Solution

The role and contribution of the HR professional with reference to the CIPD’s Profession Map

In a constantly changing business environment, organizations are exploring how they can develop and expand themselves and their employees. Professionalism in HR is someone who is managing self/teams, and/or across the organization, but also uses the knowledge and skills to set principles. Professionalism is not just about demonstrating expertise and skills, but knowing how and when to apply that knowledge. The HR professional is a real asset within the organization. The HR Manager/professional design and implement HR policies, programs, and processes. He or she assesses the needs of manpower, coordinates the recruitment and the reception, and deals with benefit and compensation plans. Furthermore, HR professionals are responsible for personal development which includes all aspects of career assessment, orientation, motivation and engagement, training, functional and geographical mobility, rewarding and so on. They also support the whole organization through its values, strategy and insights, objectives and design.

Being a professional HR individual is having the right skills, knowledge, and behavior of the ‘thinking performer’ from the CIPD Profession Map. For example, the Thinking Performer would contribute to the organization & keep in touch with customers. The ‘thinking performer’ performs operationally, but also would think about what they are doing, also they would see to contribute to the business’s objectives, and recognize their responsibilities.     

CIPD Professional Map shows the professional areas of what a person is supposed to do and understand each area, the behaviour needed to carry out the activities and the four bands that show the trail and focus to developmental planning and activities (CIPD. (n.d)., 2018). The Map is also flexible, so a person can select what to focus on a subject to the area of work, and a person’s career development ambitions. There are two core professional areas according to CIPD map, which is Insights, strategy & solutions and Leading HR. For one to be a successful leader, he or she must be a role model and develop and supports others within the organization (CIPD UK. (n. d)., 2015). Strategy, Insights & Solutions involve developing actionable insights and solutions, prioritized and tailored around a deep understanding of business, contextual and organizational understanding. In addition, it indicates how a person moves from one bad to another. Behaviours indicate how HR professionals are supposed to conduct themselves. The behaviours are 8 in numbers; Curios, decisive thinker, skilled influencer, personally credible, collaborative, driven to deliver, the courage to challenge and role model.

Band one deal involves HR specialists who take care of customers and administrative functions. Band two involves managers and supervisors who develop major HR policies and ensure that the top executive is informed. Band three involves HR consultants and partners while band four deals with HR personnel who come up with long term strategic plans. The importance of the map is that it clearly describes the competence for people working in HR but also shows what to do in order to be successful and effective in HR and what to deliver at any stage in one’s career.

My current role in my organization is HR assistant which put me in band one. This is because I recently joined a newly formed HR department and my current focus at the moment is data processing, providing information, etc., I am also still learning and I don’t have previous HR experience which puts me in this band. In order to move from band one to band two, I must spend time-solving HR issues, analysing information, focusing on team and company goals rather than my own by gaining more knowledge of the organization and becoming more involved in more projects that will make me more knowledgeable about different aspects of the HR department

One of my behaviours is engagement with employees which also put me in band one.

This is because currently I collect and analyse employee responses, maintain the information, build engagement workshops, etc. Firstly I need to gain experience in the basics of the HR department and aspects before moving to do bigger projects.  In order to move from band one to band two, I must be able to provide reports based on the data, implement employee feedback processes, being able to encourage people, coach managers, etc.  In order to do this, I need to gain more experience and take on more projects.

I believe I’m credible which put me in band two. This is because I use my experience and identify opportunities to widen my existing skills. I am able to provide advice and take on any learning from colleagues and managers. This is because by studying CIPD, I am able to use some of my own knowledge and skills to help out and give advice. I am also always keen on taking any new learning as it helps me with my progression. In order to move to band three, I must act as a role model and focus on building more knowledge and also being able to offer professional and up to date advice to all staff by using my own knowledge of HR and business trends. In order to do this, I need to further study and do research to keep my knowledge relevant and up to date.

Project Management Techniques within an HR Context

Project Management is the art and science of knowledge, skills and experience application for the purpose of initiating, planning, executing, and controlling the project team with the aim of meeting the project requirements or achieve project objectives (Explorer, 2016). The project I was a part of was in relation to the recruitment of home trial nurses. I was responsible for searching for nurses, scheduling interviews, requesting, collecting & completing right to work documents (the nurses could not start without going through the HR onboarding process first) & create spreadsheets for the use of the whole team to know what stage we are at with each nurse. This was a challenge as it was a new process to the company and every process had to be set up from scratch. We also didn’t have any nurses contacted/ set up with us at the start that we could use straight away when a vacancy came up, and as the contacting process took a very long time we would often miss visit deadlines.

Key Stages of a Project

• Initiation

When the project was born, my manager identified to me what my tasks will be and what training I will be given and by whom, and who is going to be involved in this task. The people involved were recruiter, nurse manager, country lead, and HR assistant. My training was with the country lead and for the first month, we had meetings set up where we would work on setting up processes and at the same time onboarding nurses for vacancies.

• Planning & Design

In this project, we delegated tasks to people that best suit them by looking at their best skills and experience that would be used effectively in this project, we also set time frame on how quickly things need to turn around for the nurses not to miss the visit scheduled. We also agreed on what timetables & spreadsheets we are going to use in this project and who is going to design them for the team to use.

• Execution

We set meetings with the team where we discussed how everything is going to be executed and how we want it to work, and once we were happy with processes put in place, we had put all our plans in action.

• Monitoring & Controlling

To monitor and control the project, we conducted regular meetings with the team and evaluated our processes to see if they work effectively and also by identifying any problems or issues that we could resolve as a team. We looked at spreadsheets and trackers to see how we are doing and what we can do to improve and speed up the process.

• Completion

When we completed our project, we evaluated how we did to see what we could have done better and how we are going to do it better next time, we also reviewed and reflected on our project to avoid making the same mistakes in future projects.

I was involved in another project for recruiting new graduates for leadership program in IMF bank. The leadership program lasted for one year. We used the following steps to identify the best candidates; initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and completion. The initiation stage involved carrying background check on candidates to determine whether they could fit in organization. The second step involved planning on the candidate that we had shortlisted in terms of the cost of their training. After we had come up with a plan of action, we executed it through testing student in by putting them in leadership positions. We kept monitoring the performance of the graduates to determine whether they were improving. The last stage was completion where we dropped those we felt they did not showcase leadership capability and absorbed the graduate who performed better.  

Problem Solving Techniques within an HR Context

The main two problem solving techniques that are used in HR to solve the problem is root cause analysis and 5 Why’re methods. There are many problems that arise in the HR department or issue connected to employees and they touch the HR department. Therefore, it is advisable for HR to adopt a problem solving technique that can help them find the root cause of a problem in order to find a permanent solution. 5 Why’s technique involve asking the question ‘why’’ five times when a problem arises until a person reaches the underlying source of a problem. 5 why’s tool is a useful method of getting to understand the underlying problems about something. It also helps to go a little deeper on a particular issue, which is great on its own and coming up with solutions that fix the underlying causes. The 5 Whys method is a technique used by HR to determine what the root of a problem really is. Using the 5 Whys helps to find what the problem really is, and providing an opportunity to develop a more long-term solution.

I have used 5 why’s a technique in my organization when handling poor performance that had been recorded in last year to identify the underlying reason behind employee’s performing poorly. I asked myself five questions: Why employees have been coming to work late? Why employees have been taking too much time to complete tasks? Why employees have been engaging in conflict with their supervisors? Why absenteeism has increased in the recent past? Why the rate of employees leaving the organization has increased? After analysing the five questions, I realized that employees have not been increased salaries and allowances for a long time. Employees performed poorly due to poor compensation plan and lack of conducive working environment. I engaged the rest of human resource officers and top executive to increase allowances for employees to improve their performances. The HR department also installed air conditioners in the offices. After six months, employee performance had doubled.

Root cause analysis is a process through which to discover the contributing factors behind an organizational issue. Proactive human resource officers use root cause analysis tools within their department to, for example, determine why the performance of employees has dropped. This level of analysis enables the HR department to succeed with their short-term and long-term objectives and to mitigate disruption at the management level. Root cause analysis means digging and finding the very basic cause of a problem and not a manifestation of it. It is critical to successfully solve a problem in order to avoid expending resources in the wrong place. This often only mitigates the problem temporarily and eventually, it resurfaces over and over again. Although it sounds easy to implement it could also easily fool even the most experienced, as manifestations may present themselves as the real root cause.

In the last organization I worked for as HR officers, I encountered employees’ protest that lasted or one week. The HR department had no clear reason why employees were protesting. I was appointed to deal with protest and instead of solving immediate strike I analysed the possible causes of the protest by examining the reason that could have made employees protest. After analysis, I realized that employees were overworked and this demotivated them, triggering the strikes. I advised HR depart to hire more employees to reduce the number of tasks that a single employee handled.

The Elements of Group Dynamics

According to CIPD “The Dynamics of Organizational means that all professionals must be able to work with one another.  HR professionals are no exception to this and must work with colleagues within their function as well as individuals and groups from another background” (Barnett, 2016) Team Work is common in Organization & HR Department working with a variety of stakeholders with different goals and interest. HR team must understand the required skills to work interactively and cooperatively to operate successfully and effectively.

According to Bruce Tuckman, there are five stages of a group development (CIPD Profession Map, 2015):

1. Forming – in this stage, the roles & responsibility are not as clear as members dependent on the leader. The leader directs the team member and set clear roles and objectives. Group members here pretend to get along with others(Barnett, 2016).
2. Storming – the members push against the limit and responsibility, the conflict between members for different working style and challenges. A leader must build trust and a good relationship. Group members in this stage stop being polite and try to get down to the issues.
3. Norming – clear roles and responsibilities, resolve the differences and respect for the leader. Group members get used to each other in this stage and develop trust(Mind Tools., 2016).
4. Performing – members see themselves as a part of the team, achieve team goal by hard work. A leader can focus on team development by delegating work to the team member(Barnett, 2016).

Forming is considered as the most important stage since a team member brings different strength and weakness along. Different work style comes from different background and diverse skills which can also be challenging. It depends on the right member to work together so the task can be creative and innovative which will impact the HR by building good relationships (Statistics, U. B., 2015). To build good team dynamics, we should learn how to separate our own interest and focus on the organization interest, being supportive and try to understand a different point of view.

All individuals should be operating in groups and being able to support, encourage and work well with each other, which leads to working effectively as a team by respecting each other and see that others do have a valuable input to make.

Conflict Resolution Methods

Negotiation

Negotiation is the most basic and common method of conflict resolution. It involves direct communication between the conflicting parties with an objective of finding an amicable solution (Manage Train Learn, 2016). In an HR setting, conflicts like performance review conflicts can exist when an employee receives bad comments over their performance. At that time, the employee can become very annoyed and may argue or conflict if they feel they have been personally abused or they feel the analysis of the performances was unfair. In this case, the negotiation will come in where you will sit with the employee and discuss the reason that led to the comments and also provide advice on how to improve to prevent such situations happening in the future. The employee will also raise their concern and provide solutions that they think they best suit the problem and I will put them into consideration. In an HR context, negotiation will help in retaining respect, solving the conflict easily and fast and will also help in settling on a middle ground. The action to be taken would involve the creation of an action plan in order to improve the employee’s performance and record any goals met. These records will need to be updated and reviewed periodically to note the progress of the organization.

Withdrawing

The method is also regarded as avoiding. This is when one doesn’t address the conflict but sidesteps, postpones or simply avoid it completely (Collins, 1991). In an HR context, employees might have conflict over one individual who has been promoted. In this case, if you try to solve the conflict, then you lose as you cannot promote everyone. In my organization, this method can be applied to solve conflicts that are not serious and genuine, conflicts that may result to fight between the parties or ones that I feel nervous to handle. The technique is cheap as it doesn’t take up any resource and helps to avoid repetitive conflicts over the same issues (Conflict Resolution, 2016).

Smoothing/Accommodating

This involves the accommodation of other peoples’ concern first before considering yours (Conflict Resolution, 2016). In a group dynamic setting, conflicts over working conditions improvement can occur. If at this time the organization is making profits and the employees are giving their best, as the Human Resource boss, I would apply the smoothing method to avoid further conflicts. This would involve the improvements in working conditions as the employees will become happier than before and perform well. The method would be very effective as it wouldn’t require any effort and would improve performance and positively affect profits.

Methods for Influencing, Persuading and Negotiating with Others

The first issue that I identified in my organization was the duplication of work hidden agenda among the employees. As the employees were several of them in the team, each person would be working on their own flowcharts/spreadsheet, and often duplicate work. This would often cause confusion and conflicts. To resolve this problem, we had first clarified issues by listening to each other’s needs and each other’s opinions and ideas and negotiate and evaluate our materials & processes we all had and clearly identify who is responsible for which task, by identifying who would be best at what task, we also agreed to write up activity charts of each process.  For example, the activity chart reflected what each person was supposed to do, by when and the persons they would report to.

As a Human Resource Manager, the matter was directed to me. To influence, persuade and negotiate the decision, I listened to the needs of others, but also by getting my points across in a calm manner. The result was positive as everyone was following the same processes and work was completed faster.

The second problem I identified in the organization (HR Department) was the lack of face to face communication. The team would often use email to communicate with all members of the team which very often was very confusing due to the very high level of emails being sent. This also caused emails being missed by some people, therefore, tasks, issues, etc. was not dealt in timely manner and conflicts were caused as tasks were not being completed or there was a misunderstanding that could have been avoided if spoken face to face. To solve this problem, I had to influence team members to communicate better by getting an agreement acceptable to both sides. I would suggest ideas that the team could use such as follow up on unanswered emails, schedule meetings, going to the person and speak face to face when an issue occurs/ or when communication is not very clear and afterward summarize on email as to what has been said/agreed between both parties. This would result in less email traffic and a clearer understanding of all team members. The result was also positive as it created a more positive atmosphere in the team as everyone was communicating better, also people were more confident in what they were talking about which created less confusion in the team.

To influence, persuade and negotiate the decision, I emphasized the positive aspects of my argument and backing up my points with facts of how it’s not working now and how this decision will help and improve the situation

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