Hrm Case

According to Fortune magazine's and The Sunday Times' surveys on great companies to work for, in 2004 and 2003 respectively, highly motivated people contribute to highly satisfied customers and to successful business performance (Kermally, S 2004).

Workflex is a small and medium size enterprise whose competitive advantage is its unique turnaround of labour supply to the tourism industry. Adopting Ansoff's growth matrix, its expansion strategies include market penetration and development with its existing products and developing new products for its existing markets.

Understanding Workflex's internal labour market is the starting point as Workflex's workforce is the outcome of the flows and effectiveness with which they are managed. Its Human Resource (HR) policies and practices need to be congruent to sustain Workflex's competitive advantage.

In view of Workflex's expansions plan, this report outlines the need to engage employees and practise industrial relations where unionizing Workflex would lead to a pool of ready workers. A performance management procedure of ranking and performance review is recommended to ensure fairness and align employee performance to management's objectives. Besides paying wages, an appropriate compensation and benefit system for the rank and files, part-time workers, managerial and administrative employee is recommended to reward high performers and motivate employee, while positioning Workflex to be the choice employer.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 5

2. Key Challenges 5

3. HR Strategy 5

4. Industrial Relation Practices 6

5. Performance Management 7

5.1 Performance Procedure 7

5.2 Forced Distribution 8

5.3 Promotion Criteria and Guidelines 8

5.4 Timelines 9

6. Compensation System 9

6.1 Skill-based Compensation for Rank & File 10

6.2 Merit Pay Compensation for Managerial & Adminstrative employee 11

6.3 Part-time Workers 11

6.4 Other Employee Benefits 11

7. Recommendations 12

7.1 Comprehensive Compensation and Benefits Scheme 12

7.2 Fostering Relationship 12

7.3 Human Resources Information System (HRIS) 13

7.4 Training and Development 13

7.5 Become a Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) Approved Training Organisation 13

8. Conclusion 13

9. References 15

10. Performance Rating - Annex A 16

11. Employees Ranking - Annex B 16

1. Introduction

Workflex is a small and medium size enterprise that was established since 1992. Its core business is to provide labour to the thriving tourism and hospital industry among, several hundreds of accommodation venues for tourists.

Its key competitive advantage is the immediate turn-around of providing the required labour upon customer's request. This has relieved their customers of administrative costs and unexpected employee unavailability.

Workflex has several expansion strategies to expand into the general industrial/commercial operations of organizations that need regular housekeeping and/or ground maintenance, provision of new consulting services on design of improved cleaning and maintenance practices, offer major repairs and renovations, and tree looping, and pest control services.

To prepare for this report, research was conducted amongst HR academic literature, trade magazines, the Ministry of Manpower and the Singapore Workforce Development Agency websites.

2. Key Challenges

Workflex adopts an organic structure with 12 permanent employee (full time) in management and administration, 70 workers permanent employee (field work) and 20 workers permanent part-timers. There is no inventory on the types of skills its employees possess.

It faces difficulty maintaining an up-to-date registrar of some 160 causal labour while there is no wage equity and remuneration system for a wide-range of job categories.

3. HR Strategy

Strategic management of Human Resource Management is critical to long-term business success (Poole, M and Jenkins, G 1996) to sustain Workflex's competitive advantage.

Advocating Sun Tzu War and Management of a thorough understanding of oneself and its enemies (Chow et al, 1996), Workflex would need an overview of its employees' skills inventory before embarking on any expansion plan.

A skills inventory, qualitative in nature, helps to evaluate the internal supply of labour and consolidate basic information on all employees. A job analysis using the employee-oriented or behavior approach focuses on how the job is done, the job requirements, in terms of formal qualifications, knowledge, skills and abilities and personal characteristics. Appropriate methods of data collection from observation, interviews, employee recording, critical incidents and recorders could be utilized. Further, questionnaires will be utilized for team leads and above.

Human Resource (HR) planning is required to ensure that the right people are placed in the right place, in the right jobs and at the right time.

To provide operational flexibility with the desire of cross-training employee, the skills inventories will be compared to the Singapore Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) system, Environmental Cleaning and Landscape competencies maps to highlight gaps in Workflex's training requirements (Singapore Workforce Development Agency).

Among the business objectives that Workflex had indicated, I would recommend (Maier, R 2007) to focus on quick wins such as developing higher value-adding service of its competitive advantage and market penetration.

Three HR initiatives are recommended to align to Workflex's business objectives: