Conducting a Job Analysis (Gary Dessler)

There are six steps in doing a job analysis, as follows.

Step 1: Decide how you’ll use the information Some data collection techniques—like interviewing the employee—are good for writing job descriptions. Other techniques, like the position analysis questionnaire we describe later, provide numerical ratings for each job; these can be used to compare jobs for compensation purposes.

Step 2: Review relevant background information such as organization charts, process charts, and job descriptions.Organization charts show the organization-wide division of  work, and where the job fits in the overall organization. The chart should show the title of each position and, by means of interconnecting lines, who reports to whom and with whom the job incumbent communicates. A process chart provides a more detailed picture of the workflow, particularly the flow of inputs to and outputs from the job you’re analyzing. (In Figure 2, the quality control clerk reviews components from suppliers, checks components going to the plant managers, and gives information regarding component’s quality to these managers.) Finally, the existing job description, if there is one, usually provides a starting point for building the revised job description.

WORKFLOW ANALYSIS AND JOB REDESIGN Job analysis tasks such as reviewing current job descriptions enable the manager to list what a job’s duties and demands are now. Job analysis does not answer questions such as “Should this job even exist?” To answer such questions, one must conduct a workflow analysis. You may then deem it necessary to redesign the job. Workflow analysis is a detailed study of the flow of work from job to job in a work process. Usually, the analyst focuses on one identifiable work process (such as processing an insurance claim), rather than on how the company gets all its work done. The accompanying HR as a Profit Center feature illustrates workflow analysis.

The Basics Of Job Analysis (Gary Dessler)

Talent management begins with understanding what jobs need to be filled, and the human traits and competencies employees need to do those jobs effectively. Job analysis is the procedure through which you determine the duties of the jobs you are analyzing and the characteristics of the  people to hire for them. 

Job analysis produces information for writing job descriptions (a list of what duties the job entails) and job (or “person”) specifications (what kind of people to hire for the job). Virtually every personnel-related action you take—interviewing applicants, and training and appraising employees, for instance—depends on knowing what the job entails and what human traits and skills one needs to do the job well. 

The supervisor or human resources specialist normally collects one or more of the following types of information via the job analysis:

● Work activities. First, he or she collects information about the job’s actual work activities, such as cleaning, selling, teaching, or painting. This list may also include how, why, and when the worker performs each activity.

What Is Talent Management? (Gary Dessler)

Talent management is the goal-oriented and integrated process of planning, recruiting, developing, managing, and compensating employees. When a manager takes a talent management perspective, he or she:

1. Understands that the talent management tasks (including recruiting, training, and paying employees) are parts of a single interrelated talent management process. For example, having employees with the right skills depends as much on recruiting, training, and compensation as it does on applicant testing.

2. Makes sure talent management decisions such as staffing, training, and pay are goal directed. Managers should always be asking, “What recruiting, testing, or other actions should I take to produce the employee competencies we need to achieve our strategic goals?”

Strategic Human Resource Management (Gary Dessler)

Managers formulate corporate strategies, and then competitive strategies for each of their businesses. Then, we’ve seen that once a business decides how it will compete, it turns to formulating functional (departmental) strategies to support its competitive aims. One of those departments is human resource management and its functional strategies are human resource management strategies.

What Is Strategic Human Resource Management?

Every company needs its human resource management policies and activities to make sense in terms of its broad strategic aims. For example, a high-end retailer such as Neiman-Marcus will have different employee selection, training, and pay policies than will Walmart. Strategic human resource management means formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors the company needs to achieve its strategic aims. The following Strategic Context feature illustrates this.

What Are HR Audits? (Gary Dessler)

Human resource managers often collect data on matters such as employee turnover and safety via human resource audits. One practitioner calls an HR audit “an analysis by which an organization measures where it currently stands and determines what it has to accomplish to improve its HR function.” The HR audit generally involves reviewing the company’s human resource function (recruiting, testing, training, and so on), usually using a checklist, as well as ensuring that the firm is adhering to regulations, laws, and company policies.

In conducting the HR audit, managers often benchmark their results to comparable companies’. Sample measures (metrics) might include the ratio of HR professionals per company employee. HR audits vary in scope and focus. Typical areas audited include the following:

1. Roles and head count (including job descriptions, and employees categorized by exempt/ nonexempt and full- or part-time).

What Do The New Human Resource Managers Do? (Gary Dessler)

For much of the twentieth century, “personnel” managers focused mostly on day-to-day activities. In the earliest firms, they took over hiring and firing from supervisors, ran the payroll department, and administered benefits plans. As expertise in testing emerged, the personnel department played a bigger role in employee selection and training. New union laws in the 1930s added, “Helping the employer deal with unions” to its list of duties. With new equal employment laws in the 1960s, employers began relying on HR for avoiding discrimination claims.

Today, employers face new challenges, such as squeezing more profits from operations. They expect their human resource managers to have what it takes to address these new challenges. 

Let’s look at 10 things today’s HR managers do to deal with these challenges.

Why Is Human Resource Management Important to all Managers? (Gary Dessler)

Perhaps it’s easier to answer this by listing some of the personnel mistakes you don’t want to make while managing. For example, you don’t want

● To have your employees not doing their best.

● To hire the wrong person for the job.

● To experience high turnover.

● To have your company in court due to your discriminatory actions.

● To have your company cited for unsafe practices.

● To let a lack of training undermine your department’s effectiveness.

● To commit any unfair labor practices.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE Carefully studying this text can help you avoid mistakes like these. More important, it can help ensure that you get results—through people. Remember that you could do everything else right as a manager—lay brilliant plans, draw clear organization charts, set up modern assembly lines, and use sophisticated accounting controls—but still fail, for 

instance, by hiring the wrong people or by not motivating subordinates.

Determining the Optimal Blueprint for Your Organization (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The key question to answer here is: What is the most effective Human Capital Strategy for your organization? How can you know if your company is improving the performance of its human capital? How can you know if your company is managing its human capital more effectively than its competitors are? 

The Human Capital Lagging Indicator 

Is there a single measure that concludes human capital improves year- over-year? Or, should we judge the efficiency of a human capital strategy by measuring changes in each of a set of key positions? 

A 2007 McKinsey Quarterly article stated that the value of “intangible capital” of the world’s top 150 companies, as measured by market value less invested financial capital, increased from $800 billion in 1985 to $7.2 trillion in 2005.6 However, annual reports still focus on how a company uses its financial capital—not how it is growing its in- tangible values, the most important of which is human capital. 

Strategic Human Capital Components (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The human capital vision creates a concrete and measurable definition of success; the strategic components are plans that describe how to achieve that vision. Achieving the vision requires excellence in four components. (See Table 2-2.) If all four are well-executed, it is likely that your organization will have a sustained competitive advantage through people. The first three strategic components are critical roles - roles that are most important for customer and shareholder satisfaction. The fourth component enables the first three. 

Effective Executive Teams 

The key question to ask about the first critical role—effective executive teams—is: Are our executive teams more effective this year than last year? The executive teams may include the corporate top team, business unit teams, region/country-level teams, and functional leadership teams. Without a high-performing executive team at the top, little will happen below. Executive teams set the end-state vision and business strategies, and invest time and money to ensure that aspirations turn to business results. 

Setting the Human Capital Vision (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The human capital vision is founded on the human capital theory and attempts to turn the theory into a concrete statement of success. Figure 2-2 presents an example.

Several assumptions lie beneath the vision statement:


• Leading measures are defined by performance, not competencies. Competencies are an important means to an end and should be measured and managed as such; but success is industry-best performance, not industry-best people.

• Success is measured against industry benchmarks or primary competitors. Being world-class is ideal, but it is not required to deliver business results. Burger King’s performance in site selection must be better than McDonald’s; it does not need to be better than Marriott’s.

The Human Capital Vision (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The important question to answer here is: What does success look like?

In the mid-1990s, Taco Bell, then a PepsiCo company, was one of the hottest companies on earth. In the middle of its success, John Martin, Taco Bell’s CEO, assigned seven of his highest-potential middle managers to a two-year, full-time, multidisciplinary team to rein- vent Taco Bell’s business model. Martin’s vision was “250,000 points of access by the year 2000.” He defined a point of access as “wherever someone can buy a Taco Bell product.” Taco Bell’s new vision was clear, memorable, and measurable.

Given that Taco Bell had about 4,000 stores at the time, 250,000 seemed to be an unrealistic goal. However, the team energetically be- gan work and within a few short months had created a new process that increased store openings from 700 each year to more than 1,200. Martin thanked the team but told them that while that was very good news, the goal was still 250,000 points of access.

The team decided that it needed to think more creatively. At the time, cafeterias were the only place to eat in airports. “What if we put Taco Bells in airports?” the team members wondered. “Let’s call them SPODs” (special points of distribution). Soon, Taco Bell SPODs were popping up in airports, stadiums, and strip malls. SPODs quickly added more than 1,000 points of access each year. Again, Martin was grateful but unmoved. The vision was still 250,000.

The Human Capital Theory (Bradley W Hall,PHD)

The first question to answer is: How does HR create business value? 

Several years ago, while involved in a project with a large retail company’s HR department, I noticed that the labor law team was the largest corporate HR department. The company employed eight to ten times the number of labor lawyers per employee as its competitors, and four of its six corporate HR executives had been promoted from the legal department. Attorney telephone numbers were on the speed dial of every HR generalist, and daily decisions were routinely screened for legal exposure. HR generalists complained incessantly about the legal team obstructing their work, but the checking and approval process remained intact. What would you say was HR’s theory on how it added value to the business? 

A second company I supported had been a lead company in a regulated industry for many years. In this company, the focus of HR staff meetings was policy and policy enforcement. Before meetings and on breaks, HR generalists playfully sparred with one another on policy details. “. . . That’s right, but she only gets 30 days if she has more than two years of tenure at a company merged before 2001.” Peers looked on and cheered as one bested the other. How might you describe the human capital theory at this company? 

Today’s Approach to Human Capital Management (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

Today’s approach for improving workforce performance is failing. There are three reasons:
1. No one is accountable for year-over-year human capital performance.
2. Results require a system, not world-class programs.
3. Today’s HR model is misaligned to deliver business results.

Let’s look at each of these reasons.

No One Is Accountable

The head of manufacturing is accountable for year-over-year improvements in manufacturing productivity. The head of marketing is ac- countable for year-over-year changes in brand equity. The head of sales is responsible for revenue growth. But who is responsible for year-over- year improvements in the company’s most valuable asset—its people? Nobody. Line managers see HR as accountable, but HR sees itself ac- countable for programs that must be converted into business results by line managers. No one is in charge of human capital performance.