Human Resource Management Final Exam
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Human Resource Management Final Exam
Employee Training, Development and Orientation
There are three approaches towards the preparation of employees for success in their respective workplaces, and they include orientation, training, and development. Employee orientation is the first step of human resource activity, and it involves the introduction of new employees in an organization. With orientation, all new employees are familiarized to the organization with relation to the organization’s vision, mission, as well as, objectives. Employee training refers to an organization’s planned effort aimed at ensuring that employees learn their respective duties and responsibilities. Training is necessary for the assurance of work competency, which in turn translates to excellent performance by employees. Development, on the other hand, refers to an organization’s planned effort aimed at assuring growth and development of employees in the work place. In essence, development emphasizes the need for employee growth through a sequence of progressive changes with relation to duties and responsibilities.
Alternate Work Arrangements
Alternative work arrangements are a recent trend in most organizations’ human resource activities. Also referred to as flexible work arrangements, alternative work arrangements, refer to employee working schedules that are different from the normal eight-to-five, five-days-a-week working schedules that most organizations utilize. With the provision of alternate work arrangements, organizations allow their employees to choose a work schedule that favors their personal needs. There exist three main types of alternate work arrangements including staggered shifts, flextime, and compressed workweek. Staggered shifts are a type of alternate work arrangements that is aimed at reducing the number of employees arriving and leaving a workstation at a particular time. Flextime, on the other hand, is a type of alternate work arrangement whereby employees are allowed flexibility from their routine time of reporting. Instead of coming in at 8 am and leaving and 5pm, employees can be allowed to check in earlier or later but still work for the expected eight hours. The last type of alternate work arrangement is compressed workweek, whereby employees work fewer but longer days, as opposed to, the normal days in a week.
Compensation Costs
Fixed compensation costs refer to the cash and non-cash compensations that organizations grant their employees. Examples of these include basic salaries, allowances and additional cash reward compensations. Variable compensation costs refer to compensation granted to employees based on their qualifications, and renditions of services to the organization. Most organizations prefer variable compensation plans because they reduce cost per unit of output and increase the quality and quantity of output by employees.
Health and Safety
Health and safety in the workplace has increasingly received attention with relation to human resource management. The reasons for this is because employee health and safety has a direct impact on the success of the organization. Not only does it affect productivity, health and safety in the workplace also carries financial implications. Accordingly, current health and safety organizations have focused their activities on the health and safety right of employees during their course of duty. Three specific areas that have been of interest with regards to employee health and safety include hazards, risks and their outcomes. For that reason employers are focusing their activities on the reduction and control of these risks.
Case Study
CCI’s initial incentive system was a merit based incentive system, which saw the division of employees into teams who competed against each other for merit. Accordingly, the different teams that CCI employed focused more on achieving merit for their performance instead of the attainment of organizational goals. For that reason, the teams failed because they concentrated more on competing and gaining merit instead of performing their duties towards the fulfillment of organizational goals. However, by changing their incentive focus to goal-oriented efforts, open communication systems and extensive training, CCI managed to empower their employees to work towards organizational objectives. This is because these three plan strategy pushed employees to focus on the goals of the organization through proper training and the emphasis of overall organizational team work. With this, CCI employees stopped thinking of themselves as separate teams and instead as one organizational team.
