Human Resource Management in Banksia Health Service - Case Study Example

Running Header: Human Resource Management Student’s Name: Instructor’s Name: Course Code: Date of Submission: Title Human Resource Management Case study: Banksia Health Service Table of contents Executive summary 4 Introduction 5 Situational analysis 5 Human resource solutions 6 Recommendations 7 Implementation 7 Conclusion 8 References 9 Participants and sampling 13 Executive summary This article was commissioned to establish the situation at Banksia Health Service and what has resulted to poor financial performance of the facility. The analysis has established that Human resource management for many years has remained a very big challenge in the health sector. The process of monitoring, controlling and evaluating the role of HR function must proactive, respectable and professional. The Banksia Health Service is a facility that was established by the government in the 1990s as an initiative to serve the local people by providing them with health solutions. During this review, it was found that lack of human resource function and proper channels of communication has remained the biggest problem for the Health facility. Finally, this analysis has managed to propose some of the important recommendations that can be used to sort out the mess at Banksia Health Service which include the introduction of the human resource function and the allowing membership to trade unions. Introduction Human resource management for many years has remained a very big challenge in the health sector. This is Perhaps because of the perceptions that health sector institutions and organizations have got a very unique mandate to execute. The report by the Joint Learning Initiative (JLI) 2005 and the World Health Organization (WHO) 2006 had indicated major challenges with regard to human resource management in the health sector. Strategic human leadership and management of people is the sole responsibility of the Human Resource Function (Batt 2000). The challenges faced within the health sector are reflected world over. According to the two reports, the Human Resource Strategies and Policies are underdeveloped and utilized thus raising the concerns about professionalism with HR management within the health sector. HR policies ought to be universally accepted. The methods of monitoring, controlling and evaluating the role of HR function must proactive, respectable and professional (Joint Learning Initiative 2005). Based on the fact that the health sector is continuously expanding, it is now becoming clear that the health sectors will not be able to withstand the storm of industrial relations disputes. The primary objective of this paper is to critically study the situation at Banksia Health Service. The analysis will include the identification of the HR problems that are facing Banksia and then propose HR specific solutions in managing the HR problems that are facing the facility. Situational analysis Health Service is a facility that was established by the government in the 1990s as an initiative to serve the local people. The facility is established in the local areas of Australia and currently it has got more than 500 employees. The issue of human resource management is what has remained a very big problem for the facility. For many years, the facility has not been able to break-even. Despite the government sponsorship, its financial position and overall performance has been below the expectations. The facility was primarily commissioned in the area of Banksia in order to offer community and acute as well as aged care solutions to the people living in the area. However, since the facility has not been doing well, it has raised a lot of concerns from the public and consequently the government. Given that the health facility has had numerous industrial relations disputes and poor financial performances, the government has been forced to contract professional bodies to study the real situation at Banksia and the cause of tribulations. The research report in 2007 by Bartram, Leggat, Stanton and Young had found indicated the problems that were facing the health facility were mainly associated with poor human resources strategies, policies and procedures. First, according to the report, the facility did not have clear policies and procedures with regard to human resource. To add on that the HR function was not present and that it was the responsibility of the senior management and more especially the Chief Executive to execute the mandate of the HR function. This arrangement resulted into a lot of inconsistencies in managing human resource against the facility vision and mission. Some of the HR functions were carried out by the payroll and clerical officers apart from the CEO. This meant that there was a lot of incompetence in Human Resource Management. Second, the facility did not have clear and objective human resource philosophy. This was perceived as the major problem since the human resource team could not work towards a common goal. Given the fact that many of the HR functions were delegated by the chief executive officer and remaining reluctant to create a human resource function helped enhance mistrust among the staff and consequently industrial actions. The human resource problems were also enhanced by the fact that the facility did not apply universally accepted principles and policies. The management was fond of importing human resources strategies from the other facilities which were not relevant to this case. Third, communication was also cited as one of the major source of problems that Banksia was facing. Communication is a very important human resource strategy. Apart from enhancing cohesiveness, it also helps convey important information that affects the employees. The organizational policies, vision and mission are well understood through communication. Communication plays a very important role in harmonizing various activities within the organization. The communication in the institution was failing because of lack of a proper organizational was lacking and therefore flow of information was not easy. On the other hand the responsibilities could not be clearly communicated since there was no proper structure. Since there was no human resource function, even after restructuring the facility’s function, it was not easy to interpret some of the human resource functions. This is because there was no the HR function. The senior managers were obligated to interpret and communicate some of the policies some of which were done sparingly and heterogeneously to fit specific interests. This trend helped in enhancing the facility’s industrial relations conflicts and actions. In addition the middle level still are of the view that even restructuring has been, the human resource has seen not seen much impact. Employee training and development has failed to take place. The whole process of recruiting, selecting and appraising employees is no formal and there is a lot of bias when employing the new staff. Human resource solutions The process of realizing the importance of human resource within the organization is the genesis to developing lasting solutions that will help overcome the current challenges that are currently facing the Banksia health facility (Peccei & Rosenthal 2001). Human resource management principles require that proper policies and procedures be put in place to manage the workforce. Employee selection, recruitment, development and appraisal is the core responsibility of the human resource function. Based on the situation at Banksia it’s very evident that human resource has not been recognized as an important function of the institution. No recruitment policies and procedures that have been put in place. Continuous development of the employees could play a very important role in making sure that there is clear description of roles and functions of each department (Osterman 2000). There is need to restructure the whole organization in order to create room for the human resource function to come in and help strategy manpower policies and procedures that could help the facility attain its goals. There is need to redesign the facility to come up with those policies and procedures that are universally accepted and could apply in the context under which the business was operating. Recommendation In order to help the management at Banksia attain its goals the following recommendations have been developed: Introduction of the human resource function: The introduction of the human resource, it will mean that facility will no longer the challenges they are facing now more especially with performance of the facility. It is through the human resource function the management can be assured that good policies and procedures that govern the staff are developed. The human resource function in any organization is the one mandated to fill any vacancies that exist within the organization (Management Sciences for Health 2008). The process of recruiting the employees is supposed to be carried out by the professionals who are able to determine the kind of people the organization requires. Training and development, communication and employee welfare are some of the issues that need to be taken into consideration as one way of ensuring a good working environment is created which is friendly and motivating to the employees (Joint Learning Initiative 2005). Formation employee welfare organizations: The employees should be allowed to join workers unions which are obligated with the responsibility of championing the employees’ grievances whenever they feel aggrieved. This will help reduce the incidences of industrial actions which always influence the employee performance because of frequent strikes and actions (Monks and John 2001). Implementation The implementation process is the biggest challenge of getting any policy into work. It requires that everybody is involved as one way of making sure that the support of the majority of the workers starting from the top management downwards is won. Sabotage is very possible if all key stakeholders to the implementation are not involved (Boxall & Purcell 2003). The implementation process should be followed with some form of evaluation criteria which will be used to determine the impact of restructuring the organization and introducing the human resource function. Conclusion The human resource function is very important function in any given organization. At Banksia lack of proper policies and procedures has cost the facility a lot in terms of performance. The performance of the organization has been declining because there is nobody who is responsible for getting the right people with the right skills into the organization who can turn around its performance. The human resource function is expected to play the role of designing the job description for each and very person who works for the organization. This has resulted into persistent conflicts among the chief executive, the senior management, the middle level managers and the rest of the employees. Ideally, restructuring the organization is very important step for institution in ensuring that activities and responsibilities are given priority above everything. Creating a good channel of communication will help solve the problem of mistrust that currently exists. In general terms, the human resource function should be given room to formulate policies and procedures for running the facility. References Batt, R. (2000). ‘Strategic segmentation in front-line services: matching customers, employees and human resource systems’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 11(3), 540-61. Boxall, P. & Purcell, J. (2003). Strategy and Human Resource Management, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Joint Learning Initiative (2005). “Human Resources for Health: Overcoming the Crisis.” JSI (John Snow, Inc.) Research and Training Institute Strategic Report. Cambridge, Mass. Kathy M. & John M. (2001). Designing and aligning an HR system. Human Resource Management, 11(2), 57–72. Management Sciences for Health (2008). “Improving Employee Satisfaction and Performance through Human Resource Management: A Virtual Seminar.” Cambridge, Mass.: MSH/LeaderNet. Monks, L., and John McMackin (2001). Designing and aligning an HR system. Human Resource Management, 11(2), pp. 57–72. Osterman, P. (2000). ‘Work reorganization in an era of restructuring: trends in diffusion and effects on employee welfare’. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 53(2), 179- 196. Peccei, R. & Rosenthal, P. (2001). ‘delivering customer-oriented behaviour through empowerment: an empirical test of HRM assumptions’, Journal of Management Studies, 38(6), 831-57. Read More