At the beginning of the 21st century, companies try to attract and retail top talents. The “best practice” approach is based on belief that there is a set of superior HRM practices which, if adopted, will lead to better organization performance. This approach is widely used by organizations because it helps to achieve effectiveness of performance and high standards in order to deliver customer satisfaction. The underlying assumption is that the organization can accomplish things only because management guides and energizes it.
Dubai Customs is a government organization which secures free trade and controls complacence with international laws. “Dubai Customs supports fair trade practices by identifying and addressing non-compliance with the common Customs law of the GCC” (Dubai Customs 2008). Dubai Customs pays a special attention to human resources and training of employees, high level of professionalism and responsibilities of the staff. Dubai Customs uses best practice approach in order o gain and retail top talents.
In general, best practices involve effective methods and techniques used in recruiting and employment processes (Armstrong 56). These and other programs will improve and bring advantages in recruiting and retaining employees. In order to attract employees, companies propose unique career opportunities and sound salary and benefit programs. Effective communication requires a knowledge of what the “audience” wants to hear. Therefore, the opinions of the people who comprise the organization, and more particularly the environmental forces that shape those opinions, must be intimately understood if management is to guide the organization effectively toward its goals (Grant 114).
In order to retain employees, companies introduce employee bonus programs and support continuing education programs for all of its employees. Organizations fighting for top talents, remove irritants, make jobs tolerable, and provide an occasional temporary glow; or to put it another way they protect the individual from the dangers of demoralization. But they are not ordinarily able to spark the kind of all-out concentrated effort of which most people are capable. Traditional motivators, when properly used, make employees placid but not fully productive, compliant but not creative (Armstrong 81).
The pity of it is that this tepid state of affairs is often aimed for quite deliberately and accepted gratefully when it is achieved. It seems to be part of the unwritten folklore of many organizations that a pacified workforce is the ultimate goal to be sought as far as motivation is concerned; even that it is an optimum basis for managing a business. It is almost as if the whole purpose of motivation was to prevent subordinates from obstructing the intentions of their superiors. Sensitive and appropriate supervisory methods, two-way communication systems motivate employees and help them to fulfill career goals. In three levels (attracting, recruiting and retaining) rewards play a crucial role for both the company and applicants (Campbell 54).
Best Practices at Dubai Customs
In Dubai Customs, best practices are based on complex analysis of the company’s needs and demands, and careful planning of all positions. The main stages of this process are: recruitment requisition, job description, position evaluation and budget check and sourcing. Dubai Customs’ procedures for recognition and promotion are all examples of traditional ways of motivating employees which can be quite effective (Nankervis et al 39).
In order to attract top talents, Dubai Customs gives “significant attention and funding to increase professionalism through training, education, professional development and performance management. Dubai Customs aims to be the gold standard in undertaking all Customs processing in a seamless, efficient and cost effective manner” (Dubai Customs 2008). When management aims merely to minimize the employee’s ability to interfere with its aims, either through old-fashioned pressure tactics or by means of the more sophisticated gambit of keeping him contented, it is in effect acknowledging him as a sort of necessary evil whose potential contribution to the organization is at best rather small.
But scientific and technical employees are still regarded as being basically different from all the other people in an organization. That the difference between these employees and most others could be one of degree rather than of kind, indeed that the “difference” is largely a reflection of the fact that we understand them a lot better than we do the others in an organization, is not widely recognized. Training, development and educational objectives are the main priorities of the company (Nankervis et al 43).
Employee counseling, no matter how it is done, plays a crucial role in motivating the young. It functions somewhat like a satisfier that is, a counseling program will not necessarily improve morale, but the lack of some kind of formalized feedback will almost certainly hurt morale. This is simply because the future is so important to the young person that he will draw conclusions from a lack of evidence about it just as readily as he will from actual evidence. When the job brings with it no clues about what the future may be like, the young worker is likely to conclude that the future will be no different from the present; therefore, his “future” is already upon him, and he may as well quit hoping (Campbell 29).
There are, of course, many kinds of evidence about the future other than a conference with a manager that is deliberately focused on it. The rate at which promotions occur, whether on the basis of merit or seniority; the company’s own growth prospects; and the rate and caliber of new hires all provide grist for speculating about one’s own future. But in most organizations an individual’s future is heavily affected by the opinions of managers who are most familiar with his work; therefore, an exposure to those opinions in direct discussion is the most potent of all the clues by which the young employee attempts to foretell what lies ahead for him.
Emiratization is one of the unique best practices used by Dubai Customs. Emiratization is a main part of Dubai Customs HR goals. It follows one of the main objectives Dubai Government goals. The HR Department works towards increasing the % of UAE Nationals in their annual recruitment plan” (Dubai Customs 2008). This is true regardless of whether the organization seeks cooperation through appeals to loyalty and self-interest, as in an enlightened commercial enterprise, or through sheer coercion, as in a police state. People pursue whatever they consider to be their best interests regardless of whether anyone else, including those who wield power over their working lives, shares their opinion of where their advantage lies.
Since promotion generally brings greater responsibilities, prestige follows as a sort of corollary. It is worth noting that sometimes people are promoted for the sake of prestige alone without any corresponding increase in the scope of their duties. That is, they are promoted as a way of thanking them for devoted service or as an acknowledgment that they have acquired more value to the organization by virtue of their lengthening experience (Campbell 77).
In any case, promotion calls attention to the man who receives it and indicates quite clearly that the organization looks with favor upon him, whether for his demonstrated ability or for his continuation in its employ. This kind of favorable attention may be highly prized, either as an indication that the future is increasingly rosy or that the past is appreciated and not forgotten. Advances in prestige serve the advantage of both the rising, mobile young man who needs periodic proof that he is still rising and the relatively immobile man who needs proof that the time he has contributed is appreciated by his employers.
Second, promotion often takes the individual into a higher salary classification, thereby increasing the upper limit of earnings to which he may eventually rise, or it may introduce new forms of income such as stock options. Consequently, the increase in income entailed in promotion may be much more than the usual addition of a relatively small percentage of the previous income. It could result in a sharply higher standard of living (Campbell 73).
Recommendations
To improve its best practices, Dubai Customs should apply a concept of psychological advantage to all levels of HR management. It means the individual’s private notions about what constitutes his own best interests — is a product of the way he perceives his environment and his ability to affect it. Advantage depends first of all on what seems to be possible — on what the environment can be reasonably expected to yield — and secondly on which of these possible outcomes, if any, is desirable. Dubai Customs can therefore expect that a man’s ideas about his own best interests will be strongly influenced by whether he feels that he has much power over the events that affect him and on which regards he regards as worthwhile. This is the phenomenon on which so many well-intentioned and carefully prepared incentive programs have foundered (Grant 114).
Management cannot assume that its view of the environment is shared by the people it manages. Dubai Customs shall have more to say on this point later; for the moment it should be noted that effective planning for incentives requires a first-hand knowledge of how employees perceive their job environment (Nankervis et al 87).
Because young men with ability and ambition are so strongly oriented toward future rewards, it can be a serious mistake to place them in positions in which they are unlikely to acquire the kind of experience that will qualify them for advancement.
Repetitive jobs that require little use of judgment or self-reliance do little to prepare men for promotion. Yet it is common to place essentially overqualified young men in lower-level positions on the theory that it will be best if they “learn the business from the ground up” or in the belief that they will handle the work more efficiently than people of humbler capabilities (Campbell 82). In the long run, then, the result of placing overqualified young men in positions with limited growth potential can be a hostile, demanding, and not particularly efficient group of employees (Campbell 92).
Also, Dubai Customs can introduce special programs for women. In contrast to European countries, women are deprived a chance for career development and professional growth. They are usually oriented toward a home and family of their own rather than a career in business; therefore, the lack of a future in their work ordinarily will cause them little dismay. Their working careers are usually brief, enjoyable, and moderately well-paid interludes between graduation from high school or college and the beginning of their real careers. A special program for women employees will help Dubai Customs to attract top talents and retain women staff (Campbell 82).
In sum, best practices help companies like Dubai customs to improve their HR management and attract top talent. Best practices should be a philosophy of the company which tries to achieve fast growth and maintain positive morale and climate. Employees’ behavior is related to a meaningful situation within a business world, and not to physical stimuli as such. the tasks of the company is to find the best possible approaches to meet organizational needs and satisfy employees.
Works Cited
- Dubai Customs. 2008. Web.
- Grant, R.M. ”The resourced based theory of competitive advantage”. California Management Review, #33. 1991, pp. 114-35.
- Armstrong, M. Human Resource Management. 8th edn. Kogan Page, 2001.
- Campbell, D.J. Organizations and the Business Environment. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997.
- Nankervis, A. R., Compton, R. L., Baird, M. 2007, Human Resource Management: Strategies and Processes. Thomson Learning Australia.