what aspects need to be pruned back.

Hallmarks of Effective HR Management Practices

To help you to carry out such an assessment, we now provide a free, easy to use tool.   This helps to focus your attention on various aspects of hr management which we have found, from both managerial and consulting experience, are key aspects that need to be reviewed to ensure that your people, at all levels, are working to the appropriate end results and in a way that will bring benefits to your service or business.

You can download a copy of the assessment by visiting the following page on our main website – Hallmarks of Effective HR Management.

If you have queries about completing your assessment or the issues raised, feel free to give us a call.

Sources

Our blog contains a range of articles on topices that interest managers and suggested alternative options – this is a link to our HR Management Dimensions blog.

[1]  See an earlier blog article – Exposure v Experience – the better way to identify capable, adaptable staff

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