Human Resource Report

The human resource department is an imperative department in BP firm as it deals with hiring and other issues related to employee’s welfare. The department can analyze the labor market demand in the region and introduce relevant policies to implement. Wages and other benefits are professionally addressed by the department to ensure that both the firm’s management and the employees are satisfied. The committee sets and implements various standards that usually guide the employees in their work to act in the interest of the enterprise (Beardwell & Holden 1997). The human resource policies are crucial in an organization as they help to communicate the values and expectations of all the members of staff. They also help the company to make informed decisions, which are reasonable and consistent. Therefore, employees depend on the human resource department for fair treatment and collective bargaining agreement. BP plans to reduce the staff by more than 4000 job positions worldwide due to the increased oil price in the industry. The reward system, as well as employees’ relations, influence employees’ motivation. Thus, organizations need to invest in them to achieve excellent performance.

Purpose of Human Resource

The human resource department in BP Firm perfroms the following functions:

Manpower Planning

It mainly involves planning for the future labor demand and needs within an organization such as BP. Therefore, they try to evaluate how many employees and what skills will be required in the future. In BP Company, HR department is responsible for determining the level of termination or hiring to ensure that the company has the optimal number of employees.

Recruitment and Selection

It is a process that aims at satisfying the BP Company’s need for more employees. Therefore, the department evaluates the skills and the requirement set for various types of vacant positions to ensure that they obtain the best-qualified personnel. The department is responsible for the advertisement and offering invitation letters to suitable candidates. Interviews help to evaluate the best suitable candidate adequately to ensure that their skills match with the job requirements. They need to hire a competent and qualified candidate for the position, which helps to increase productivity of the firm (CIPD 2016b). Some of the open positions in BP may include traders, scientists, and engineers.

Compensation and Benefits

It is an essential function of the human resource department in BP. Various benefits awarded may include health benefits or the pension, which acts as a saving plan. The department will offer compensation to all employees affected by the job cutting expected in the UK.

Staff Safety and Risk Management

BP Company has a duty to compile with the firm’s instructions regarding work safety and injuries. At BP, employees operate in the safest environment since such issues as, for example,  installation of firefighting equipment are carefully controlled BP Company requires ensuring that their staff members who are not affected by the retrenchment operate in safe working environment.

Compliance

The human resource department in BP ensures compliance with set labor laws in the environment to offer best practices in the workplace. They can comply with minimum wage requirements, statutory deductions, among others. They are required to remit various deductions to the relevant government concerned bodies. Cutting more than 4000 job positions worldwide will ensure that they meet government regulations on remunerations.

Training, Learning, and Development

Training and development of the employees is an essential human resource function in the BP firm.

Training mainly deals relates to improvement or development of more skills among the employees to ensure that they become more productive. Therefore, training involves changes in skills or knowledge of the employees with the main aim to improve their performance. It is recommended for the BP firm in the UK to implement training, learning and development fully for further prosperity of the organization. The firm has to plan the training keeping in mind individual and organization goals. Hence, it needs to prepare training calendars at the beginning of each year where training needs are identified among the employees (Marchington & Wilkinson 2006)

Therefore, training needs analysis should be conducted in all the departments to evaluate the need for training. After the analysis, training hours are selected by the concerned trainers responsible for the task. Sometimes, the BP Company can deliver trainings away from the company offices to ensure that they are effective and applicable. The following are the main benefits of training to the BP Organization.

• New employees’ orientation: Training will be beneficial to the BP firm in a situation when they hire new employees in future. It can be conducted by a professional expert from the firm who possesses valuable experience.
• Handle shortcomings: In BP, employees have various shortcomings, and, therefore, trainings will ensure that the employees address them in the best way possible. For example, the firm can divide the organization into various groups for training such as finance training, IT training, middle-level managers, executive leadership, among others.
• Improvement in performance: Performance improves if the employees’ challenges are solved. Training will ensure improvement in service delivery since the employees will be more competent in performing their duties.
• Employees’ satisfaction: Investment in training for the BP firm will lead to employees’ satisfaction and motivation.
• More skills: Training will help the employees acquire more skills thus enabling them to master new roles in their professional life.

Development

Development mainly implies various opportunities created to help the employees grow in the field (Bratton & Gold 2012). It is a long term goal as compared to training with a primary focus on the current job. Development focuses on preparing people for future job responsibilities and tasks. Thus, BP firm should ensure that they offer development and training programs for its employees to help them execute their duties. Human resource department should ensure that the employees learn by taking on professional courses, which help to equip them with the best skills. Therefore, the management can facilitate the development and the motivation of the employees in the BP Firm.

Reward

Reward management is mainly concerned with the formulation of various strategies and policies with the aim of rewarding the employees fairly and equitably (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin & Cardy 2008). The effects of reward on employees’ behavior can be explained by Douglas McGregor`s theory X and theory Y (decision-making theory). McGregor claimed that managers in theory X believed that workers hate work and must be directed to work. They are not creative or smart. The workers will only work adequately when there are rewards and punishments as they do not care about the organization. According to theory Y, managers feel that workers love the organization they work in and can direct themselves to work under the right conditions. The BP firm needs to adopt reward management, with the main objectives being:

• Recruitment and retaining their top talents and experienced employees within the organization.
• Reward motivates employees to work hard and become more productive, which is beneficial to the organization.
• Financial stability is achieved when employees are offered stable reward system programs.
• Comply with legislation set by the government.

Various types of rewards

• Salary and allowances
• Security reward
• Provision of basic needs reward
• Incentive pay
• Bonus pay.

Types of Pay

Skill-Based Pay. It is based on the performance of individuals according to their skills and competency. It is viable for firms undergoing the technical change in their operations such as BP firm. It mainly assists in attraction and retains key employees and hence better staff development. However, if the labor market is weak in the firm, the employees may be poached. The BP Company sometimes applies the skilled based payment to ensure they retain the best-qualified personnel.

Pay associated with Organizational Performance. It is paid to employees according to the performance of the organization in the market. In case BP makes enough profit in the market, they will be able to offer to their shareholders part of the profit as for a reward for the work well done.

Payment by Results. It is paid for the amount of work done and completed.

The BP Firm in the UK can practice the reward in the human resource department through offering employees benefits such as meals, health benefits, holiday pay, relocation, maternity leave, life insurance, etc.

The human resource department is responsible for administering and managing the payroll structure, salary and other incentive schemes in the BP Company. Since they are faced with an issue of cutting jobs in the UK, they will ensure that the affected are rightfully remunerated. Reward system in the form of compensation and other benefits guarantees that the hard-working staff members are rewarded in a cost-effective manner. Therefore, it motivates the employees to improve the productivity, which results in better performance. The BP organization needs to implement a fair reward system, which will help in the following ways:

• Have the positive impact on the efficiency and productivity among the employees.
• The system encourages the employees to perform better in the operations and achieve set standards.
• It will raise the morale and cooperation among the workers.
• Labor disputes will be solved by the system.

Employee Relations

Employee relations deal with the BP firm’s efforts to manage the healthy relationship between the employees and the organization. Thus, the firm should establish proper employee relations, which offer fair and equitable treatment for all the employees. After the job cutting has been conducted, the human resource department must apply an employee relations program to unite them. In such a way, the employees will be committed to their roles and become loyal to the company. Employee relations programs aim to prevent and solve any problem that may arise from the organization in the workplace. This means that they are an important part of the human resource strategy, and the BP Company can use them to maintain their competitive advantage in the market. They help to focus on employees’ problems such as compensation, working conditions and other challenges they are exposed to.

An effective employee relation program begins with well-written policies, which describe the firm’s rules and procedures. The most important factor in the relationship with the employees is communication, and they need to be informed of the operations happening within the company. Application of the best employee relations strategies offers direction for the entire organization concerning various matters (Torrington 2009). Involvement of the employees in decision making by the management makes them feel appreciated and ensure strong employee relations are maintained.

Rensis Likert’s Participative Decision-Making Theory

Likert was interested in how organizational leaders make decisions. His ideas were influenced by the notion that supervisors with strong employee productivity were employee centered. He noted that these leaders involved employees in the decision-making process. Likert introduced four management styles that can also be implemented in the BP Company to improve employee relations.

Exploitative Authoritative: In this case, subordinates are not engaged in decision making because the leaders do not trust them. Employees comply with the management due to fear.

Benevolent Authoritative: Leaders make decisions alone because they believe that the decisions are theirs only, and employees must comply with them. Employees who comply are rewarded.

Consultative: In this system, managers trust employees` decision-making capabilities even though they do not have complete confidence in their decisions. They seek input necessary for decision making from employees. However, managers may have already made decisions even before they involved the employees.

Participative: According to this style, employees are fully involved in decision-making. Leaders have full confidence in the ability of workers to make and implement decisions. The employees tend to be motivated more in this system of management.

More Strategies that Help to Improve Employee Relations

For an organization to perform in the best way possible, it is critical that the employees are comfortable and have strong relationship with the management. The following are the main strategies, which help in strengthening the relations:

• Teamwork: Employees should be involved in the organization operations, which makes them fully appreciated in the market.
• Assign tasks and encourage the members of the team to offer an equal contribution in a set period. Therefore, employees require being motivated to work in groups, which provides the opportunity to maintain healthy employees’ relations.
• Encourage communication: Poor communication creates misunderstandings; thus, it must be clear and precise. Communication helps to pass valid information that ensures improvement in the level of employees’ relations.

Recommendation

It is recommended for the department to implement training and development for those employees who are left after the corporate downsizing to ensure that they are fully educated on the modern ways of operations in the firm. Training improves performance and increases productivity, especially when the firm is facing various challenges either in the UK or in the world in general. The main challenge is the lack of professionals willing to deliver the trainings and employees’ unwillingness to attend them. The problem can be resolved by offering the employees various benefits for the training program such as special incentive.

In addition, it is recommended to apply the job cutting strategy for the BP Company and adopt the reward system. Implementation of the job cutting in the BP Company with 600 employees means that the organization will be able to minimize their operating cost. The reward system helps to ensure fair and equal remuneration for the BP Company operating in the UK. The main drawback for the program is the increased cost of wages, which may be associated with ghost workers operating in the BP Firm. This issue can be resolved by conducting a continuous audit to detect the presence of ghost workers.

Therefore, the BP Company should embrace the new strategy to ensure they can overcome oil price collapse in the oil industry. In the human resource department, there are more roles and responsibilities to play to ensure the continued success of business operations. Therefore, employee relations should be strengthened to ensure that workers in various departments are fully motivated.

Conclusion

The human resource department in the BP Firm mainly deals with the employees’ welfare by ensuring that they receive their compensation at the right time. Thus, it is very important for the department of the company to offer fair and equal share of the compensation package. In the department, the payroll system as well as other statutory deductions will be implemented. It is anticipated that the best reward system will be established since employees are motivated by the stable rate of pay. Training, development and learning should conducted to ensure the employees are competent for their assigned roles and responsibility. They should be involved in a continuous process, which allows constant development and growth. To ensure normal operations within the organization, the department is responsible for the welfare of the employees through employees’ relations. If properly implemented, the above discussed steps will ensure increased productivity and performance since the employees are fully motivated to work hard.

Related Free Management Essays