The strategic managing of Human Resources has an enormous impact on today's organizations' performance. There is a relationship between the business strategy and HR strategy and the company's success depends on how well they fit to each other. This assignment focuses on the influence of the HR strategy on an enterprise called Clipperful Plastics and explores the way in which an appropriate HR strategy could assist the company in the achievement of its organizational objectives. It also studies the positives and negatives caused by implementation of the combination of cost leadership business strategy and low commitment HR strategy. In addition, Clipperful changes its business strategy to differentiation. This assignment suggests the high commitment as the HR strategy which best fits to the differentiation and proposes some useful measures for the company to take in order to ensure best contribution of the HR strategy to the overall Clipperful's performance.
This assignment also takes a further look at the existing barriers to communications at Clipperful Plastics and their influence on the company. It identifies a number of barriers to communication at the company, including lack of information, lack of feedback to the shop floor workers, cynicism among the employees, the leader's ability to communicate effectively and to convince and the leader's ability to listen. It also suggests possible ways to overcome these obstacles.
The organizational culture is also explored. Possible ways of changing the culture are considered. The assignment assumes that organizations are not homogeneous and many various cultures, which are known as sub-cultures, could exist in a single organization. As the strategic change is assessed to be difficult and time-consuming, it is proposed to establish a new, counter sub-culture as a best way of cultural change that contributes positively to the achievement of Clipperful's aims.
[...] Provide career development opportunities. If a higher position becomes available, first look internally and if there is an appropriate person, offer a promotion to him/her. Establish 2-way communication by organizing quarterly meetings between the top management and the shop floor workers. Encourage employees to share ideas and ask questions. Line managers to hold weekly discussions with their teams concerning the results' reports and suggestions for improvement. Each team member should be encouraged to share its opinion and proposals. Create and inculcate a new sub-culture. [...]
[...] On the other side of the coin, the very low morale and highly disengaged workforce have started to cause some problems. There have been a large number of customer complaints. This is certainly an early warning signal and should draw the management's attention. Clipperful Plastics had just three key customers and the contracts with each of them were close to their end date. So it was crucial for the company to renew these contracts and respectively to keep its major clients. But the huge number of complaints was raising doubts concerning Clipperful's survival. [...]
[...] A possible solution for this problem is holding weekly discussions, with participation of the line managers and all of the members of their team, concerning the reports of achieved results and suggestions for improvement. Each member of the staff should be encouraged to share his vision and proposals. This could result in positive impact on employees' engagement and morale. Another current barrier to communication at Clipperful is the cynicism among the employees. It is a result of some fake promises for change of the approach toward people in the past, which have never happened. [...]
[...] Conclusion Clipperful Plastics applies the 'best fit' model of HR strategy. In the past the company has implemented cost leadership business strategy in combination with low commitment HR strategy. This has brought impressive results to the company. Clipperful became a market leader within the UK and increased its sales revenues and profitability and all this during economic crisis. Due to the changes in the internal (the low commitment strategy has resulted in bad culture, disengaged and uninvolved workforce) and external (serious incident has affected the industry and the quality has become first priority) environment, the company made a decision to change its business strategy in order to survive. [...]
[...] Another barrier that the communication at Clipperful faces is the leader's ability to listen. In fact, the current Managing Director West has made the first step to overcome this obstacle by going to different plants for some face-to-face sessions with the workers. But it is far from enough. If West wishes to entirely overcome this barrier, he could do this kind of meetings regularly, on a monthly basis. Actually, just attending the meetings is also far from enough, real listening and understanding is needed in order to improve the organizational communication. [...]
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