Human resource Management

HR MANAGEMENT

16.4.18

Presentation

HR for Antonelli. HR has to translate business orientation or strategy in what people can/have to do/could

realize in the company. An hr person is a business person in the end, and its business is people, people

connected to what the company has to reach. People must adapt to one company in the struggle to reach

the firm objectives. Hr person defines, finds, trains the right talents for the firm. The best hr is the hr that

understands very well the business and its needs.

Two souls of HR: training, talent scouting… but also a tougher one, more administrative (contracting, trade

unions, firing…). Also, relationship and communication are fundamental. It’s one of the function with most

stakeholders within a firm.

Daniele Sacco, HR and organisation director of Mondadori.

32 ys of experience. Started in HP. What hr is depends partly in your own beliefs but also by the company

values; they have to be aligned. “HP-way”: if you put people in the condition of doing a good job, he or she

will do a good job. Total trust in people. Sacco realised his job was helping people doing their job. There’s a

space between the company culture and your interpretation, especially when you are a decision maker.

Problem in mixing company culture and country culture.

Values: how they are built and how they are deployed. Companies with strong culture not necessarily have

a list of values.

All the functions of HR are interconnected. 17.4.18

The HR value & the HR function

The value of hr practices. we refer to it when we talk about the culture. In general terms the organisational

structure, which is the set of relationship and authority between all the people and units within the

organisation. Organisational chart is important because is the tangible representation of who does what

and who’s the boss of whom (who should lead who), responsibility and what a boss can ask to others. Org

culture is much more intangible; sometimes also tangible, e.g. organisational artefacts tell us about the

culture of an organisation (office lay out in Google or the building of UCSC). Hr management isn’t just how

the org should be but it makes the org work.

This three elements (org structure, org culture, HR mgt) have an impact on behaviours and performance of

individuals but also of teams, and eventually, the organisational performance (what value the organisation

is able to deliver).

Strategy can be imitated, but what matters is the way you implement it, and implementing it effectively

depends on how you manage people. Depends on individuals/teams’ behaviours.

Why is HRM important for all managers? All people in the org want that people that are working with them

are fit with their kind of job. It is going to improve the organisational climate, facilitating the work of all the

colleagues, performing their tasks at their best. Everyone, even top mgt, want a low turnover, so to

minimise the costs of hiring and firing people and to let them have the time to develop competences etc.

Line managers do have hr responsibilities. Some of the most important duties are performing, sometimes

without even knowing:

- Placing the right person in the right job

- Orientation: starting new employees in the organisation

- Training

- Improving the performance of each person

- Fostering cooperation and smooth working relationship

- Interpreting the company’s policies and procedures

- Controlling labour costs

- Developing the abilities of each person

- …

Organisation chart.

Graphical representation of the structure. It tells how activities are allocated to org units (boxes) and what

are the reporting relationship among units (lines), chain of command.

Above all (unit X there’s CEO or board of directors); in hierarchical terms, the most powerful level. Unit A,

B, C the way the work is subdivide between them depends: functional, divisional or business units.

Not much information about horizontal communication and coordination among units. To know them you

must observe actual behaviours and relationships among people working within an org, that may depend

on informal relationships as well.

No information on the lateral, non-authoritative relationships. Staff lines that support the unit. It’s not

actually that they not depend on the unit, but they don’t have an hierarchical relationship with the unit, it’s

more of support, “advisor”.

Staff units are out of the hierarchical line.

Hr activities: staffing.

Ensures the right number of employees within the organisation; the right skills; matching the right job with

the right time.

Job design and analysis, human resources planning, recruitment and selection are constant activities,

meaning that they need to be carried out constantly, ongoing activities.

Job analysis.

Systematic process of determining skills, duties, knowledge required for performing hobs in an org.

It impact all activities of HRM.

The organisational chart helps you very much. Sometimes, for each and every firm conventions of the way

the org chart are represented are very tailored, they change from case to case.

HR PLANNING.

Trying to do forecasts. Matching internal and external supply of people by anticipating job openings over a

specified period of time. The goal is to set the stage for recruitment and other hr actions.

RECRUTIMENT AND SELECTION attracting individual to apply for jobs.

TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT.

- Train: providing employees with the knowledge and skills needed for their present jobs.

- Development: offering learning that goes beyond the present job requirements.

➔ Long-term focus for development. Some competences (cfr competences model) are to be

developed overtime; i.e. soft skills.

CAREER PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT.

Ongoing process trying to understand what each person is seeking in his/her career. Set goals for

individual’s career and identifies means to achieve them.

Career development: ensures to have the right people at the right moment; a pipeline of people with

proper qualification and experience. People already formed and familiar with the culture, developed inside

your firm that you may need, for instance, to send abroad. I know the head of division is retiring in three

years and I start from today to seek among the people already in my firm that could fit the role and the

training they’d need.

APPRISAL AND COMPENSATION.

Appraisal is the forma system of review and evaluation at individual and team.

Compensation: all rewards that individuals receive as a result of their employment.

Case.

Shared responsibility between line and staff mngrs.

Company growing a lot. Problem of involvement of line managers in the process of hiring people. Sharma

met the team leaders regarding the performance appraisal process.

The recruiting had a three steps process, cv, a test and then a personal interview. Every single stage was

performed by Sharma.

When you have rapid growth you need specialists, delegating hr functions to a hr manager that you didn’t

have before. (ans. 1)

2. problem of not defining roles and responsibility of the hr department. A better involvement, cooperation

and coordination of line managers and hr manager is the solution. Sharma based his job just on general

ideas of the needs of the line managers with the employees. Also the performance measurement system

wasn’t the result of cooperation between the two.

3. the CEO is held responsible of solving the conflict between line and staff line, saying where the truth lays

or finding a compromise between the two positions.

Summurising.

- People management activities are structurally shared between the line managers and the hr

specialists. The hr specialist is in charge of one of the hr activities (recruitment, compensations and

benefits…)

- The key point is to understand how to build a balance in this relationship:

o If hr tasks are dominated by hr specialists, sometimes business priorities may suffer:

technically the hr process done by Sharma was perfect (he delivered what he was expected

to and on time), but eventually it wasn’t agreed with the others, it wasn’t shared.

o If tasks are too much delegated without the appropriate support, hr policies could be

deployed in an ineffective way or be inconsistent across the organisation.

Line managers have a fundamental role in bringing hr practices into life and they have a strong impact on

individual and business performance as well.

Usually, recruitment, selection and training are considered shared, while the others’ activities are either

solely managed by line managers or by hr functions.

The balance between hr functions and line managers is hard.

- Line managers lack of skills. Lack of motivation into getting envolved. Overload of work. Lack of

consistency across hr practices and decisions.

- Hr specialists; need to build trust between line managers and hr specialists; the line managers are

the ones that are actually going to use the resources selected by hr. sometimes the authority is

delegated but the budget isn’t. 23.4.18

Flexible work arrangements

Generation gap creating a big problem in companies: traditional management isn’t able to understand nor

to manage needs of new generations.

Motivation. It’s personal; only achievable when the management and the HR dep work are connected to

the individual’s needs. Sometimes you need to sacrifice something to be motivated in the future.

We’ll now cover the topic of flexibility on a contractual pov.

MODEL: HR IDENTITY (Dave Ulrich)

- Vertical: OPERATIONAL FOCUS:

o short-term [00:19:00]

o long-term: reasoning about investments needed;

skills the company is going to need; what to

outsource. Every decision must be compared to the

effect it could have in the future.

- Horizontal: ORIENTATION

o PROCESS: process to guarantee equity; provide

rules

o PEOPLE: focus on people culture, capabilities… differences are an advantage.

All four of the configuration are good, depending on the situation. During the day you find yourself in

different situations that require all of the four aspects.

- ADMINISTRATIVE: the role of HR is an administrative one. Wages, contract, some aspects of

hiring/firing… routine jobs

- EMPLOYEE CHAMPION: HR deeply understands people;

- CHANGE AGENT: long term and strategic focus and attention to people. When some companies

need to change strategy for business reasons: when you change strategy, you have to change

people’s culture. Change management is hard and costly; HR is the function that has to drive the

change.

CHANGE MODEL

- COMPLEXITY

- TIME: usually the time is mandatory

The easiest change that requires the least time is a change in

TECHNICAL SKILLS (in the same field: e.g., financial dep

required to learn new financial techniques).

ATTITUDE TO THE CHANGE. The believes in change.

Moving from attitude to INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOUR. Moving

from what I believe to what I do.

GROUP/TEAM BEHAVIOURS. Changing behaviour of a group of individual is harder than changing a single

person’s.

CULTURE Is the most difficult. It is very complex and request the most time.

Management means to anticipating problems. Reducing time required to face complexity.

- BUSINESS/STATEGIC PARTNER: do all the processes to support the business. It isn’t a servant, it’s a

mutual agreement.

Reasons for growth in flexibility

- Greater need for capital utilisation – economic crisis

- Women (and other categories) participation to the labour market

- Ageing: how to keep up productivity with people ageing

- Employer branding issues: attraction; flexibility is attractive; work-life balance is highly requested

by millennials; earlier generations were well evaluated for being a workaholic; the number of hours

was an evaluation criteria; millennials move now towards result, not number of hours worked.

COST of LABOUR = NET SALARY + TAXES for the COMPANY + SOCIAL CONTRIBUTION

[…]

Contractually you have different companies.

A first kind is ‘fixed contract’: one for lifetime.

Then we have fixed contract with time constraints (3ys).

Then contracts given by work agencies: these contracts are fixed contracts with the agency. The only

difference between agency contract and a contract with a company is flexibility: the agency decides your

career, paying a wage in the same exact way of a normal company (taxation and social contribution). The

agency is used by companies for instance to cover peaks of work: for covering a specific period without

having to hire new people. It’s like leasing.

CHARACTERISTICS of FLEXIBILITY

[…] - WORKPLACE DESIGN ARRANGEMENTS: structuring and modification of the office layout to

guarantee flexibility and interactions.

- TELE-WORKING: the use of ICT infrastructure and devices enable workers to access their work tasks

from remote stations

- FLEXI-TIME: employees are to decide their own working hours and their location.

Do your work, respect deadlines. That’s it. It is also cheaper for the company (less space to rent).

HADI MOUFARREJ – LINE MANAGER: THE PARTNER OF HR

«I want my company to look like the world».

Leadership skills: HRM AS A BUSINESS PARTNER:

- Communication, verbal, face to face, - Organisational challenges

meeting…. It is KEY - Measurement setting development

- Motivation - Training: for the team and the manager

- Inspiring: give people means while him/herself

they’re doing. You need to make your - Coaching: the hr partner has an eye over

people believe in you. If you believe in your work as a manager

your manager, you’ll work twice harder - Feedbacks to leaders.

- Accountability & commitment: - Leaders identification:

(affidabile) what you say it’s what you do. - Promotional funnel

- Cultural diversity: acknowledge and be

sensitive to cultural shifts and differences

of your customers (and teams)

- Global mindset

CEOs or Business Leader Main Skills:

- Industry or domain expert

- Strategy definition

- Resource allocation: money and people.

HRM skills:

- Industry expert: to help you he must understand your business and its challenges to know how to

help the ceo making the right decisions.

- Business partner: HRM is the partner of the CEO, assisting him/her, telling how the business is

going, how people are performing, how I can improve and if / how I can move the resource.

- Policies sponsors

An organisation is living system; it needs systematic diagnostic.

Measurement setting: quantitative and qualitative aspects. Particularly important because Measurement

drives behaviour.

Executive team selection: right balance between competition and team spirit&culture.

Culture setting and performance assessment.

HRM is a business partner and career companion 24.4.18

Francesco Costanzo – Linked in.

How the digitalisation is changing the way companies hire and attract talents. How it is impacting hr

industry.

Mission for linked in aren’t jobs but economic opportunities (job isn’t the first) for every member. Use the

power of the network to be more successful. The concept of changing job isn’t there. The first value is

member firsts; each decision is made to protect members. They took decisions so clearly against the

business, on a revenue pov, just to make the members have the best experience.

Global workforce is any individual with a professional background. 3.3 billion people are working around

the world, 20% of which are white collars. Goal for linked in is to have all of the working force on linked in;

then each company to have a digital representation on linked in. at the moment they have 10 millions jobs

represented. They want all the skills needed for the job. Also the academic institutions where to learn

those skills. Knowledge. All together it means a digitalisation of the work market.

Right now, there are 500M members (almost all the white collars). 2b updates on the platforms. Billions of

connections per month.

Business products:

- Hiring solution (70% of the business)

- Marketing

- Sell

➔ It’s all about relationships.

HIRING SOLUTIONS. Recruit and retain.

Talent landscape. Thanks to internet, starting from 2000, people didn’t need any more to look for jobs

through the newspaper and lending cv by physically going to the HQ.

Active candidate: someone that is proactively looking for a job. In linked in the 20% of people is active

candidate. But the rest, who aren’t proactively looking for a job are taught as passive candidate: they are

happy with their position but are open to new opportunities. Companies are aware, so they aren’t just

talking one to many, but their communication is targeted for the talent. Linked in isn’t for people looking

for jobs, but to create opportunities.

They want companies to understand what they want, to target their audience. Attract. Ex a company

looking for launching a product, they only need sales people, there is no sense to talk to everyone, they

need to target: linked in help companies to target them.

They them help to recruit people, start conversation with people. Then empower.

All together they create an ecosystem called social recruitment.

Engage top talent on a single platform.

Before companies could select best talent among those who applied. Now things are different, people

change easily career trajectories. Companies are fighting over talents: they aren’t at the centre anymore,

talent is.

Digital transformation

Digital means to put your client at the centre, means listening. Amazon got the one day shipping, even

when being the first market place in the world, to provide clients the best service possible, increase their

satisfaction and ultimately to make their life easier. Digital transformation isn’t about tools, it’s about

mentality, company culture. Change a company culture is the toughest job you can do.

Digital transformation isn’t a top-down process. It comes from your competitor. Getting back to Amazon,

pure digital company in terms of offer, but if you look at the employees’ background it isn’t digital. Amazon

employees did strikes. From a company perspective, clients aren’t just the final clients but also internal

clients: your employees. Amazon