Human Resources Management

Human Resources Management
Student’s name:
Institutional affiliation:

Human Resources Management
Post
It is my fourth consecutive year workings as an employee in one of the famous and highly competitive firms in the tech market. Within the last three years, the company had lost its creative mojo, and its performance had dropped significantly as a result of no innovations on the company’s product. Most of the blame was directed to the company’s Chief Executives Officer, but a deeper analysis and questioning most of the employees reveals that the actual cause of the current internal issues originated from the HR department office. The main cause of the problem as it appeared to us employees in the firm was the recently introduced hitherto-unquestioned Human resources department tool called “stack ranking”.
According to O’Connor (2013), stack ranking had existed in companies across the world for decades, and it involves ranking employees on the scale of 1 to 4 after every six months. From the ranks, those that fall on 1 also known as the “excellent” employees were rewarded with better or additional pay with those that got 4 or 5 depending with the HR Stack ranking design were categories as worst performers. Even though Javad (2015) categorizes the HR tool as an advantageous means towards improving the performance of a company in the market, such system only applies to a low performing or a slow-growing company and not one that is already established in the market.
Indeed, as a strategic partner in the frim, the HR was tasked with the role employing, recruiting, evaluating and training employees in the firm in addition to firing employees who were underperforming in the firm.

Among the roles of the HR department, tasks such as evaluating, and training were done poorly is not done at all and one of the roles that were upheld most by the office was firing underperforming employees based on the “stack ranking” results.
O’Connor (2013) states that stack ranking involved a compulsory assessment of all employees in the firm and it was a must that a portion is ranked as “best” and while another portion as “poor” even they did well in the firm. As for the poor, they were sent to “special project” which was a path to being fired. The constant “rank and yank,” whether the employees were good or bad, resulted to everyone in the firm concentrating on short-term goals rather than the long-term goals of the firm. As a result, the performance of the firm dropped as employees focused more on sticking knives into each other out of fear of being the next to be disposed of. The result of the stack ranking tool was more damaging than good to the employees, and constant disposal of workers scared away talented potential employees and negatively affected the relationship between the employer and the employees.
Response 1
It is essential for a Human resource manager as a strategic partner in any organization to develop a career development plan that will ensure the firm maximizes on the employees’ skills and seek employees that meet the expectations of the firm. According to Lips‐Wiersma and Hall (2007), career development strategies result to systems of operations that ensure the employees achieve career satisfaction as the plan contains their career requirements and performance expectations that the agency has on them. If a company employs personnel who are highly skilled in their respective field and the HR department lacks a plan on how their skills will be utilized in the firm, I agree with my fellow classmate that such an employee will eventually feel their skills are being underutilized and will, as a result, seek a better firm with well layout career development plan. Furthermore, other talented potential employees might seek another agency who are well organized.
Normally, a clearly stipulated career development contains some criteria that will ensure highly experience and good performing workers in the firm get rewarded and promoted within the firm. Furthermore, workers training schedules are included to ensure the skills of the employees are improved consistently and in line with the ever-advancing technology. Lack of a proper career development plan will then mean that the company lacks any criteria to promote and reward its works not offer them training session hence poorly performing in the market.
Response 2
Beardwell and Thompson (2014) state that one of the key roles of all HR departments is attending to employees’ issues, hiring strategically and hiring right. The inability of the HR personnel in addressing the employees’ problems greatly contributes to low employee morale. Furthermore, excessively exhausting an employee rather than finding some additional personnel to assist lowers the morale and hence the general work output. Hollenbeck and Jamieson (2015) explain that providing a conducive working environment for the employee is a step towards having psyched and highly productive personnel. Therefore, in relation to my classmate’s post, the general performance of the firm is eventually going to drop because of lack of enough human labor, poor working conditions and the HR department neglecting the issues being raised by the employees in the firm.

References
Beardwell, J., & Thompson, A. (2014). Human resource management: a contemporary approach. Pearson Education.
Hollenbeck, J. R., & Jamieson, B. B. (2015). Human capital, social capital, and social network analysis: Implications for strategic human resource management. The Academy of Management Perspectives, 29(3), 370-385.
Javad, S. (2015). It’s time to bring performance appraisal into the twenty-first century: The lessons from companies like Cisco, Google, and Infosys. Human Resource Management International Digest, 23(7), 23-26.
Lips‐Wiersma, M., & Hall, D. T. (2007). Organizational career development is not dead: A case study on managing the new career during organizational change. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28(6), 771-792.
O’Connor, D. (2013). Trust, conversation, and creativity: Designing an intentional culture of success. Journal of Professional Communication, 2(2).