1. ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS AS PART OF THE STRATEGY LEADING COMPANY’S MANAGEMENT
Every organization and every manager aims to achieve high or at least acceptable effectiveness. However, effectiveness is understood differently by each company.
We can say that a common element to all ways of understanding it includes the economic results of the organization.
If the company does not make money, it ends up disappearing from the market. One might think that if it is a public service organization, it can continue to be maintained at the expense of the Administration's budgets (state or local). In any case, also in this case, public administrations are increasingly interested in optimizing community resources and minimizing their costs and deficits.
However, while there are organizations committed to doubling their value in the stock market in three years, others propose a smaller increase in financial benefit, offset by other objectives such as the quality of life of their staff, customer satisfaction, respect for the environment or certain benefits for society.
Thus, every organization -in one way or another- establishes criteria of success that will help it determine and assess whether it has been effective as proposed, within a certain period of time or not. Establishing these criteria of success, seeing or imagining oneself in a certain way in a short, medium or long period of time (vision), experiencing that is what gives meaning to your activity (mission) and establishing the action plans to achieve it is what is called «build your strategy».
This strategy is established by analyzing your environment and yourself in front of it. Studying the threats and opportunities it offers, its capabilities and weaknesses to respond to it, adapt to it and configure it to the possible extent. Also, we have present in these processes the corporate values, those that exist in Company’s culture, even though sometimes the new strategy forces some of them to change.
2. MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS CONNECTED TO STRATEGY AND EFFECTIVENESS
We are talking about environment, values, strategy, criteria of effectiveness. What does all this have to do with the selection system? Or with remuneration, performance evaluation, goal setting or training? Indeed, all these actions are precisely management decisions that affect human resources and that they will adapt in one way or another depending on the strategy and how the company understands its effectiveness.
If the management understands that in order to be competitive, the organization must incorporate new technologies, produce high quality products or services and attend more carefully to the needs of its customers, it will have to modify its selection criteria. Without a doubt, it will be good not to select based on the kinship of the candidates with the current employees, but because of the candidate's knowledge about the new technology and ability to handle it, their availability to work with high quality, the willingness to serve the client, to the current skills they have, to the desire to continually learn and acquire new knowledge and skills, the availability for innovation, for teamwork, etc. This can be very difficult if for many years the selection has followed criteria based on a paternalistic and "family" culture: changing this practice will now clash with deeply rooted interests and behaviors. It will be necessary to introduce a change of corporate culture, which is not achieved quickly, without effort or work.
It will also have to train those who have already been in the company for years, since they have been functioning differently, so that they can adapt to the new orientation and circumstance. Some people may not want to accept this training and changes. Management will then have to think about where these employees are placed; if your early retirement is encouraged, if outplacement plans are made, etc. All this will be connected with the planning of the organization's human resources. If managers act consistently, the performance evaluation system of their employees will incorporate as evaluation criteria, not only the quantity but the quality of the product or service provided, the ability to interact with internal and external customers, the willingness to learn and develop new skills, etc. In addition, the compensation and benefits system will no longer use possible criteria that are more or less arbitrary or disconnected from the company's strategic objectives. Accordingly, the review of salaries, for example, will not be based on the sympathy or dislike that the boss feels for his employees, or on the seniority of the employees, but will seek to reward and stimulate those learning, behaviors, attitudes and results that they want to empower themselves.
Actually, and remembering the case, lacking arguments to review salaries, knowing how and with what criteria to evaluate staff performance, set goals and manage the difference between people, maintaining equity and avoiding comparative grievance, are all issues systemically related, so that none of them can be addressed efficiently, without treating the remaining ones at the same time, since all of them are conditioned by the established effectiveness criteria and the company's overall strategy.
3. HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOSOCIAL PROCESSES AND THE QUALITY OF HUMAN RESOURCES OF THE ORGANIZATION
This integrated management perspective goes beyond the so-called human resources management systems (recruitment, training, compensation and benefits, performance assessment, human resources planning, talent identification, career paths and succession planning, risk prevention and occupational health, communication).
The environment, the strategy adopted in front of it, the organizational design in which it is adopted (the structure of the company, the technologies incorporated, the processes and work systems and the Human Resources management systems) affect other dimensions than not being intangible, they cease to have an enormous presence and strength in the organization: the psychological and psychosocial processes that are generated in individuals and groups and the quality of individual and group human resources that, as a result, occurs in the organization.
People feel more or less capable of doing their job; perceive more or less equity in the company; they feel that there is a probability that, if they make an effort in their work, they get the rewards that they are interested in obtaining; they perceive overwhelming or reasonable demands of their bosses and their jobs, clear or confusing, consistent or contradictory, etc.
Psychological processes: equity, capability, role clarity, role conflict, etc.
All this gives the perception that there are behaviors, ways of proceeding and attitudes that the company rewards and wishes to develop in its people, although on the other hand, there are others that it wishes to eliminate. Likewise, it perceives how its directors and managers deal with matters related to work, employees, customers, money and resources; they feel if their formal work group is a simple group of people or really a team where there are more than interpersonal group relationships, cohesion, mutual support, shared goals and objectives; perceives how conflicts in the organization are treated and how they are resolved; people feel if there is a pleasant and satisfying environment for the way things are treated or tense and rejection by employees.
Psychosocial processes: culture, climate, leadership, grouping, etc.
This psychological phenomenon which is not everything in the organization but is in everything, finally have an impact on the quality of the company's human resources, which is composed of different aspects:
- The climate that exists in the organization as a whole and in the groups.
- The functioning of the groups as work teams.
- The motivation of people, their commitment and identification with the organization, their competencies, levels of stress and burn-out, their professional quality of life and job satisfaction.
Logically, a company that has high quality employees in the sense expressed here can safely expect efficient results from its employees in their jobs, in the units and groups, and finally, in the joint organizational system, which will have an impact on the achievement of its effectiveness.
4. THE NEED FOR A HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS
All that we have just explained is what constitutes an integrated vision of the human system of the organizations, the actions and decisions that, as a consequence, are implemented in them constitute the integrated management of their human resources.
These decisions and actions are led by the entrepreneur in the small business, by the general director in the medium-sized business, and in the large business the figure of the Director of Human Resources needs to be created. Sometimes external consultants will also be used, either to explore the situation of the organization's human resources, or to develop actions that help establish management systems or facilitate processes that improve their quality. In each case, these different professionals have to achieve the integration of human resources management techniques and systems in a manner consistent with each other, with the company's culture and strategy. We talk about techniques and systems.
An Example:
A system, for example, is The Compensation and Benefits one. Some techniques, on the other hand, that support the remuneration system, are, among others, those for job analysis and description, and for job valuation.
In any case, techniques, systems, structure, technology, objectives, strategy, all of this must be related. This is the perspective that needs to be taken by a professional who directs a Human Resources Department or a consultant that offers his/her support and intervention services in the organization for the development and improvement of the human processes that take place there.