HR Planning at Qantas - Essay Example

HR Planning at Qantas Introduction The study primarily seeks to put forth the effectiveness of human resource planning in organizations and its effects in attaining employee loyalty and satisfaction. Organizations have been increasingly focusing their attention towards improving employee relations within an HR environment and have also realized the importance of building committed and communicating teams. In the rapidly changing external environment firms have been focusing more on human strategies in order to remain competitive in the global market. In this situation organizations have been increasingly trying to find out what employees think and want from them1. The question of trade union has an important role to play in this context. They are meant to ensure that employees desires are satisfied and that they get a proper working environment and culture for conducting their jobs conveniently and comfortably too. It is also crucial that the strategies that the management undertakes are willingly accepted by employees and unions in order to ensure to make them effective and successful. Employee’s acceptance of the organizational strategies accounts for a key factor for their effective implementation. The project seeks to present the present situation at Qantas Airways which Australia’s flag carrier and regarded as one of the most well known airlines in the world. The company’s maintenance and repair costs account for one of the most expensive in the world; however, they are the least efficient at the same time. The CEO, Alan Joyce has realized that implementing positive changes for the purpose of improving the current situation is being resisted by employees which have been retarding the progress of the organization. However, there are a number of strategic contingencies faced by Allan Joyce in implementing the strategic choices in the organization. These would be explored in the project. Finally recommendations are provided for attaining the commitment of employees and implementing the human resource planning process. Strategic contingencies affecting the strategic choices that Qantas has from theoretical and practical perspective and effect of the choices on human resource planning The most important and prominent contingency faced by the company was to implement any plan as the staff were not willing to accept in change initiated by the management. As presented by Kavanagh and Ashkanasy, (2006), any change management strategy must strive to bring about a complete cultural change in the organization in order to be successful and the most important component in this change process is effective communication and transparency and must be led under proper and competent leadership2. The various contingencies towards bringing out the changes can be discussed under the certain theories and models3. The primary change management principles are discussed as under. Figure 1: Primary Change Management Principle (Source: Hiatt & Creasey, 2003, P. 15) In this case the resistance towards change is primarily the main focus of concern. The main aim was to reduce the maintenance costs for which new maintenance regulations were attempted to be implemented. The new maintenance regulations were issued by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to align the functioning of the airline in accordance to that followed by the European airlines. It also tries to make further advancement in its technologies and services. He realized that the numerous people were responsible for maximizing the profitability of the aircraft in terms of fuel efficiencies and introduction of new products and services. However, it was also realized that the maintenance costs and repair costs were extremely high and this required a complete change in the procedures and practices. The company wanted to significantly improve its international operations. The prime aim was to reduce all kinds of redundancies which would be possible through the implementation of a four pronged strategy. It was important that the redundancies were eliminated completely and successfully. As mentioned by Senge, et al., all interventions must be made to have long lasting impact on the organization. It is worthwhile to identify the existing gaps, make a thorough analysis of the causes and then recommend and implement interventions. Such interventions are likely to fetch long lasting results for the company. However, most of efforts for changes fail because of the fact they do not yield long lasting results. It is crucial to sustain the change efforts in order to deal with the challenges successfully and avoid the cause of the gap to reoccur repeatedly4. One of the obvious strategic alternative present before the company was to cut jobs in order to curtail costs which were rising at an alarming rate. However, the main problem with this step was that would result in considerable employee dissatisfaction and spread insecurity among the existing employees too. Job cuts would necessarily have to be done on the basis of employee performance and productivity which means that employees who were underperforming were required to be removed. However, this would result in considerable dissatisfaction among employees in the organization. It has been mentioned by authors and researchers that service capability has a direct link with job satisfaction. Organizations must thus seek to promote such strategies which simultaneously manage high quality of services as well as attains high levels of job satisfaction too5. Thus the management decided to implement the immediate strategy for removing redundancies by asking the pilots to take long leaves instead of taking away their jobs. One of the plans that Joyce wanted to implement was to stop the licensed engineers from conducting unnecessary and unwanted transit checks on the modern aircrafts. It tried to implement the system of ‘A’ category of licenses which were allowable under the new regulations of CASA. This was meant to close the gaps existing in the way of attaining global competitiveness. The idea was to free up the specialized engineers and allow the airline to adopt with the best practices in the world. However, it can be apprehended that the engineers would resist to this idea. This is because any strategies to change are confronted with denial which eventually changes into acceptance. Researchers explain that an individual can react to a change negatively but eventually develops a different attitude at a later stage in the change process6. This can be explained with the transition curve presented in the figure below. The capability of the organization to modify itself and adapt itself to the endogenous and exogenous variables would account for the crucial component in the improvement of the process. Figure 2: The transition curve (Source: Lazăr, 2005, P.3) It is expected that initially changes would be resisted by the engineers and the company’s employees and that the unions would make unfair and unreasonable demands in terms of compensation, however, situations would be brought under control once the changes would begin to yield results and reap benefits7. Recommendations for maintaining employee commitment and implementing HR planning policies It is recommended that Joyce do not implement job cuts as a measure of attaining cost cuts. This is primarily because job cuts only results in the spreading of apprehensions and anxieties among employees which further results in diminishing performances and productivity. Rather a high performing work practices would be more effective in terms of explaining strategic contingencies. Instead of downsizing and removing the extra pilots the company could restructure the existing work practices to ensure high delivery of services so that the work quality could be maintained at a high level8. Instead of downsizing, the company could redesign the pay structure of employees in order to ensure overall lower costs. The prime area of restructuring should be on using innovative practices and renewal, especially in the knowledge based organizations. Moreover restructuring should be done responsibly and on a reasonable basis. The idea should be use its human assets wisely and not eliminate them in times of crisis. This is because the human assets play the role of developing new markets, sources of revenue and customers9. The pay structure could be revised under which the variable component of the salaries could be increased. Under the system the variable component would have to be directly linked with performance and productivity. Such a strategy would provide with a stronger ground on which management would be able to negotiate with the unions and attain their support. It is recommended that performance related compensation packages are implemented for generating greater productivity and performance. It must also be ensured that the strategies are fair and not biased towards groups or clusters. Only a standard and unbiased strategy could be helpful in attaining employee commitment and loyalty10. In other words the objective should remain the same and the organizations must not move away from the focus while implementing strategies. Since the immediate concern before the management was high costs and lower efficiencies, it could be better eliminated through compensation restricting and not by company downsizing. One of the key areas of workforce planning would be to consider the external changes and its impacts on the company. Since global competition is stiff and external conditions keep changing at a fast pace, the company must make a talent forecast. It is possible that diminishing the organization would be effective in controlling costs for a short span of time but might eventually result in talent shortage at the long time when the economy would face booming conditions. Organizations increasingly face with talent shortage. Moreover competition in the airlines industry remains high due to which the company would be likely to face recruitment problems in future. Thus it is recommended that the company must try and retain their existing talents and utilize them to the company’s benefit. Due to the high competition existing in the airlines sector it would be difficult to get talent as per requirements. Thus the main concern should be to focus on employee satisfaction and commitment and tacking negotiations with the union. It was important to be prepared rather than be faced with a surprise. Joyce could rather try and attain stability in the organization which would act as a cushion against external shocks and competition and strengthen the ground also. Most importantly all human resource strategies must be aimed at attaining the business objectives. Thus the HR policies and practices must be consequently aligned with those objectives in order to be effective. Reference Bramham, J. (1994). Human Resource Planning. Universities Press. Cascio, W. F. (2002). Strategies for responsible restructuring. The Academy of Management Executive (1993-2005) © 2002. Vol. 16, No. 3, Aug., 2002. Dow, J. & Raposo, C.C. (2005). CEO Compensation, Change, and Corporate Strategy. The Journal of Finance. Volume 60, Issue 6, pages 2701–2727, December 2005. Hiatt, J. & Creasey, T. J. (2003). Change management: the people side of change. Prosci. Kavanagh, M. H. & Ashkanasy, M. N. (2006). The Impact of Leadership and Change Management Strategy on Organizational Culture and Individual Acceptance of Change during a Merger. British Journal of Management. Volume 17, Issue S1, pages S81–S103. Lazăr, I. (2003). Change management in organizations. Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, 15 E/2005, pp. 49-55. Ramirez, M. Guy, F. & Beale, D. (2007). Contested Resources: Unions, Employers, and the Adoption of New Work Practices in US and UK Telecommunications. Volume 45, Issue 3, pages 495–517, September 2007. Schlesinger, L. A. & Zornitsky, J. (1991). Job Satisfaction, Service Capability, and Customer Satisfaction: An Examination of Linkages and Management Implications. Human Resource Planning (1991). Volume: 14, Issue: 2, Publisher: Human Resource Planning Society, Pages: 141-149. Senge, P. et al. (2007). The dance of change: The challenges to sustaining momentum in learning organizations. Volume 38, Issue 5, pages 55–58, May/June 1999. Ven, A. H. V. & Poole, M. S. (1995). Explaining development and change in organizations. The Academy of Management Review. Vol. 20, No. 3, Jul., 1995. Read More