Human Resource Ramification at Southwest Airlines - Essay Example

Human Resource Ramification at Southwest Airlines Introduction It is normally the call for every company to expand its wings in an effort to see the business reach the most parts of the world. Companies, therefore, use various strategies to be able to effect this global expansion. The global expansion of business is usually one of the ways that a business uses to evaluate its growth in the market. Businesses, therefore, apply various strategies including buyouts, mergers, acquisitions, franchise, and many other strategies to ensure their growth. These strategies also are used strategically by the companies to ensure that they compete fairly in the markets and stay on the competitive edge of the business in the industry. In as much as such strategies are helpful in terms of expanding the business and eliminating competitors to penetrate the market, companies are always faced with various challenges in implementing them. One such challenge includes that of bringing together the human resources from the two sides and ensure they cope well and harmoniously to work towards achieving the objectives of the newly formed company. Southwest Airlines recently, in 2011, acquired AirTran Airways and the new company now is faced with the challenge of making the new acquired employees get used to the new culture at Southwest Airlines (Gary, The Mission of Southwest Airlines, 2014). Southwest will also add thousands of employees from a number of airlines from a variety of locations. The main purpose of this paper is therefore, to analyze the challenges that the Southwest Airline is faced with while trying to acquire the new employees and make them adapt well to its existing culture and ways of doing work. It will, therefore, carry out a SWOT analysis of the company to use in providing recommendations to address the issue. SWOT Analysis It involves the strategic analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the Southwest Airline from the human resource management perspective. Strengths Looking at their strengths, Southwest Airlines has flexible employment guidelines even though the guidelines are monitored by the workers union. The airline can negotiate flexible work hours by the union (Stewart, 2008). This enables workers to avail themselves to work at times that they are most comfortable with, and their overtime allowances paid. The airline also has a warm staff relationship as it looks responsibly after its staff. This makes the staff be motivated and go extra miles for the benefit of the company as they know the company also cares for them. Weaknesses Looking at the weaknesses of the airline, we find that; the airline is flexible even though unionized since they can still negotiate for flexible work hours. This can be a weakness to the airline as the union can negotiate work hours in favor of the employees. The airline will have to bear with the situation even when the negotiation is not in their favor. The airline also has conservative growth tactics that may be considered to be unfriendly to the newly acquired employees. The new employees might have gotten used to their previous growth tactics. When they come into Southwest Airlines, all that will be forgotten, and they will be forced to get acquire and get used to the conservative growth tactics of Southwest Airline. Threats Under threats to the Airlines human resources, there is an increased prevalence of terrorists attacks that put the lives of the employees at risk. The attack might result into the loss of good employees with adequate competence and experience to run the Airline. The Airline will, therefore, be forced to recruit new employees who must be trained and equipped well to be able to replace the ones lost. This is always a tedious and expensive exercise. Another threat is that of the recession that comes with reduced air travel and increase in oil prices. Such threats may go to an extent where the company may have a lot of operating expenses than the incoming revenues. It might not, therefore, be able to pay all the employees, hence retrenching some of them or reducing their pay and allowances. Opportunities The opportunities available therefore, include the fact that, the company can expand to other cities, and in fact, it has recently expanded to new cities like Washington D.C and New York (Gary, 2014). This is a good thing to the employees as they get the opportunities to extend their services to other cities thereby seeing most of them being promoted to new positions. It, therefore, promotes career growth to its employees as well as improving their welfare as their income will also increase through promotions. The opportunity will also lead to more employees being added to the airline. Venturing into international flights is also another viable opportunity for Airline that may also go a long way to improving the lives of the employees, their careers, and welfare. Recommendation to Address the Issues To address the issues from the SWOT analysis of the Airline, there are various recommendations that can be implemented. On its strengths, the airline can resort to the creation of strong negotiation committees that will face the union negotiation committee to be able to negotiate fairly for flexible working hours in its favor. The airline is also urged to make use of its great staff relationship to induce them into living the Southwest way which encompasses three characteristics of having a warrior spirit, a servants heart, and a fun-loving attitude. This will make it easy for the management to inculcate the Southwest culture into its acquired employees. The recommendations to help improve on its weaknesses, the airline should ensure that it becomes flexible with its growth tactics so that the incumbent employees can also bring forth their suggestions on how to improve the growth of the company. Growth tactics should be those that can change with the various changes in the business environment. Therefore, some employees may have with them the tactics that they have acquired from their previous working stations. Such can be debated upon to evaluate which ones to be taken up and which ones to be done away with. During recession, the company can resort to reducing their prices and improving the quality of services to help them maintain a given threshold of customers so that they do not end up retrenching many employees. The airline should also ensure that they keep enough funds when the business is well that will enable it to take care of its employees even during the times of recession. To be in a position of expanding to other cities, the airline can involve in various mergers and acquisitions. It should also exploit the opportunities available in the international market by spreading its wings internationally. This will create great opportunities to its employees in terms of their career growth and development as well as improving their welfare. Tasks for Recruiting and Hiring To be able to recruit and hire employees for global expansion of the Airline, there are four tasks that should be considered. These include developing a hiring strategy, creating accurate and updated job descriptions, sourcing of candidates and preparing the candidates for interviews (Tara, 2014). When developing a hiring strategy, the airline will keep in mind that the strategy should be in line with the goals and objectives of the airline including its culture. With an updated job description, the airline will be able to select the best candidates that are well suited to fill the positions. It also helps the candidates to know what the position requires of them. Sourcing the candidates will entail where exactly to get the candidates from. For an expanding business, the candidates should be sourced from various parts of the world as the airline is yearning for global expansion. However, it should be careful to find competent and experienced candidates who are also flexible to change and adopt the companys culture. Metric for Evaluating the Outcome of the Expansion of the Organization To evaluate the outcomes of the expansion of the organization, there are several metrics that can be used. Some of these include employee satisfaction surveys, improved labor relations, decrease in pay disparities, improved job satisfaction, better retention, improvement in productivities, organization rankings in terms of best places to work, innovation and creativity levels, and the relationship levels among diverse members of staff (Marc, 2012). Such metrics and many more are very useful in evaluating the outcome of the organizational expansion that Southwest Airline can employ. Thoughts about the Merger and Expansion The merger and expansion by the Southwest is a good step that the company has used increase its human resource services globally (Griffin, 2007). The strategies are aimed to capture more market space for the company and also improve its competitive position in the industry. However, due to the conservative nature of Southwest in terms of its human resource culture, the company must face challenges in trying to make the new employees adopt its ways of doing things. The company will, therefore, go through a thorough hiring and recruitment process to end up with those employees that will be able to deliver as per the requirement of its goals and objectives. References Gary, K. (2014). A Year in Review. Southwest Review, 1. Retrieved from https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/index.html?int=GFOOTER-ABOUT-ABOUT Gary, K. (2014). The Mission of Southwest Airlines. About Southwest, 1. Griffin, R. (2007). Principles of management. Boston: MA: Houghton Mifflin CO. Marc, B. (2012). Diversity Metrics, Measurements, and Evaluation. Workforce Diversity Network, 5. Stewart, S. (2008). A Southwest Airline SWOT Analysis. Rapid Business Intelligence Success, 1-3. Tara, H. (2014). Steps in Recruiting and Hiring Process. ERC, 2-4. Read More