Analysis of Employee Knowledge, Skills, and Behaviors in HRM

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DEVELOPING INDIVIDUALS, TEAMS AND ORGANIZATIONS
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Table of Contents
Introduction..................................................................................................................................3
LO1:.............................................................................................................................................3
Analyse employee knowledge, skills and behaviours required by HR professionals.................3
LO2:.............................................................................................................................................5
The factors that are considered while evaluating and implementing inclusive learning and
development to drive sustainable business performance.............................................................5
LO3:.............................................................................................................................................9
Contribution of high performance working (HPW) to employee engagement and competitive
advantage.....................................................................................................................................9
LO4:...........................................................................................................................................11
Supporting high-performance culture and commitment to performance management and
collaborative working................................................................................................................11
Conclusion.................................................................................................................................13
References:................................................................................................................................14
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Introduction
Development in the workplace and understanding the role of continuous adaptation in order to
pursue more knowledge in the field along with gaining skills is important for individual growth
in a career as well as life. The aim of the current study is to evaluate the importance of
developing their individual personal skills and knowledge in order to achieve success in cross
organizational culture. This reflects their contribution to driving team success and makes it to the
same route in benefiting the organization as a whole. The study also aims at focusing on how
exactly individual learning takes place and what makes it more easy for learning interventions
that draw organizational goals and objectives. This helps in understanding what it takes for
developing professionally and in a competitive environment of the cross organizational culture.
The study focuses on developing learning curves and strategies to support self-based learning in
a cross-organization culture that is aimed to support self-growth as a professional as well as that
of the organization. Upon completion of the study, a thorough knowledge will be gained in terms
of comprehending the ways to lay the foundation of continual professional development and
make plans that would make them positively contribute to the sustainable growth of an
organization.
LO1:
Analyse employee knowledge, skills and behaviours required by HR professionals
Becoming an HR professional reflects that the person should have such qualities which
differentiate the person from others as he/ she is enabled to build a bridge between the
management and the employees. Chelladurai and Kerwin (2018) have commented that a HR
manager should have sympathetic attitude, integrity, patience and capability to take a quick
decision. Other than that, the leadership approach is also necessary for becoming a HR manager.
The person should be responsible for the proper recruitment of the candidates and to keep the
track of the improvement of the staffs.
It is highly necessary to have some special skills to become a successful HR manager. Berman et
al. (2019) have opined that the HR manager should be capable to poses skills of human relations
more rather than to have other managerial skills. The qualities of a HR manager should be
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divided into those segments like physical health, mental capability to have the judging power,
adaptability. The person should have the willingness for accepting any station and prompt
decision should be developed in accordance to it. Morgeson et al. (2019) have suggested that a
good personnel manager is only able to become a good HR manager. The person may need to
resolve the problems of the employees too. Thus, having the patience and judging capacity is
equally important. However, the person should try to convince the employees to follow the
policies of the management. In spite of that, the employee motivation and retention are further
depending on it.
While developing a professional development plan for a HR manager, it is more important to
follow the typical steps. Chelladurai and Kerwin (2018) have commented that self-assessment
from the staff members is highly beneficial in this regard.
Self-Assessment
Being a student of HR management, I am quite confident on myself as I am able to handle the
HR issues in the organisation. I am quite confident on me that I would be able to handle
problems of the employees.
Assessment of Individuals’ Skill Level
This is the part where I should assess the skills of mine. It is important to have at least four major
skills in me. First of all, the technical skill is mandatory. It would help me and my team to
complete the task with the help of upgraded technologies. Other than that, having the social skill
is more important. It would help to complete the work together. Other than that, I am quite
confident on my aptitude as well. I am a good learner. Thus, I would be able to cope up with any
situation easily. Finally, I should mention about my attitude as well. I have a positive way of
thinking, which would be beneficial to maintain a positive work environment within the
organisation.
Assessing the Needs of the Organisation
Being a HR manager, I am also responsible to consider the purpose of the organisation too. The
main goal of the company should achieve. Thus, I would be responsible to prepare the
employees in accordance to it.
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Exploring the Development Opportunities for the Employees
I should remember that I am responsible to motivate the employees as well. Self-development is
the key factor of employee motivation. For that I could arrange some learning sessions from
which they would be able to upgrade them. This knowledge enhancement would ultimately help
the company to get better output.
Recording and Analysing the Progress of the Staff Members
As I have already mentioned that being a HR manager it is also necessary to track the
performances of the employees. Thus, I should maintain a daily record book where I would note
down all the performances of the staffs whether they are improving or not. Even, the daily
records should be analysed in a proper manner so that the employees should be assessed
properly.
LO2:
The factors that are considered while evaluating and implementing inclusive learning and
development to drive sustainable business performance
The factors that need to be considered by an organization during implementing or evaluating
inclusive learning and development methods in the organization must include all the formal and
informal methods. A learning organization has its focus on developing a culture of shared
knowledge that aims at making the individuals able to develop themselves and improve their
skills that will directly influence the growth and achievements of the organization.
There has always been a debate on the use of training or development by an organization in order
to impart knowledge and make their employees skillful in their job roles. Training is a learning
process that deals with imparting knowledge related to a particular job role. This aims at
developing the key skills of the employees that are required by the employees in that particular
job role (FRIEDMAN, 2012). On the other hand, Development does not narrow down its focus
into a specific job responsibility of the employee. It is an educational process that aims for the
overall growth of an employee in his professional career. As training is based on making in
employee develop skills that are job oriented and has its effect for a short period of time it does
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not enable the employee to gain skills that will help him in personal development for the future.
However, that might not be the motto of the organization at the current stage (Routledge et al.
2015). Nowadays, training has been an integral part of an organization where it focuses majorly
on the making the new recruits acquainted with the process they are going to work with.
Organizations also do have plans for employee development in the later stages. Development
does not limit the competencies of an employee to a particular task but improves the personality
and attitude on all rounded aspects that will help the employees in facing future challenges as a
professional role (Van De Voorde and Beijer, 2015). Alongside the update of technology in an
organization, the development of employees is also an important factor for organizational growth
that is scaled over a long term basis. There are few typical methods of a development program
that are followed such as coaching, mentoring, counseling role playing, job rotation, conference
training, etc.
Thus it is important for an organization of above a medium scale of operations, to focus on both
training and development of their employees and not just one (Jiang and Liu, 2015). This will
allow the organization to retain its employees while leveraging short and long terms goals.
The learning curve
Following a particular learning style is important. Not a mix of learning styles and approaches
toward personal development can gain much of results. Kolb's experiential learning theory was
presented by David A. Kolb in the year 1984. There are four basic stages in the learning cycle
that makes the learner touch all ground. These four stages include,
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Figure 1: Kolb’s learning cycle
(Source: Abdulwahed and Nagy, 2009)
1. Concrete Experience: This stage includes encountering of a new experience or situation
or facing any existing experience in a different way.
2. Reflective Observation of the new experience: The learners gains insights on the
learning of any particular inconsistency between understanding and experience.
3. Abstract Conceptualization: The previous stage of reflection allows the learner in
gaining in-depth insights thereby pushing for new ideas, modifications or abstract
concepts that the person has learned from the experience.
4. Active Experimentation: By now, the learner is able to implement those new ideas or
concepts that are abstract into the world around them.
These four stages are an effective way of self-learning or self-development in a professional
career (Abdulwahed and Nagy, 2009). It is a continuous cycle of four stages experience,
reflection, conceptualizing, testing and again repeat. Following these four stages, there are four
learning styles as explained by Kolb's.
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Figure 2: Kolb’s learning cycle with learning styles
(Source: Abdulwahed and Nagy, 2009)
1. Diverging: These kinds of people are imaginative and prefer to do things differently.
While they might not get themselves into doing things and prefers watching and learning.
They are open-minded to take feedbacks and have a broader interest in various cultures
and peoples.
2. Assimilating: People following such a learning style rely on in-depth information that
can be accumulated, analyzed and explored with the analytic model (Konak et al. 2014).
3. Converging: This style often reflect on people who love solving problem and applying
their theoretical learning into practical's to gain experience about the outcome. They
mostly prefer technical task and are more inclined towards experimenting.
4. Accommodating: This learning style is based on active experimentation and concrete
learning. A person with such a style is more inclined towards practical doing.
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Barriers to learning
The common barriers to personal continuous development and professional learning are lack of
time, excessive workload, negative motivations for learning outside job role and sometimes no
clear direction of achievement by the person (Cunningham, 2017).
These barriers can be well addressed by effort and understanding by both the employees and the
organization. Enriching the organization culture, adapting to new technologies at the workplace
and learning programs can be of great help. On the other hand, the employee has to have a vision
of their own to succeed and the zeal to gain more skills and knowledge.
LO3:
Contribution of high performance working (HPW) to employee engagement and
competitive advantage
High Performance Working (HPW)
The concept of High Performance Working is to focus on the idea that gaining success in a
dynamic and competitive market cannot be done only through high rising economic scales,
technological development or having huge access to capital but through innovation, speed and
adaptability. HPW refers to the practices by an organization to improve its capabilities to attract,
hire, retain and engage high performing employees (Martindale and Dowdy, 2016). The
strategies combine the effort of the HRM, work structure as well as the operations process who
are responsible to work on the major attributes of employment during the framing of HPW
strategies (Fu et al. 2017).
HPW organizations
The characteristics of a high performing organization are,
● Continuous measurement and effective feedback: In an organization that is performing
at its best implements a continuous measurement, control and monitoring in all of its
department. They are more focused to note down the performance of each employee over
a timely basis and provide feedbacks that are important for the employee to learn and
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develop. These organizations maintain a key performance matrix and provide benefits,
bonus and appraisals to their employees based on the matrix.
● Clearly defined management structure: The hierarchical and the management structure
of a High Performing Organization is clearly defined with no scope for leakage of job
responsibilities (Topcic et al. 2016).
● Collaboration at the workplace: It can be clearly seen in an organization with a high-
performance work culture that all the departments’ work with high collaboration. They
are more inclined towards sharing and working as a team supporting each other works
over time.
● High financial efficiency: An organization with a high-performance work culture
controls and manages its financial resources more efficiently than any other business
(Chuang et al. 2016). They are able to make better decisions of procurement and strategic
alignment of the yearly budget.
Benefits of HPWO
A high performing organization brings benefits and long term advantages to both the employee
as well as the employer or the organization as a whole. The common and important benefits of
HPWO are,
● A better attitude of the employee: Every high performing organization is bounded by
rules and policies that are followed efficiently by their employee. The employee is
motivated to work with persistance and maintain the culture of the organization.
● Better cooperation within the organization as well as outside: Employees in an
HPWO are better trained and developed for working in coordination and as a team inside
and outside of the organization.
● Employee engagement: A high-performance workplace environment looks after the
betterment of the employees. Here employees tend to stay for a longer period of time.
● Improved overall organizational performance: As the employee performance
increases and innovation, creativity and better management is maintained, the overall
productivity and performance of the organization increases.
● Better financial outcomes: HPWO allows the management to control, and manage the
financial outcomes of the business more efficiently.
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Barriers of HPWO
The benefits of a high performance organization are immense (Smith, 2016). However, not all
leaders and managers are able to take their business to such a strand. There are certain barriers
that need to be addressed effectively to achieve an HPWO. They are,
Not able to educate the employees sufficiently: It is the inability of the organization to train or
develop their employees for better performance.
Poor leadership: The leadership style for carrying forward an organization towards HPWO is
also an important factor. Poor leadership can be a big barrier that still exists in developing an
organization with high performance work culture.
The burden of rules: Sometimes in order to bring in change in an organization the management
burdens the employees with several rules and policies that the employees were not initially
accustomed to. This demotivates the employees and also their performance.
Unable to develop an open workplace culture: Maintaining an open work culture is important
today to encourage the employees and made them deliver more towards productivity while the
organization takes care of their needs. Many organizations fail to do so and therefore face a
barrier towards HPWO.
LO4:
Supporting high-performance culture and commitment to performance management and
collaborative working
Performance management:
Performance management can be defined as a process of developing a workplace culture that
motivates the employees to perform to the best of their abilities. Performance management is
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based on developing a clearer job description and abiding by proper employee recruitment plans.
This continues further with the recruitment of potential and qualified employees to be selected
for the job role (Soto-Acosta et al. 2016). All the employees are monitored with continuous
measurement of their performance, meeting job responsibilities and also their behaviour in the
organization. This makes the employees more aware of their performance and gives extra effort
to stay on the high levels of their KPIs (Van Dooren et al. 2015). This is how an organization
develops and also brings better team support, better performance and enhanced organizational
efficiency.
The existing organizational culture plays a major role in supporting performance management.
An open organizational culture that promotes creativity and innovation, and also allows the
employee to work as they prefer to make them motivated to perform better and give their senior
no chance to mark them down on performance (Cooke et al. 2016). This supports the
performance management system that is incorporated into the organisation with an aim to
enhance employee performance.
The plans for performance management can only be successfully integrated through internal
collaboration and coordination among different department and teams in an organization. It is
difficult to implement performance management by the leaders without proper internal
collaboration (Noe et al. 2017). Bringing any change in the existing culture or policies to bring in
parameters of performance management requires support from all its stakeholders.
Organizations are not an easy cakewalk to run. You not only need genius minds to work behind
it steadily for the constant loop of growth happening, but at the same time you also need
organization strategy and tools that are absolutely spotless. Speaking of which, performance
management when put to organizational methodology it shows successive results of high
scalability and profitability. It has not only helped to overcome geographic dispersal and
competing challenges but also keeps the organization fortified on ground of market fluctuations.
Performance management also uplifts customer expectations during a period of transformation
and keeps the organization running with goodwill.
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