Managing Performance and Talent Management

Contents

A. Introduction

B. Job analysis for experienced web developers and an e-commerce project manager i. Job analysis ii. Job description and person specification

C. Advices for Improving High Staff Turnover and Staff Performance

i. Selection method ii. Performance management

D. Recruitment Problems for Expanding the Store in Rural Area

i. External factors ii. Talent management

E. Conclusion

F. Reference

A. Introduction

Good Food is a retailer that has three stores and currently operating in the West Midlands. The company is now thinking to expand its business in a whole different distinct which is South Shropshire and develop online shopping service. However, if they want to implement these ideas, they need to face these challenges:

• interview process,
• employee selection,
• decrease in sales and high turnover rate.

This report will mainly focus on job analysis, managing performance and talent management.

1 Job Analysis for Experienced Web Developers and an E-Commerce Project Manager

1.1 Job Analysis

Job analysis presents a detailed framework of the position by mentioning the activities need to perform and list out the requirements required. It can help the company to filter the applicant with suitable skills. Doing a good job analysis for the job description is vital for Good Food because some employees had pointed out that the job description did not reach their expectations when they were applying for jobs. If the jobs can match the ability and expectation of the worker, it can maintain a long-term employeremployee relationship and decrease the staff turnover rate.

There are different methods can be used to collect information on a job for job analysis and they may be qualitative or quantitative:

Interview: ask the employees and superiors directly about the idea of online shopping service and know what kind of colleagues they want to have. The company can also get more information by interviewing the applicants to realise what they want to gain from this job.

Pros: can receive descriptive comments in terms of the duties and sub-duties of online shopping service

Cons: may contain bias or some employees may too shy to express their idea in person

Observation: observe the daily activities of employees and superiors to find out what needs to improve or can change to an online version. The company can also recognise the reason to implement online shopping.

Pros: some situation that employees may not want to mention can observe

Cons: managers may forget to observe when busy and they must be very clear about what to observe

Questionnaires: to receive a variety range of ideas and employees can anonymously express their feeling.

Pros: can receive a large quantity of data and listen to different opinions from the various departments

Cons: need a lot of time to summarise and the employees may not willing to answer if there is a large amount of open-ended question

(Adapted from: Doron & Marco, 1999)

As it is a new position in the company, the most appropriate method is an interview. Good Food can listen to both current workers and applicants to discover the problems of the general store operation and possibly the risk of online shopping. The company can also hire an expert to join and provide technical support for the position as they are not familiar with the profession either (Wilson & Dierdorff, 2012). With professional knowledge, it can decrease the workload of the manager and recruiting a more suitable employee for the company.

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By using this method, Good Food also can gain a benefit of "cost-benefit evaluation of the amount of time" (Wilson & Dierdorff, 2012, p44). The interview time can flexibly arrange so it will not affect the operation of the store and the work of the manager. The open-minded atmosphere can help them realize the needs of each other by telling their concerns and clarifications of misunderstanding (Taylor, 2019). Positive communication can benefit job analysis at a higher level and narrow the gap between each other. After the interviews, the company can summarise the conclusion of the jobs to provide a clearer picture so it will match with the thoughts of the employees.

1.2 Job Description and Person Specification

There are two main documents will be used in the recruitment process:

Job description: list out the area of the role that the position needs to play. It is a work-oriented approach so the requirements and conditions of the job will describe. For example, the location of the company, working hours, pay, duties and activities, rules and contract time.

Person specification: list out all the requirement of the job to make sure the applicants will fulfil the expectations of the managers, It is a worker-oriented approach so it will base on the attributes of the job holders themselves, for example, experience, qualifications, skills, competencies and personalities.

In the exit interview, the staff mentioned that the job cannot reach their expectations and does not match with the job description. That means the job description is not accurately playing its role, so the applicants misunderstood that the job is as same as what they expect.

These two documents are playing the following roles:

Identifying the personnel qualification: Job description can help Good Food to identify the right employee who will satisfy with the environment and benefits of the job. Person specifications will find out who has enough capability and qualifications to work for the company.

Henson (2011) mentions that these two documents can advise Good Food to choose the appropriate employee by comparing the individual education level and work experience with the requirements listed. It can also increase the accuracy of the hiring process and ensure that candidates can fulfil the minimum requirement of the job to perform the assigned function without error so they will feel satisfied with the surrounding of the working environment. It can link the skills of the employees to the requirements listed so the managers will know whether they are qualified.

Collecting data: Job description and person specification are also playing the role of a huge database within the recruitment process. As the company will receive a lot of resumes after issuing the recruitment post, they can compare the resumes to their job description and person specification. The cooperation can have a chance to find out the degree of similarity from the job description and the resumes of the candidates (Bhatia, Rawat, Kumar & Shah, 2019). Therefore, the company can find the chances to improve or change the details of their two documents to increase the chance of attracting the correct person for the position. During this process, the managers will be more determine which kind of people they are going to hire. They can compare the old resumes to their job description and analyse what causes the misunderstanding of the job. Therefore, they can learn from the mistakes to create a better one.

2 Advices for Improving High Staff Turnover and Staff Performance

2.1 Selection Method

There are several selection methods:

Interviews

Pros: the most common method and has high predictive validity for job performance and have a different version of interview types, such as face-to-face, telephone and video call.

Cons: will be biased and the interviewer will contain some subjective judgement.

Assessment centres

Pros: can measure several dimensions and assess a group of participants at the same time

Cons: expensive resources as they required lots of assessors to monitor the performance and update the exercises. The scores of some specific competencies from assessment centres will question.

Resumes, CVs and application forms

Pros: the second common method and listed all the skills clearly

Cons: competency cannot be easily verified because it is self-evaluation and the design of the resumes will be one of the considerations

(Adapted from: Robertson & Smith, 2001)

Personality testing

Pros: have criterion-related validity and can find out if the candidate is suitable for the organisation's environment and culture

Cons: will contain discrimination for minorities

(Adapted from: Calvasina & Calvasina, 2016)

For a fair and best practice in the selection process, Good Food can try to combine two selection methods to achieve the best outcome for recruitment. The two methods advise consolidating will be personality testing and interviews:

Personality testing

In the testing, Good Food can know more about the applicants and find out if they are fit in the organisation's environment and culture. They can also test for the teamwork spirit. If the employees have a strong sense of teamwork, they will not quit the job so easily. As only the senior management team of Good Food share the same vision with the company, they need to try to recruit some employee with a passion for natural homegrown food. In this part, the interviewer can test for their attitude towards the organisation's products.

Interviews

As structured and job-related interviews can measure cognitive factors such as cognitive ability, tacit knowledge, and job knowledge and situational interview contains high validities (Robertson & Smith, 2001), so two types of interviews will be suggested to combine. Dealing with the customer needs better communication skills and patience since sometimes they will misunderstand the messages. The staff may have to explain it in a clearer way to let them understand the situation. Setting a scenario can test the applicants if they can solve the problems and know the product. It can also help the applicants to know better the job especially the work shifts as the situations created mostly base on reality. Good Food needs to set this test in a candidate friendly way so the applicant will not feel biased and discriminated against.

To improve the selection process, apart from combining selection method, there are few points need to be considered:

Avoiding some possible discrimination: Good Food needs to implement an equal employment opportunity to facilitate the employee not to create job discrimination when hiring new employees (Waheed & Yang, 2019). Waheed and Yang (2019) also point out that reference and prejudice may cause bias in the hiring decision.

Therefore, the company needs to consider carefully when the candidate has either one of them by using equal employment opportunities or other general principles.

Linking the methods to key knowledge, skill, ability, others (KSAOs) and competencies: If Good Food can hire someone shares the same competencies and KSAOs that the company requires, it can probably make the selection process smooth. However, before finding a suitable employee, the company should first identify the KSAOs that they desire applicants to have and develop a tool to measure them (Odom, 2013). The tool can help the company to predict the work performance of the employee by matching the level of KSAOs so they can select a candidate with a certain score to obtain a proficiency of job interest in the future.

Keep checking the outcome of the selection processes: To learn from the wrong things can also make the selection process improve, so Good Food should monitor the processes and keep changing if there is any problem. If Good Food can improve the selection process, it will maximise its work productivity and even increase sales.

2.2 Performance Management

To achieve good performance management, the first thing Good Food should do is to identify the business objectives and role. Then the goals can be the standard to manage the performance. The second is to operate the performance management system and the third is to monitor and give feedback. The last step is to correct the plans and objectives. McConnell (2004) mentions that performance management is to positively influence the employee to achieve a certain level of performance and it includes daily identifying, evaluating, and correcting the behavior of employees. Effective performance management is interactive which managers can discuss the cooperation's vision and employees can talk about their individual goals (Selden, 2009). The recommended approach to managing performance will divide into two parts which are performance appraisal and development.

Performance appraisal

The main purpose of performance appraisal is to establish performance standards and expectations for employees (Selden, 2009). It can collect data about the strengths and weaknesses of the employees. The data can raise by combining these two sections:

Multisource feedback: Good Food can send out a questionnaire follow by behavioral observation scales to the staff so every employee can be the role of observer. They can give a score to their colleagues for their working performance. It can promote teamwork spirit among coworkers to let them know each other better. As this feedback is made by their colleagues who are the most proximal to the job context, the feedback will be more reliable and they will be more likely to take the actions after they obtain the feedback (Kim, Atwater, Patel & Smither, 2016).

Formal review meeting: The meeting should base on the actual daily work issue so employees can have improvements. To conduct a meeting, the manager should let the employees know it in advance so they can have the time to do some self-evaluation. The manager should observe the working performance of the employees to find out what problems are incurring. To achieve a better outcome of the meeting, the manager should be an active listener and encourage the employees to talk more. The work problems should be discussed and the manager should guide the employees to agree they have room to improve.

(Adapted from: Armstrong, 2016)

Development

After receiving the feedback and meeting, the managers should provide some opportunities for the self-development of the employees. If the employees have a good performance, the managers can give rewards to them for encouragement to influence their behaviour. If they were not doing well in the past, the managers can provide training to improve their jobrelated skills and abilities by gaining indirect and positive effects on performance (Schraeder & Jordan, 2011). Good Food can develop a mentoring system for the staff. Schraeder and Jordan (2011) point out that mentoring can help to develop a relationship by understanding the culture of the company with experienced staff in long-term prospects. The senior management team can use this opportunity to promote their passion for the junior.

3 Recruitment Problems for Expanding the Store in Rural Area

3.1 External Factors

There are two kinds of labour markets that are internal and external. The internal labour market means that the jobs are only for the employees inside the firm and workers outside the company cannot apply for the vacancies although they have fulfilled the requirement of the position (Rogers, Castree, & Kitchin, 2013). The external labour market means the firm wants to hire new employees outside the company. To ensure the external labour market before the open of a new store, Good Food needs to make a supply forecasting for the local labour market first. There are a few factors that Good Food needs to consider:

Population movements: The free-mobility migrants have a higher unemployment rate than local people, but they can have a choice to choose where to work and not going back to their origin country (OECD, 2012). If Good Food wants to employ the free-mobility migrants, there will be the risk of a high turnover rate when they do not want to stay in this country.

Age and skill levels: If the aging problem of South Shropshire is serious, Good Food may have difficulties for recruitment. De La Croix, Pierrard and Sneessens (2013) express that the aging population will decrease the labor force and change the equilibrium factor prices. The skill levels of the people will also affect the resources that Good Food wants to put for recruitment. As people with high skill levels can have more chances of choosing different jobs, the competitiveness of recruitment will be high in that area. Moreover, productivity will increase in the proportion of the level of education (OECD, 2012).

Unemployment rates: Junankar (2016) states that if the unemployment rate is high, the company can get more labor services as the workers are in a weak position. Even the wage, working hours, condition of employment and attitude to their work will be different. However, if the unemployment rate is low and people from rural areas are fully employed, Good Food needs to give out more resources to find and recruit workers.

3.2 Talent Management

Every employee can be a talent because employees are a scarce resource for the company. Therefore, Good Food should have satisfying talent management for analysing the potential workers and train them to become future leaders. Talent management mainly focuses on the skills and abilities of the employees and examine whether their acts and contributions can promote them to a management role for the success of the company (Law, 2011). To obtain good talent management, there are two approaches:

Inclusive approach: In this approach, every employee will be considered as a talent and have the potential to contribute to fulfilling the organization's objectives (Taylor, 2019). If all the employees get involved in talent management, they will feel engaged and increase their working performance. Although all the workers will have different contributions to the company, they should treat as a part of the human capital and benefit in the management.

Exclusive approach: Selected employees will be grouped through a nomination and have talent management (Bolander, Werr, & Asplund, 2017). Good Food should consider competence, commitment and contribution to choose talent. Law (2011) mentions that a welldesigned appraisal and development system can be useful for helping the company to identify the potential employee and encourage to become a leader in the future.

Apart from choosing a correct approach for talent management, the company needs to develop and retain talent:

Developing talent

Good Food should provide development opportunities to their employees and the development approach can be mentoring, coaching or leadership training (Thunnissen, 2016). Development is a good chance for an employee to learn. After learning, they can have a better ability to work with their jobs.

Retaining talent

To retain the talents, the first thing is to let them feel comfortable when they are working for the company. Law (2011) states that the culture of the organization plays the most critical role in retaining talents. The company needs to create a friendly working environment for them.

Thunnissen (2016) comments that if the managers can train and develop the employee with the talent management practice in the direction of fitting into an organization's needs, they will be motivated and increase their individual performance. When the employees have a feeling of contribution to the company, it will increase their loyalty and sense of belonging. The organization's performance will be increased and decrease the turnover rate.

B. Conclusion

To conclude, Good Food needs to have better management of the employees by improving the job analysis, performance management, and talent management. Doing good human resource management can help the company to achieve its objectives and gain a competitive advantage. Recruitment, assessment and development and retain employees are significant elements of the supervision of the workers.

C. Reference

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