Company Overview and HR Concept Introduction
Google is one of the largest multination IT corporations in the world. It generates billions of dollars of revenue and offers a variety of services to its clients. Google’s primary sphere of interest lies within the boundaries of the internet and computer technology. It facilitates internet advertising and search, creates and distributes paid and free software, hardware, and so on. Google employs almost 74 thousand people in more than 40 offices around the world. Such a large corporation has a rich corporate culture. However, like any complex system, it has certain flaws and imperfections that need to be addressed. The following report aims to review key human resource management (HRM) practices and critically evaluate them in order to improve the organization’s performance.
HR’s main task is to maintain the effectiveness of the workforce at the positions they are assigned. It performs monitoring, evaluation, and adjustment of corporate policy in relation to personnel. Additionally, it manages conflicts between employees and employee-management misunderstandings. It facilitates and oversees the process of initiation and termination of employment.
Performance Management
One of the key practices of HRM is employee training and development. To ensure the worker performs well an employer needs to establish a mechanism that allows the former to evolve in a professional manner. Maintaining challenges is one of the key roles of training and development. Training and development enable workers to broaden their horizons and be more effective as professionals.
Performance management is a set of practices and strategies aimed at maintaining and increasing the level of workers’ productivity. Through a combination of bonuses, incentives, motivational interventions, and other techniques HR managers are able to control employees’ performance and keep them interested in the job.
Job and work design is another essential HRM practice. At the same time, it refers to the design of a workplace from an organizational or administrative perspective and a bottom-line functional approach. Its aim is to make work conditions maximally comfortable and adjusted for each and every employee accommodating their physical and spiritual needs. For the employer, this practice is a guarantee of stability of the workflow whereas for the employee it is the absence of distractions and emphasis on his personal comfort and design.
Flexibility is a practice that allows HR management to switch employees between positions in order to meet the company’s present goals. It is required due to changes in the market that often happen fast, and the company needs to adjust to the new conditions in order to survive. For the company, flexibility means a continuation of competition and conformance to the new standards. An employee, on the other hand, gains an opportunity to increase his or her versatility within the scope of their profession.
Job and Work Design
Job and work design, according to Parker (2014), are significant factors that contribute to employees’ productivity that is beneficial for both sides. Appropriate and effective job design can motivate the worker to be more committed and responsible for his or her professional duties. It also allows developing his or her individual potential. For instance, according to Business Insider (Gillett 2016), Google has the highest rate of job satisfaction at 86%. It is clear that by providing competitive salaries, bonuses, training, and other techniques, Google effectively capitalizes on its job and work design.
Flexibility allows capitalizing on the skills of the company’s staff in order to stay competitive. With a change in a market, a need may arise to form new teams to fill an emerging niche or reorganize old departments. Google is a team-oriented company, where every member is capable of switching to another project that suits his or her abilities. The flexibility of the teams and their composition ensures the company’s ability to follow the market trends, focus, and prioritize promising areas.
HRM Practice
Changing work arrangements and making them user-friendly is a prominent technique of workplace flexibility. Negotiating bonuses, and tailoring payment schemes could also be effective methods of this HRM practice. For instance, a company might allow an employee to change his or her working conditions to those he or she is accustomed to most. If a worker begins experiencing trouble working from the office, he or she may be allowed to switch employment to a home-based one, provided he or she maintains the same level of performance and the job specifics allow such change. The employee benefits from this approach by receiving a comfortable workplace tailored to his or her needs, while the employer receives an employee who will likely perform better as a result of working in good conditions.
Job rotation is one of the most promising methods of job design. It allows horizontal and vertical mobility of employees that challenges them to achieve new heights of professional development. Job enrichment is yet another technique that allows an employee a certain level of flexibility in planning and arranging the process of his workflow. The latter could be exemplified by a person who is able to arrange the items on his desk in a way that he or she is able to reach any specific item with minimum body movements. Such a method is frequently used in manual assembly lines or hand-made facilities. From both methods, workers achieve job satisfaction by being able to develop as professionals in more than one sphere and receiving a distinction for good performance resulting from workflow optimization. Employers in their turn receive versatile workers able to deliver steady results in many spheres, which allows the company to implement change more easily. In addition, they can benefit from bottom-level workflow adjustments that can positively affect higher-level ones.
Workplace Flexibility
Google Inc. serves as an excellent example of workplace flexibility. The corporation’s workers are supplied with an unlimited amount of healthy food and drinks. Google offers its workers a variety of workspace options from standard cubicles to work-at-home. The former enables employees to stay healthy and take fewer sick leaves, which is good for both Google and its staff. The latter is a form of caring for employees’ mental comfort. It is a fact that people work better in a work environment that suits them be it home or office. By offering several options, Google utilizes a personal approach to every employee maximizing his or her productiveness. As it was cited earlier, due to such procedure, employees of the company have high job satisfaction rates.
In addition to that, informal flexibility is quite often seen in workplaces. It is imbued in the nature of the relationship between management and employees. Google exercises a trust-building and result-oriented approach towards motivation. For instance, it is common that a developer employee has an unlimited number of vacation days or sick leaves. All of them need to be discussed with supervisors, however, they do not usually refuse. In exchange for such trust, employees are expected to deliver excellent results by the end of the deadline. If the worker does not live up to the expectations, he or she is discharged from employment. Thus, the company creates a trusting relationship with each person from the start. However, should such trust be violated the consequences will be dire? In such a way, Google leaves only the employees who are willing to perform in exchange for understanding and support in times of need.
Job design is also well illustrated by Google. It effectively uses job rotation to motivate workers to develop as versatile and active performers. For instance, almost any employee in Google is able to be promoted or assigned a new project even if he or she was hired a year ago. The employee needs only to provide proof of their substantial capacity to be promoted. An independent body of managers evaluates the achievements of a certain applicant for promotion and defines his or her fitness for a position using a specially designed equation. The impact of this system is evident from Google’s own analytics center that showed its poor accuracy (D’Onfro 2014).
Another job design technique is job enrichment. The autonomy Google provides to its employees in regard to planning and executing their duties is rather substantial. Decision on the method and process is often left to the developers, while senior staff assesses the success or failure. In this way, the organization inspires personal responsibility and creativeness.
External and Internal Factors
Employees are the receiving end of all HRM strategies and decisions. Therefore, their active involvement in the process of their development is critical to their success and livability. The role of an employee in HRM decision-making is that of an arbiter. While the initial drafting, development, and finalization of the change is the HR’s job, workers should play an active part in assessing the change project at every step ensuring their interests are preserved and cared for in the best possible way.
Employee relations are affected by external and internal factors. External ones can be economic, social, technological, environmental, and political. Each of those is not part of the daily routine of a worker and is not directly related to his tasks, but on a larger scale, they define the environment in which employees work and how they work. A major change in any of these can change the workplace, tasks, priorities, and can even affect interpersonal relationships.
The Legal Side of Employee
The legal side of employee relations also defines the environment within each organization. Among the key legal elements, one can identify safety and security, fairness and equality, financial compensations, and other items. Recently, discrimination has become a major legal concern that changed the sphere of HRM. Since the 1950s discrimination by race and gender has significantly diminished, but the level of salary and promotion options is still an issue in many corporations. Decision-making in the sphere of equal financial compensation is enforced by Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the basis of the Equal Pay Act 1967. It has introduced fair and equal criteria for rewarding or punishing an employee such as skill, effort, responsibility, and other factors (Hall 2009).
On the one hand, this process and policy have a tremendously positive effect on employee relations in protecting each employee’s rights to be rewarded according to objective criteria. On the other hand, HRM has to put additional resources on controlling them. It is especially true for large organizations.
Equal Employment Policy
Equal employment policy is one of the key issues of employee relations in Google. Compliance with the aforementioned Equal Pay Act of 1967, Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and other legal documents is the priority, and HR policies are tailored in a manner that shapes the company to suit everyone (Building a Google that works for everyone n.d.).
Labor unions are not well-formed in Google’s working environment due to the fact that Google has substantial management inclusiveness and employee-manager relationship are well established. This creates an atmosphere of understanding and wide representation where each opinion is heard and given feedback. In such circumstances, trade unions are not required as an instrument of collective will expression. Given the fact that problems are addressed on the individual level, there is, practically, no need for collective problem-solving. It is, however, important when a group of people is oppressed.
Effective grievance and discipline-restoring mechanisms are based on the swiftness of response and factual data (Singh & Mathur 2016). Transparency policy is also of importance, as workers often believe that those of higher standing are handling their matters improperly. The grievance procedure should also be clear and accessible to every employee.
Employee Relations
Employee relations are central to HRM. It is, basically, the subject of HRM. Application of the best practices positively affects employee relations and ultimately serves as a performance incentive that betters the company on a lower level. Training and development works create a challenge that motivates the subordinates to develop additional skills and contribute to the company’s ability to be flexible on the market. Offering good opportunities for professional growth also influences retention rates. Flexibility allows employees to maximize their performance by achieving higher levels of personal comfort in their workplace. Job and work design shape the environment where workers can feel cared for spiritually and physically. All of these HRM practices ultimately lead to better performance, both individually and within a group. In Google, teams play a large role. However, the organization recognizes and evaluates the impact of every person. Healthy and effective HRM results in a company becoming a second home to motivated and top-performance people.
Reference List
Building a Google that works for everyone n.d., 2018,. Web.
D’Onfro, J 2014, ‘Google wrote an equation for deciding which engineers should get promoted — here’s why it failed’, Business Insider, Web.
Gillett, R 2016, ‘5 reasons Google is the best place to work in America and no other company can touch it’, Business Insider, Web.
Hall, A 2009, Legal issues in human resource management, Society for Human Resource Management, New York, NY.
Parker, K 2014, ‘Beyond motivation: Job and work design for development, health, ambidexterity, and more’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 65, pp. 661-691.
Singh, N., & Mathur, S 2016, ‘study on grievance handling: a comparison between public and private sector manufacturing organizations’, in S Bhakar (ed), Global advancements in HRM: innovations and practices, Prestige Institute of Management, Gwalior, India, pp. 246.