Introduction
This report is based on the experiences and facts obtained from Jardine Schindler Group (Jardine Schindler 2014), a South East Asian branch of Schindler Group (Schindler Group 2014) which is a multinational engineering company founded in Switzerland in the 19th century. This company is currently the leading global provider of related products and services of its kind. Jardine Schindler Group is composed of more than 300 field and office employees. The senior management is headed by its general manager and is operated by the heads of finance, maintenance, installation, technical, and human resources.
The Human Resource Department (HRD) of the company is the main driver for all human resource (HR) initiatives such as those related to business & leadership training, compensation & benefits, development planning, employee engagement, international assignments, leadership development, performance management, recruiting strategy, strategic job families, sustainability, talent management, internal corporate communications, and job markets. Aside from these, HRD is also responsible for employee safety due to the unique setup of the company as an engineering centre, with a lot of employee safety and health considerations. In effect the head of safety reports to the HR Manager (HRM).
Of all HR initiatives and functions being implemented by HRD, two of the most underperforming areas are on development planning and recruiting strategy. These two functions are discussed in more detail in the next sections.
Development Planning
One of the commitments of the Jardine Schindler Group is in people development. Therefore, all employees should have an annual development review with their respective immediate superiors. The development review (DR) is done during the 2nd and 3rd quarters of the year, and is separate from their annual performance review. The DR provides the opportunity to discuss skills, knowledge and behaviours necessary for success in the current and future roles or how to meet strategic or operational goals. Individual development actions can and will arise from these discussion. It is actually part of a knowledge management framework (Lapina, Maurane, & Starineca 2014) in order to know details about each employee as a function of organizational effectiveness (Hlupic, Poulodi, & Rzevski 2002).
Ideally for Jardine Schindler Group, development reviews are conducted based three facets. First, performance gaps are identified based on the current role of the person being assessed. Specific gaps in achievements of performance objectives are discussed on a one-on-one basis. Also, the impact of the development needs is stressed by the immediate superior for the person being assessed to understand fully how important the gaps need to be filled. This then usually results in a learning and development program to be endorsed by the immediate superior to HR.
Second, the business strategy is analyzed as well as the general evolution of the business and markets, and how development needs would impact everything. During the DR, the employee is evaluated based on key performance indicators depending on his or her job role. These objectives are usually vitally few as it is believed that having few, but very significant objectives, are better than having too many objectives that do not really put much impact in the business.
Lastly, the individual career goals are discussed. During this stage, the employee’s individual career interests and possible next career steps are brought out. The employee is given the chance to discuss all his/her plans in the future. He or she is given the chance as well to layout what he or she wants to do in the next three to five years. During this discussion, the immediate superior assesses them and evaluates what trainings and development are needed in order for the employee to achieve his or her plans. This usually results in trainings to improve employee skills, learning programs and developmental job assignments, either interim or permanent.
Despite of having a corporate program to implement development planning strategies for Jardine Schindler Group, the system is still not robust with respect to its organization, implementation and evaluation in most of the departments in the company. In fact, the necessary factors for the success of the employee based on the company’s core values are not assessed very well and that the resulting development plans become ineffective in the end. One reason on why this function does not work properly is because the people who conduct development reviews have limited understanding on how performance is being managed in the first place and how DRs are used in measuring, analyzing and evaluating each and every employee under the performance management perspective. The usual practice is that the immediate superior asks questions to the employee based on what is written in the assessment form even if the immediate superior does not understand the item. For example, one of the items being assessed is the employee’s customer orientation. The immediate superior should assess if the employee understands and is willing to search for, work on and meet or exceed internal and external customers’ needs. However, the immediate superior may not be able to evaluate what needs to be done based on the assessment score he or she gets from the employee. With all 21 professional and technical job-related skills under assessment and evaluation, it is most likely that the immediate superior makes the wrong assessments and evaluations, which will then result in misidentification of the gaps that are required to be addressed both by the immediate superior and HRD.
Aside from the wrong assessment and evaluation problems by the immediate superior, other gaps include the misidentification of development goals and actions which could be attributed with the competency of the assessor. There are cases in which the assessor imposes his or her plans for the employee even if the plan was not well-taught. With the wrong plan in place, the employee is then at risk of doing the wrong job (if the plan requires job rotation) and eventually leading him or her to be less motivated.
Performing systematic root cause analysis shows many potential failures that contribute to the underperformance of this function:
- The development review as part of the development planning and performance management program is not well-understood by the assessors and the employees. This could be attributed to the low internal communication between different departments as the HRD is not able to have a regular communication with the heads of the other departments regarding the real purpose of the DR and how it should be handled and used properly. Another factor which attributes to this potential failure is the inability for HRD personnel to effectively analyze the entire process of development planning. The corporate office has a list of standard procedure on the entire process, but there is no guarantee that each and every HRD personnel who coordinates all works related to development review knows the process;
- There is no system in place that could ensure that HRD is able to analyze the development review conducted by the managers from other departments. Once the documents are submitted from the assessing department to HRD, those people under HRD who are supposed to filter and evaluate the forms on how they were filled up or used, are not able to perform this very important task. The usual practice is that once these documents are submitted to HRD, they are immediately filed to their respective 201 files without even checking thoroughly. This, in turn, does not give the managers from other departments the chance to identify what went wrong during the assessment, as well as device corrective and preventive actions to minimize errors in the assessments and evaluations; and
- The development review forms used by Jardine Schindler Group are from the corporate office in Switzerland, making it not well-suited in Jardine Schindler Group’s setting especially in South East Asia. Although it well understood that unification of systems and the forms associated with them would be very beneficial especially in a multinational company, there are still many instances in which certain parts of system or form do not promote correct acquisition of feedback from the stakeholders due to various reasons such as politics, culture and values. There may be some items in the development review that require minor revisions or even some items that require deletion or replacement with a better, well-suited ones.
- The managing director should ensure that the importance and philosophy of performance management and development planning are well-discussed during regular internal communications. This could easily be done during tool box meetings, or communication days. It is best to discuss these during annual dinners and performance summaries, or even on outing events wherein a short discussion from the management is usually done during the first few hours. This is to ensure that each and every employee acknowledge the importance of development planning to improve individual and group competencies for better business performance (Kesti 2012);
- HRD should come up with a committee which involves selected managers from other departments. The purpose of the committee is to analyze fully the gaps in terms of development planning and come up with department-specific action plans to minimize the gaps that will be identified. The committee should consist of members who are able to understand the principles behind development planning, and are able as well to contribute to the committee. Any problems that may arise during change management could be addressed to and by the committee. This will also support the previous recommendation on effective internal communications (Omilion-Hodges & Baker, 2014);
- HRD should establish a robust system to ensure that errors on how the development reviews are done are well communicated to the assessors. The system should consist of processes and information flow which could be designed by the committee as indicated in the previous recommendation. The process should be realistic and lean in order to prevent unwanted additional work and to promote productivity. The feedback mechanism to the assessors should be designed in a way that promotes improvement rather than a blaming culture of not doing the things properly; and
- HRD should establish a special ad-hoc team (outside or inclusive of committee members) to analyze the development review form and localize it to fit Jardine Schindler Group’s setting. The ad-hoc team should be nominated by members of the management team which should be in-charge in identifying items in the development review form that requires revisions to meet the political and cultural requirements of Jardine Schindler Group.
Recruiting Strategy
Similar to development planning, the way HRD performs recruitment for Jardine Schindler Group is does not seem to be very effective. The current recruiting strategy is based from the corporate guidelines which require the use of all possible methods for recruitment purposes, e.g. social media, direct hiring, head hunters, etc. However, despite of the method being employed for recruitment, it is still very important that HRD is able to get a healthy pool of candidates for job openings and are able to assess and evaluate them properly for the next steps. It is also equally important to ensure that the right person is put in the right job and is able to meet the minimum requirements based on the job description.
The entire process starts and ends from the department with a job opening. It starts with the department sending a personnel requisition form to HRD for processing. The personnel requisition form indicates the job vacancy as well as the scope and job description. The form is basically a one-pager which is filled-up by the requisitioner (usually the front-line manager), and then is endorsed by the department head.
After receiving the personnel requisition form, the HRD staff then posts job vacancy announcements both internally and externally through web-based recruitment platforms such as Monster, JobsDB, Jobstreet and LinkedIn. Priority is given to internal applicants. However, if there are external applicants who are well-suited for the job, the HRD awards it to them. The HRD staff (recruitment specialist) performs a background check on the applicant based on his or her resume. Those resumes that are shortlisted are then process through an interview by the recruitment specialist, either over the phone or through one-on-one meet-up. The purpose of this exercise is for the recruitment specialist to perform quick psychometric evaluation on the applicant.
The process mentioned above seems to be common and straightforward. However, this usually results in having the hiring manager being dissatisfied with the short-listed applicants. This is because eventually, no one from the short-listed candidates fit the job profile.
For Jardine Schindler Group, this problem is perennial for job vacancies related to field support such as service technicians, repair engineers and mechanical and/or electrical fitters. Analysis show that such underperformance of the company on this aspect could be due to the following potential failures:
- The HRD team handling recruitment is not capable of performing first-level recruitment due to qualification issues. Since the job vacancy is technical in nature and require engineering skills and knowledge, it could be difficult for a recruitment specialist or staff to process applicants if the staff is not an engineer or does not have any experience in engineering. For example, if a mechanical fitter is required for the job, the recruitment specialist may be confused if the applicant is a mechanical engineer, an experienced carpenter, or an electrical engineer with ten years of mechanical fitting experience. The first instinct of the recruitment specialist could be to hire the mechanical engineer which could result in a problem since the mechanical engineer may not be interested in working as a mechanical fitter. Basically the work of an engineer and a fitter is totally different;
- The job title and description may be misleading. Although the owner of the process in ensuring that the job descriptions follow a certain guideline or standard, it is still the responsibility of the hiring manager and/or department to ensure that the job descriptions are as accurate and complete as possible. However, without any proactive measures from HRD, this will never happen; and
- The HRD basically do not have a strategy on how to find the best candidates. This also depends on the capability and competency of the recruitment staff in locating and hiring the best people around the country. For a technical position in the company, treatment on this area should be customized a bit.
- HRD should ensure that a complete and robust system for recruitment is well-established. This system would include the processes from the first to the last step, and establishing as well strategies on where and how to locate and get the best candidates. For example, if the job vacancy is for a field technician post, then it would be best to get people who are graduates from technical vocational schools or polytechnic universities. Therefore, HRD should come up with a way to be involved in job fairs in various educational institutions. Other processes in the system should be lean to prevent wasted energy during the recruitment process. Also, the recruiting strategy should be carefully targeted to the right applicants to allow successful hiring in the future. There are many approaches on this such as the sponsoring a fellowship model similar to (Illig et al 2011) or following various e-recruiting models as discussed in (Lee 2011).
Looking into the Process
For any type of function in HRD, it is important that processes are not only written but are also in place and executed properly. One of the reasons on why processes are not followed thoroughly is because the processes itself are not clear and contain a lot of additional tasks that would only waste the time of the stakeholder. It is therefore recommend that a review is done on these existing and possible new processed by an expert such a Six Sigma Green Belt holder or a Lead Six Sigma expert, for example (Martinez-Jurado, Moyano-Fuentes & Jerez-Gomez 2013; Shafer & Moeller 2012).
References
Hlupic, V., Poulodi, A., & Rzevski, G. (2002). ‘Towards an integrated approach to knowledge management: “Hard”, “Soft” and “Abstract” issues’, Knowledge and Process Management, vol. 9, pp. 90-102.
Illig, K. A., Kalata, E., Reed, A., Glass, C. & Gillespie, D. L. (2011). ‘Recruiting strategies for potential 0+5 vascular residency applicants,’ Annals of Vascular Surgery, vol. 26, iss. 1, pp. 1-9.
Jardine Schindler (2014). About Jardine Schindler, [Online], Available: http://www.schindler.com/hk/internet/en/about-us.html [02 April 2014].
Kesti, M. (2012) ‘Organization human resources development connection to business perofrmance’, in 2nd Annual International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Economics Research (QQE 2012), Procedia: Economics and Finance, vol. 2, pp. 257-264.
Lapina, I., Maurane, G. & Olga, S. (2014). ‘Human resource management models: aspects of knowledge management and corporate social responsibility’, in Contemporary Issues in Business, Management and Education 2013, Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 110, pp. 577-586.
Lee, I. (2011). ‘Modeling the benefit of e-recruiting process integration’, Decision Support Systems, vol. 51, pp. 230-239.
Martinez-Jurado, P. J., Moyano-Fuentes, J., & Jerez-Gomez, P. (2013). ‘Human resource management in lean production adoption and implementation processes: success factors in the aeronautics industry’, Cuadernos de Economia y Direccion de la Empresa, 2014. Article in press.
Omilion-Hidges, L. M. & Baker, C. R. (2014). ‘Everyday talk and convincing conversations: utilizing strategic international communication’, Business Horizons, 2014. Article in press.
Schindler Group (2014). Welcome to the Schindler Group, [Online], Available: http://www.schindler.com/com/internet/en/about-schindler.html [02 April 2014].
Shafer, S.M. & Moeller, S.B. (2012). ‘The effects of Six Sigma on corporate performance An empirical investigation’, Journal of Operations Management, vol. 30, pp. 521-532.
