Step 1: Begin Assembly of Human Resources Report to the Board of Directors

Unit 5 – Individual Project

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Assignment Overview

Type: Individual Project

Unit:  HR Plan Performance and Evaluation

Due Date:  Tue,1/15/19

Grading Type: Numeric

Points Possible:  250

Points Earned:

Deliverable Length:  Body of report should be 40-50 pages excluding title, references page(s), and any appendices

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Assignment Details

Assignment Description

Step 1: Begin Assembly of Human Resources Report to the Board of Directors

Assemble the reports generated in Units 1–4 into a new, comprehensive report that will be completed in this assignment. This step should include aggregation of the following sections:

  • Title Page
  • Executive Summary [Placeholder: this is completed in Step 3]
  • Table of Contents [Placeholder: this is completed in Step 4]
  • Section 1: Current Human Resources Environment
  • Section 2: Company’s Human Resources Posture
  • Section 3: Comparator Group Human Resources Posture
  • Section 4: Company’s Human Resources Competitive Position
  • Section 5: Recommendations and Expected Impact[Placeholder: this is completed in Step 2]
  • References [Placeholder: this is completed in Step 4]
  • Appendices [Placeholder: this is completed in Step 4]

Step 2: Recommendations and Expected Impact

Based on the work completed in Units 1–4, develop at least 1 recommendation in each of the areas listed below that are designed to improve the company’s competitive human resources position. Be sure to include a detailed description of the recommendation, an overview of how the recommendation would be implemented, and a discussion of the expected impact of each recommendation.

  1. Benefits and Compensation
  2. Diversity
  3. Employee Relations
  4. Talent Management
  5. Technology

Step 3: Executive Summary

Develop an overview (2–3 pages) presenting key points from all five sections of the report. Executive summaries are always included in reports to the board of directors as a courtesy, to allow them to quickly assess the overall report and facilitate discussion. The executive summary should be concise, factual, and professional in tone.

Step 4: Finalize Assembly of the Human Resources Report to the Board of Directors

Finalize assembly of the report, inserting the Executive SummaryTable of Contents, and the Section 5 Recommendations. Make sure the References listing is aggregated from all prior work. The final References listing should be alpha order, with citations in APA format. The Appendicesshould be ordered to correspond with the final report.

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Running Head: HUMAN RESOURCES COMPETITIVE POSITION, RISKS, AND OPPORTUNITIES 0

Human Resources Competitive Position, Risks, and Opportunities

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Introduction

The tern human resources in companies are used to elaborate more about the people who for an organization and the department that play the role of managing resources regarding employees. In 1960, this term was coined because the state of labor relations had started to demand more attention due to the introduction of notions like organization behavior, and assessment selection. However, human resource management can be regarded as a contemporaneous, umbrella definition applied to explain the management and development of workers in an organization. It can also apply to personnel or talent management. For more details, human resource management targets a number of major areas like recruiting and staffing, compensation and benefits, training and learning, labor and employee relations, and organization growth. Taking an example of Toyota Company and having conducted some research on the same, it is clear that the Company has human resources competitive position, risks, and opportunities. This is a Japanese automotive manufacturer that participates in designing, manufacturing, assembling, and sale of commercial vehicles, cars, small vans, and other associated spare parts. In this paper, the company’s human resources competitive position will be analyzed, some risks and opportunities identified and evaluated, and the Comparator Group Competitive Position.

Industry Competitive Position

This company has happened to be at the top position in its competitive position when compared to other companies that engage in the same tasks because of some famous and admired aspects of the institution operates. Since human resource management is a very powerful tool to organization success, the company has a good management team that ensures that all roles are carried effectively and in a unique manner in order to attract more customers to their quality products. With this example, the company has secured a competitive position. Moreover, the company human resource team ensures there is a good workforce plan by considering that it recruits a suitable person who can offer quality services to the company. This makes the company unique with operational excellence, and that is why it is more considered by clients, hence giving it a good competitive position.

On the other hand, the company is widely spread to many regions and its customers can assess it easily. To add on this, its supply chain is highly efficient because of classy standards used. This ensures there is a continuous supply of their products and services to clients, and customers will receive goods on time. With this, the company also happened to have a top competitive position (Essays, UK, 2013).

Human resources have also struggled to ensure there are no errors that may affect the operation of activities in the company. For example, when using inventory systems it ensures that every portion entering the next level of the production process has the required standards needed for quality products. In order to accomplish this mission, human resources ensure that the personnel serving in the production and logistics are well trained, competent, and able to sense situations that led to risks and problems.

There is also an improvement of the production lines. However, for this company to secure the topmost position in the competition, it has ensured highly efficient and effective production by enhancing the production lines. Human resource department has ensured that the company has suitable machinery at the forefront of technology and all types of equipment are reliable and they do not have defects and failures during operation. The human resource management, however, ensures that all machines and pieces of equipment are well serviced and maintained after certain duration. The company also depends on auto-maintenance that ensures that the suitable and effective efforts are consumed.

Nevertheless, the company invests in employee training and qualifications. This is because the company has understood that competent and qualified workers will efficient and effective production. The company accomplishes this by continually subjecting its workers to training sessions where they gain a lot of knowledge and improve their skills. Moreover, the pieces of training are also crucial in that they make workers learner how to meet the recommended standards in the company. The training makes workers be more effective in doing their jobs and they end up escaping from some frustration that they may face them at the workplace.

Lastly, focusing on the VRIO framework of the company and the reality that it is at the top when we consider its competitive position, it is clear that this is due to the fact that it has a competitive advantage out of its ability to develop and acquire attributes that make it perform better than its competitors, it has ensured progressive improvement in processes too, it has the most suitable and efficient human resource management system and a strong culture of handling and solving problems that make it be at the leading position in the world.

Comparator Group Competitive Position

The company has also applied the intense process of choosing a comparator group that assists it to maintain competitive compensation, know its potential competitors, evaluate its relative accomplishment, and defend its compensation decisions. The company has selected the correct group that cannot be exaggerated and that is why it is leading in its competitive position. For example, it ensures potential size consideration is examined like assets, economic capitalization, it business value, net income, profit and the number of workers. The company, therefore, ensures the correct and relevant measures when choosing its peers in order to determine its competitive position (Blejer & Skreb, 2007).

Additionally, the company competes with executive talents and it does this by first identifying another company that might have improved practices and with workers who are more talented in some fields. The company has a potential performance that makes inspires other peer companies to improve their performance. For example, its main competitors are Volkswagen and General Motors.

Human Resources Risks

There are number of risks that face companies and good measures and practices should be taken in order to handle them. Some of these risks develop from lack of critical skills, successful planning, ethics and behaviors, and when other useful factors are not properly applied. However, the risks mostly occur when the human resource does not employ proper risk assessment process. For the case of the risk caused by the company culture, the human resource department ensures that it first understand the culture of the company by studying the behaviors and ethics of its workers. By doing so, it identifies its weak employees and finds ways of managing them like establishing an ethics committee that solves risks like wrong behaviors from a given culture. A written code of conduct is also applied to ensure that workers do not implement new codes in the company that may lead to poor performance. Culture has also led to workplace disputes although the company risk management team works at ensuring that people try to eliminate some practices and behaviors that may impact the company negatively (Katie, 2013).

The company also faces financial risks in the case when finances are not effectively handled by the finance team. This risk in most cases happens when the people dealing with finances are not competent and qualified and therefore end up making losses through poor analysis or poor monitoring of cash flow in the company. In this case, human resource management ensures that it recruits employees who are suitable in order to avoid the risks. Additionally, compliance and regulation is the other risk where employees can break some regulations due to the failure of adhering being accurate while handling different situations in the company. Moreover, other workers fail to adhere to the company set agreements and therefore these occur due to ignorance of some employees. Since the risk can cause conflicts, the human resource department ensures that workers are aware of the compliance and regulation risk, and training is conducted to offer more information to employees. Lastly, supply chain risk occurs when the chain has grown to be big to a level that managing it is not easy. Human resource, however, works at ensuring any activity that may cause damage to the chain is eliminated since it can affect retention, engagement, and attraction of talent. To handle all these, proper decision making is ensured in order to limit workers cause some of these risks out of ignorance. Nevertheless, proper management makes sure that risks are assessed effectively, and employees with the right education and skills own the right responsibilities so that all activities are performed correctly (Jahedi, 2016).

Human Resources Opportunities

Currently, most external strategic factors are based on economic and technological trends. For the case of Toyota Company, SWOT analysis model is applied in identifying some opportunities the organization can apply to enhance its business. Some of the external strategic factors that human resources use include adapting to varying client needs. They do this by introducing new products after doing through innovation and invention and developing new features that make the products admirable and more demanded out of the unique features. With this opportunity, human resource management ensures that it invests more on pieces of training in order to make workers be more innovative when manufacturing products. The company also ensures that it delivers the suitable products ordered by customers on time.

The company has also focused on sustainability and environment-friendly products. However, since clients know the pollution impacts caused by some products, human resource management has struggled to ensure that the final product is environmentally friendly, and does it is sustainable. Moreover, clients in most cases buy classic products those that will serve them for a longer duration. The human resource in the company ensures that there are professional workers who can examine the efficiency of a product before it is sold to consumers. Additionally, it also ensures that workers meet the standards of the company in order to maintain sustainability in the institution (Amanda, 2018).

The other opportunity states that the company is prepared to benefit from developing a partnership. For example, while examining Toyota Company, one can identify its readiness to partner with BMW whereby the two companies in June 2012 signed an MOU where collaboration and technology were applied as a long-term strategy. However, the company also partners with it’s the other institution to ensure joint development, collaboration and assistance during the development of standard products that involve new technologies. These partnerships ensure that the two companies make a lot of cost savings, contribute to important synergies and boosts the operational margins. However, to maintain these benefits the company human resource management ensures that a collaboration committee is formed that allows workers or serves at ensuring that the partnerships are sustainable (Amanda, 2018).

To add on this, the company also makes the major acquisition from other industries. Through the acquisition, the company continues to grow, acquire new skills, assets and get opportunities to rich new markets. Human resource accomplishes these opportunities by ensuring that the two companies are in good terms, employees are flexible to learn from other institutions, and the proper collaborations are made.

Overall Assessment of the Company’s Human Resources Competitive Position

Due to the significant contributions from employees, the company can survive and flourish in the current competitive environment and properly in the front line. The company has quality products and services that are admirable that makes it attract more customers and even other companies to gain skills from its personnel. Human resources in this company have ensured the top competitive position to it because they ensure employees engagement strategies. These strategies are important in that they ensure there are growth improvement and productivity. Particularly, when the company applied engagements it led to sales increase and the collaborations among employees improved. By doing this, workers grow to be passionate about their work, proactive, and more innovative. Human resources ensure the competitive position for the company in that it has taken measures to enhance employee engagement and satisfaction.

On the other hand, also ensures the competitive position of the company in that it has introduced the use of technology while handling some specific operations in the company. This technology is important in the company because it assists the human resource management team in hiring, attracting, sustaining and keeping talents. The technology also helps most managers and workers in doing their task without difficulties, In short, human resources assists the company so much through the technology because of the automation that has led to reduced workload and contributed to more technological pieces of equipment. However, the company is in the leading position due to technology investments that do not apply in most companies.

The company human resource management also seeks to differentiate its products by adding some features. This makes the institution to be the most efficient internationally because in the extent of doing product differentiation and cost leadership ways have made it have a competitive advantage while compared to other companies. These two strategies have created superior values that meet the needs of customers. Following the cost leadership strategy, the company has been able to ensure low-cost method internationally. However, the fact the company has differentiated its products to be unique from those of its competitors has led it to be more famous and unique making it be at the top position while comparing with other industries.

Lastly, the overall organization human resources have greatly impacted the operation of the company mostly through the qualified personnel. This is because human resource management team has ensured that there is good employee relation, risks that may damage the company are properly assessed and solved. The human resource also maintains the competitive advantage of the company in the fact it uses strongly rooted methods to manage the problems that occur in the workplace. Moreover, it participates in decision making and develops committees that make follow up of the workers’ behaviors and also engage them in solving some organization issues. More pieces of training and developments are conducted to employees when human resources understand that there is a need for other training programs. In reality, the overall company human resources are significant because they participate in many areas in order to maintain the company top competitive position (Kleiman, 2004).

Conclusion

In conclusion, human resources entail the most powerful tools for a company and it is concerned with value advancement in industries. Referencing the discussed company, human resources improve productivity, lowers costs, maintain the company competitive advantage and position, and ensure intellectual growth including other roles. From the analysis of the company, it is clear that human resources play the greatest responsibility at ensuring industry competitive position. Secondly, through its comparator group competitive position, the company is depended by other industries in acquiring new skills and making them improve their production processes. Moreover, there are human resources risks that face companies although they can be managed and solved wisely when risk management team decides to take precautions. There are also human resources opportunities that assist companies to improve their productivity and acquire new skills from other partners. Generally, the company human resources have led to the competitive advantage and the fact that the company can perform its tasks and other operation effectively making it perform better than other competitors hence appearing to be in the top position.

References

Amanda Jesnoewski, (2018) Four ways to identify more business opportunities – Smart Company Retrieved November 20, 2018, from https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/advice/business-planning/four-ways-to-identify-more-business-opportunities/

Blejer, M. I., & Skreb, M. (2007) Balance of Payments, Exchange Rates, and Competitiveness in Transition Economies Springer Science & Business Media

Essays, UK, (2013) Toyotas Competitive Advantage in the Automotive Industry Marketing Essay Retrieved November 2013 from https://www.ukessays.com/essays/marketing/toyotas-competitive-advantage-in-the-automotive-industry-marketing-essay.php?vref=1

Jahedi, R. (2016). Potential of Human Resource Outsourcing Benefits and Risks in the Public Sector of Bangladesh GRIN Verlag

Katie Jacobs, (2013) Top eight HR risks, and how to handle them. Retrieved April 26, 2013 from https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/top-eight-hr-risks-and-how-to-handle-them

Kleiman, L. S. (2004). Human resource management: a managerial tool for competitive advantage. Atomic Dog Publishing

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