Daikin Asia Servicing Pte Ltd is a service company that deals with the distribution of air- conditioning wares and the related air conditioning accomplices in Asia, Middle East region, Africa region and oceanic region. The company was established in 1966 and is based in Singapore. In addition, the company provides technological information, administrative support services, marketing services and vending support services to their distributors. The company also actively supports their distributors in the area of management by enlightening them on inventory and logistics management. This is done as a way of enhancing performance of their core distributors and also ensuring that their products earn a world class ranking for their consumers. In maintaining a higher competitive edge the company upholds the corporate philosophies of enterprise management, absolute credibility and harmonious personal relations. The company also upholds a superior technology through the utilization of its resourceful research and development team. This aids them in the design and production of integrated air conditioning appliances which portray higher performance than those of their major competitors. The company’s competitive strategy broadly involves a differentiated business strategy. The company designs its air conditioning products in a peculiar manner while incorporating technology. This results to high quality products which come in differentiated forms and thus improves customer satisfaction. Therefore, the company creates an aggressive competition to its rivals as it is depicted in the Porters model of business competition. Finally, the company believes not only on product superiority but as well provides ample training programs associated with the air conditioning industries to its distributors and clients. The company boasts of over 10,000 professionals in air conditioning who help in providing expertise services.
The company broadly relies on three major human resource management strategies of training and development, analysis and design of work and performance management. To begin with, the company realizes that with the recent global economic turbulent it is prudent to provide training and development to its employees in order to maximize on performance. The company is entrenched on the fact that training and development enhances its goals and objectives. This involves a process that analyzes the needs, design and development of training programs which are conducted in the various levels of the organization. The company undertakes training and development to ensure that there is a continuous control of the performance of their workforce. This is effectively achieved by laying down the goals, examining employee’s accomplishment of the goals and setting the right adjustments so as to achieve the goals efficiently. This is further supported by providing feedbacks to the employees while evaluating their performance and also giving rewards on performance. Professionals in human resource assert that a company is only as superior as its workforce (Armstrong & Baron, 2002). For this reason, this organization realizes that training and development should more precisely act in response to the employees development needs. The company conducts self assessment among the employees to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the individual employee’s skills.
In the development of a training program for the organization, the human resource development team is proficient in carrying out a needs assessment for the company. This is viewed as a critical process of determining the training and development levels required for the company. Once the needs assessment process is determined, the procedural actions of training are incorporated in the process. These include the instructional system blueprint which provides the instructional specifications through knowledge and instructional theory to guarantee the quality of training for the employees. This piece of training and development works with regards to the criteria, conditions and performance. Based on the value that the company puts on employee’s training and development, the human resource department encourages the managers to allow the employees develop their skills in complete autonomy. This is fostered by the broad range of training that the company avails to its employees, thus they are allowed to choose their preferred training skills which would meet their individual needs. This is believed to have a positive correlation with improved productivity especially in the areas of; sales, information technology, employee retention rate, individual job satisfaction and improved customer services. In this strategy, the company acknowledges that employees have needs which should be met in order to improve their overall productivity. Therefore, apart from providing training and development the company also endows the employees with financial returns, rewards on achievement of certain goals. All these are done as a way of enhancing employee recognition which is a crucial aspect in achieving individual job satisfaction amongst the employees.
The company confidently believes that the continued training and development has a positive impact to its industry performance (Bamberger & Meshoulam, 2000). This is attributed to the fact that, expertise development of employees assists them to design very unique and high quality air conditioning appliances which meets the consumer needs. Therefore, this places the company at a higher competitive position than its competitors hence ensuring its continued success. The company also adopts the new technology in its training and development by utilizing the concept of e- learning as a training tool to its employees. This equips the employees with technological literacy and due to its flexibility the employees are definitely motivated. The company also affirms that adoption of new technology adds significantly to the enhancement in organizational efficiency and productivity. The company asserts that training of employees pays close attention in helping them to improve performance in their responsibilities. In contrast, development is believed to prepare employees to fill job positions in the company hence ensuring that they take up any job opportunities that might be created in future by this company. Development of employees is further meant to organize them in readiness of any changes that may occur as a result of work designs, customers, new technology or changes in the air conditioning appliances markets.
Secondly, the company’s design and analysis of work involves a process of gathering and preparing comprehensive information regarding various job specifications within the company. This is conducted to provide the managers with a better understanding on the processes that the work can be performed efficiently by the employees. The work design further defines the ways through which the work will be done. The company’s human resource managers work tirelessly in ensuring that a clear job description is formulated to ensure that every employee fits well where their skills are best. This involves a repetitive process of changing the functional requirements of various jobs with respect to the work specifications. The company views this as a crucial aspect in the success of the organization based on the fact that the air conditioning industry is a dynamic market. This is coupled by new developments in the products design which therefore, calls for adoption of standards in designing the company’s jobs. Due to this ever changing aspect of this industry, the company pursues policies of enriching the job by continuously adding duties to the work. This is meant to ensure that the products are improved on quality and their competitiveness in the market.
The issue of adding tasks to the jobs is also aimed at ensuring proper distributions of the company’s products to reach all the anticipated markets. The company also understands that horizontal expansion of work is critical in ensuring proper work design and thus the human resource department continues to include more responsibilities on the jobs. This is also focused on maximum utilization of the employee’s skills and expertise to ensure improved efficiency in production. In accomplishing this, the company provides various incentives to the staffs to ensure that they are motivated to handle the increased responsibilities in their jobs. The incentives include increasing salaries for the employees, provision of other social benefits to improve their welfare and offering overtime to the employees in their jobs to allow them earn more. In order to maintain a good work analysis and design, the company also formulates a reward program to the employees which is specifically based on performance. This inculcates a behavior for employees to perform their chores objectively to achieve a given target that would yield to their performance so as to earn the company rewards (Khatri, 2000).
This works as a good strategy in ensuring that the company’s human resource maintains an efficient job design that would promote production of quality products thus improving the organizational performance. The company is also dedicated in ensuring that there is equitable distribution of rewards to the employees to guarantee that they are satisfied with the reward program. This plays an important role in enhancing harmony amongst the employees which in turn facilitates good working along the formulated job designs. The strategy of work analysis and design adopted by Daikin Asia’s human resource management therefore works well in ensuring that the company gains maximum potential from the employees. This becomes significant in ensuring working efficiency which yields quality products for the company hence improving the company’s production performance. This human resource strategy is also devised to assist in enhancing employee loyalty which also leads to customer satisfaction due to improved productivity and organized working framework. Therefore, job analysis and design yields both financial and non- financial performance measurements to the company which are critical in improving the company’s competitiveness and prosperity (Robbins & Judge, 2009). This is thus a viable human resource management practice with regards to the affirmation of business literature. It is also in this human resource management strategy that the company designs its employees so as to ensure lower costs of manpower. This is achieved in various ways, for instance; downsizing the number of employees handling certain tasks or combining tasks which appear to be similar in their responsibilities. In this way, the company is able to accomplish a lower cost of labour thus improving its profitability.
Thirdly, the organization formulates performance management as human resource management strategy in increasing its overall profitability. In accomplishing this, the company ensures that the employees concentrate extremely on the activities that help in driving the organization’s achievement of its goals and objectives. This strategy helps the human resource management to achieve effective use of the employees so as to realize the company objectives. The company focuses on creating an organizational culture of accountability and performance by engaging the employees to achieve maximum performance. Using the employees effectively involves giving them the prospect to get the most out of their strengths, making their job to be inspired and providing the necessary feedback and support to them. The company’s performance management presents a system of escalating staff engagement and mainstreaming the staff to the company strategy. As the company executes its production strategy it finds performance management as an influential instrument for developing genuine objectives and goals for the staffs. To achieve this, managers have the responsibility of transforming departmental goals developed from the company’s strategic objectives, into precise goals that can be dealt with by the individual employees. Managers also have the role of showing employees how the specific goals contribute in supporting the organization’s overall strategy. The process of combining the employee’s personal performance objectives to the company’s strategic objectives adds value and meaning to their job and thus they are motivated to prosper (Becker & Huselid, 2006). The strategy of performance management presents a peculiar mechanism for continuous feedback and support which is a significant constituent of employee engagement.
After the process of setting objectives jointly, the managers and employees trail the improvement and make it certain that the performance is maintained with regard to the dynamic work situation and the organizational goals. Constant feedback helps in achieving performance by ensuring that employees refocus on their activities whenever they get out of the predetermined strategy. When the managers conduct performance appraisals they give more specific responses and also assists the employees in knowing their strengths and their areas of weakness. As a result, new performance objectives are formulated to influence the strengths of employees and provide a chance to concentrate on the employee’s developmental goals. In ensuring that the performance management strategy becomes practical the managers pay close attention to; consistency, conducting frequent reviews on the strategy and use of software based performance management systems. To support this strategy, managers undergo vigorous trainings on performance management and also apply managerial accountability to ensure the effectiveness of performance management for the company. Performance management is viewed to contribute greatly on the company’s profitability and performance in the air conditioning products industry. Performance management in the company is measured through the company’s job competencies and using objective data such as profits.
In conclusion, Daikin Asia which operates in the air conditioning industry, which has highly competitive market, incorporates best practices of human resource management so as to remain aggressive in this industry. The company has adopted three broad based strategies which include; training and development of employees, work analysis and design and performance management. The company formulates methods of ensuring that these strategies remain useful in driving its performance and profitability in the market. The strategy of training and development is aimed at improving the skills and strengths of employees in order to ascertain that they will work in a way to help in maximum achievement of the organizational goals and objectives. Whereas the practice of work analysis and design is applied with the expectation that the company will set job specifications and responsibilities that will ensure the employee’s capabilities are utilized fully in the quest to enhance production performance. This also assists in ensuring that the company continues to produce high quality products to accomplish customer satisfaction and at the same time maintaining employee loyalty. This strategy yields financial and non- financial business performance which is in harmony with business literature for improved organizational performance. The third strategy involves using performance management as a human resource management practice for the company to achieve profitability. This entails processes where managers engage employees in accomplishing the company’s strategic goals. Performance management involves dynamic reviews on the activities to ascertain that they are delivering as per the required performance levels. In a nutshell, the human resource management strategies adopted by Daikin Asia are all carried out in the pursuit of attaining increased organizational performance. This helps to make sure that the company stays on a higher competitive position than its rival businesses in the industry.
References
Armstrong, M. & Baron, A. (2002) Strategic HRM: the route to improved business performance, CIPD, London.
Bamberger, P. & Meshoulam, I. (2000) Human Resource Strategy: Formulation, Implementation, and Impact, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Becker, B., & Huselid, M. (2006) Strategic human resource management: where do we go from here? Journal of Management, 32, 898-925.
Khatri, N. (2000) Managing human resource for competitive advantage: a study of companies in Singapore, International Journal of human Resource Management, 11 (2), 336-365.
Robbins, S., and Judge, T. (2009). Organizational Behavior, (13th ed.), Pearson Prentice Hall,
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