Performance Management of Emirates Airlines

This report provides an overview of the performance management system in Emirates Airlines, including its organizational profile, HR department, strategic planning, budgeting, employee development, compensation, and quality improvement programs. The report concludes with recommendations for introducing more diversified programs in the strategic management plan and implementing a frequent performance auditing system.

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
OF
EMIRATES AIRLINES
Page 1 of 14

Executive Summary
Performance management may be considered to be one of the most crucial aspects of the human
resource management. The given report discusses about the performance management system in
Emirates Airlines. At the beginning of the study, the researcher provides a brief profile about the
firm followed by the overview of its HR department. In the subsequent part of the study, the
performance management and strategic planning system of the business have been briefly
discussed with reference to the budgeting. In the latter part of the paper, employee development
programs have been analyzed with the emphasis on compensation strategy of the business.
Finally, the researcher provides a short evaluation of quality improvement program and wraps up
the discussion by way of concluding note.
Page 2 of 14

Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction:..............................................................................................................................4
2.0 Organizational profile:...............................................................................................................5
3.0 HR department:..........................................................................................................................6
4.0 Performance management and strategic planning:....................................................................7
5.0 Budgeting and performance management:................................................................................8
6.0 Employee development and performance management:...........................................................9
7.0 Employee compensation and performance management:.......................................................10
8.0 Quality improvement program and performance management:..............................................11
9.0 Conclusion and recommendations:..........................................................................................12
References:....................................................................................................................................13
Page 3 of 14

1.0 Introduction:
In the recent era, performance management activities have become one of the crucial success
factors to enhance organizational effectiveness, as it helps to synchronize varied departmental
activities with predefined key performance indicators. Considering the fact, the present reports
aims to provide a clear view of how Emirates Airlines has developed the performance
management activity to regulate and enhance the overall employee motivation and organizational
effectiveness.
Page 4 of 14

2.0 Organizational profile:
Emirates Airline was started in 1985 with its operation of just two aircraft. It is a Dubai based
organization and renowned as the largest airline company in the Middle East. The company has
established itself as the world’s fourth-largest airline organization in terms of scheduled revenue
passenger-kilometers flown. The overall employee strength is 64,768 as of FY 2017. The vision
of the company is “To deliver a safe, sustainable and leading civil aviation throughout the globe.
The mission statement is “To deliver the world’s best in-flight experience to the customers”
(Centreforaviation.com, 2018).
Page 5 of 14

3.0 HR department:
The basic functionality of the HR department is:
 Staffing
 Designing job roles
 Managing diversified compensation and benefits
Professional compliances with the standardized policies have adhered with the HRM practices
which ensure an effective employee relation. In addition, Cook, H., MacKenzie, R., & Forde, C.
(2016) mentioned that high caliber of the workforce across global locations are attracted and
retained through effective remuneration and planning of the HRM resources.
Key Roles of HR Department in Emirates:
 Recruitment Employee services Remuneration and planning
Key impacts of HRM in the overall effectiveness:
 Business support
 Change management
 Employee diversity management
 Organizational development
 Talent management through learning and development
 Leadership effectiveness and support activities
Page 6 of 14

Emirates Airlines Vision Mission and Sustainability Approaches
Strategic Plan of Departmental units
Regulated individual and overall team performance
Job description of employees
4.0 Performance management and strategic planning:
The HM department of Emirates Airlines has designed a key performance indicator which is
linked with the overall strategic plan. In the view of O.Oparanma & Wechie (2014) strategic
plans related to the overall business sustainability are being developed at unit level performance
objectives. The job descriptions are aligned with the performance goals which help to improve
the overall team performance. In addition, the support activities are also found effective enough
to help the brand meeting individual and overall business goals. The integration of people
management and strategic planning is as follows:
Figure 1: Alignment of strategic plan with the team performance of Emirates Airlines
(Source: Created by author)
Page 7 of 14

5.0 Budgeting and performance management:
 Balanced Score Card approach (BSC):
As a tool to analyze gap in the performance, Emirates Airlines employed BSC approach
across all hierarchical levels.
 Budgeting on reward system:
A predefined budget is maintained by the performance management team to balance the
performance motivators among all employees. The budget for the reward system has
been increased by 15% in the FY 2017, to motivate and retain highly skilled workers
(Emiratesgroup.com, 2018).
 Investment on learning and development:
The Company has enhanced expenditure of L&D by 32% as compared to the FY 2014
(Emiratesgroup.com, 2018). The speculated budgeting has helped the company framing
goal-centric KPIs to enhance the overall commitment for the global workforce.
Eventually, overall performance has been increased.
Page 8 of 14

6.0 Employee development and performance management:
At Emirates, the Talent Review Program and Individual Develop Plan (IDP) are designed not
only to increase the performance of the employees but also motivating the employees towards
opportunities and challenges so that the organizational goal could be attained positively.
According to Mandhanya (2015), as the employees learn and develop new skills both the
performance and productivity of the firm would get a steady business growth. As per the annual
report, the employee performance of the firm has improved significantly and the firm also
increased its revenue margin by 6% to AED 44.5 billion in the half-yearly performance for 2017-
18 (https://cdn.ek.aero, 2018). Moreover, in order to up keep a less official learning process, the
On-the-Job Learning Module used by the firm has increased the competency level of its 70%
employees.
Page 9 of 14

7.0 Employee compensation and performance management:
The employee remuneration policy of Emirates Airline does not only focus on offering financial
benefits to the employees but also ensure the organizational performance growth to preserve its
competitive position within the market. Considering the view of Staines, A., Thor, J., & Robert,
G. (2015), the management of Emirates generally offers a staff standard benefits such as life
assurance, private medical assurance and childcare vouchers to encourage the workers. Both for
the flying and non-flying staff, the leading airline firm offers free car service, home computing
plans and other share schemes to motivate the performance graph. As a result, Mandhanya
(2015) mentioned that the employees of firm has become more dependent on the job role and
extended the length of service with the firm. Additionally, the human resource support of the
firm with an attractive salary package helps to retain the high caliber workforce around the globe
(ElKelish & Rickards, 2018).The reward management policy like Pilot and flight crew benefits
programs has helped the firm to attract more qualified and dedicated professionals. By
maintaining the payroll regulations of UAE, Emirates also provides an End of service benefits to
the retired staff so that the lifetime contribution in the firm can be admired positively. Although
the talent attraction rate in Emirates is increasing steadily, the employee turnover rate of the firm
is increasing to 2%-3% yearly.
Page 10 of 14

8.0 Quality improvement program and performance management:
It is an evident fact that Emirates are the pioneer in leveraging some traits of the digital
transformation to provide a better customer service. The Inflight Connectivity, IOT Baggage
Management etc. has enhanced the operational and customer service aspects of the firm
(https://cdn.ek.aero, 2018). A flexible cloud infrastructure has provided an unfailing consumer
experience in terms of managing booking price and seating allocation issues. All these adopted
policies of the firm are entirely mapped to its employee Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
through the Six Sigma approach (Staines et al., 2015).However, a quality improvement culture
needs to be included to collect the employee feedback about any services. The TQM
commitment plan fails to increase service level accountability of an employee. Hence, the
business performance of the chosen firm is dropping in a substantial way.
Page 11 of 14

9.0 Conclusion and recommendations:
Although the autocratic culture followed in Emirates helps the company to get more effective
results in terms of organizational growth and profitability, but sometimes it becomes frantic
while an utmost support of employee participation is needed in the decision making process.
In order to maintain the chain of continuous improvement, Emirates requires introducing more
diversified program in the strategic management plan. Rather than focusing on internal audit a
third party audit management system would be helpful for the firm to identify the performance
gap (ElKelish& Rickards, 2018). An extensive performance auditing system on a frequent basis
would help the management of Emirates to keep control over the employees so that the service
quality and overall organizational growth could be enhanced gradually.
Page 12 of 14

References:
CAPA. (2018). Emirates Airline Airline Profile | CAPA. Retrieved from
Cdn.ek.aero. (2018). Retrieved from
Cook, H., MacKenzie, R., & Forde, C. (2016). HRM and performance: the vulnerability of soft
HRM practices during recession and retrenchment. Human Resource Management
Journal, 26(4), 557-571. doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12122
ElKelish, W., & Rickards, R. (2018). Organisational culture's impact on management accounting
and control practices in the United Arab Emirates. International Journal Of Accounting,
Auditing And Performance Evaluation, 14(1), 24. doi: 10.1504/ijaape.2018.089408
Emiratesgroup.com. (2018). UAE Nationals | Emirates Group Home. Retrieved from
Mandhanya, Y. (2015). Training and Development Strategies: Motivational Tool for Increasing
Employee Retention. Training & Development Journal, 6(1), 15. doi: 10.5958/2231-
069x.2015.00002.5
O.Oparanma, D., & Wechie, I. (2014). Crisis Management Processes To Ensure Effective and
Continuous Performance. IOSR Journal Of Business And Management, 16(8), 01-04. doi:
10.9790/487x-16830104
Staines, A., Thor, J., & Robert, G. (2015). Sustaining Improvement? The 20-Year Jönköping
Quality Improvement Program Revisited. Quality Management in Health Care, 24(1),
21-37. doi: 10.1097/qmh.0000000000000048
Page 13 of 14

Page 14 of 14