UTAS

Unit-BMA583,
Managing People
and the Employment
Relationship 14
Assessment Item 3 Individual Capstone Case Analysis

Jalpa Brahmbhatt
Student ID

Executive Summary
The presented report analyses the presented case on ProService Co, a consulting engineers
and project management professional services firm and the underlying human resource
issues. The firm has seen tremendous growth in over the last decade and the human resource
management department seems to be ineligible to cope up with the increased sense of
responsibilities. This has caused several issues to crop up in the firm. A critical analysis of the
findings and observations as an external consultant was performed. This report talks about
those findings in terms of specific challenges the HR team currently faces and the emerging
HRM issues to be considered. Further, a suite of initiatives to meet the priority HR areas,
considering the prevailing theories regarding issues such as job design, business ethics,
leadership and performance management in current business context have been
recommended. These recommendations serve to minimise the challenges and concerns raised.
Given that there is a desire to see an integrated and holistic approach to the overhaul of the
HR function, a modern day HR approach called the Strategic Human Resource Management
and an implementation of several of its techniques and procedures has been advised. Strategic
human resource management is a process that helps in administrating and supervising the
assimilation of an organisations strategic intent, vision, business activities and action
sequences into an integrated suite of HR processes and practices and addresses the
contemporary issues been faced by the organisation (Baker 1999). Considering SHRM, an
external view of potential initiatives to achieve appropriate outcomes for ProServices
business has been established.

Introduction
ProService Co, a consulting engineers and project management professional services firm
headquartered in Melbourne and having four other offices across the Asia Pacific region, has
observed a significant upsurge in the employee growth rate since 2002. As per founder and
current managing director Shona Smith and other board members, this growth is a fractional
reflection of ProServices progression from a small company to a multinational organisation.
The targeted acquisitions of other companies either due to strategic geographical location, to
grasp a market segment or to attain certain capabilities, and the routine recruitment and
selection drives have led to an increase in employees from twenty five in 2002 to 420 today,
and this is further expected to rise given Shonas keenness on acquiring a small consulting
engineering firm in Perth and a project management firm in Abu Dhabi. As a company,
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ProService is making great progress and is considered as a leader among the providers of
these services, but at the same time it has also been facing some issues related to managing its
human resources. The HR manager, Alaine Jones is concerned with all these issues cropping
up and together with Shona, has resolved to undertake a full structural overhaul of the HR
function. As a strategic HR consultant, my job was to provide an external view and assist
with identifying the issues, analysing them in terms of Proservices context and vision,
prioritising them, and provide key recommendations to improve firms HR performance. A
Strategic Human Resource Management approach has been recommended.

Identified HRM Issues

With the firm getting recognised as an innovative, smart and contemporary provider of high
quality builds and project management services and deemed as an innovator and a leader in
the field, one of the major issues that has cropped up is maintaining its brand and sustaining
in a competitive environment. This can primarily be achieved by sourcing and retaining the
technically sound staff that has the right mix of skills and abilities required to perform the
tasks forming a part of ProServices project portfolio, in a thin labour market (Al-Emadi,
Schwabenland & Wei, 2015). Further, with the firm opening its satellite offices in other
countries, managing the diversity in terms of cross-cultural and interpersonal variances has
turned up to be of vital importance. This is followed by the challenges pertaining to managing
the human resources working in different environments at the head office and the satellite
offices and keeping them engaged and motivated to work on the risky yet critical projects.
Bridging the cultural and operational gaps and integrating the organisational culture during
and post acquisitions of small firms that have their own social, organisational and operational
structures is one another issue. The employees from the organisation been acquired by
ProService might not be familiar of the work culture and certain business processes that are
quite regular and ordinary at their new company. Additionally, ProService has to ensure they
have enough skilled, trained and experienced workforces to provide enough capacity to take
care of the potential future projects while also ensuring they do not have a huge surplus. In a
two-day meeting, Alaine and HR team from all of the other offices identified new risks and
threats for the business and human resource management. They brought forward the statistics
revealing an increasing trend of OHS incidents in Sydney office over the last three years most
of which occurred on sites, despite the preliminary safety measures already been enforced
and the safety induction for the employees been done.
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The possible unfair dismissal case reported at Brisbane office where the employee was
sacked despite lack of a firm evidence, on charges of having shared ProServices confidential
data with a competitor has also been cited in the meeting. Moreover, the HR representatives
at the head office in Melbourne werent even consulted on the matter. Without any firm
evidence to back the claims, it was reportedly an incident of the line manager losing trust and
convincing the office manager for a dismissal. It was later also found that the new employees
in the Brisbane office have not even been provided with the company codes of conduct since
the acquisition that was done about two years ago. This weakens the companys arguments
against the employee who could argue that even if he shared the data he wasnt made aware
that this is unlawful or is prohibited at ProService. The workforce profile indicates an
imbalance between the number of females in project management and engineering
departments.
Further, the managers at the Brisbane office were found to be involved with three sexual
harassment cases in three different incidents. Moreover, rather than seeking a resolution
following the internal mechanisms they resorted to the Queensland Anti-Discrimination
Commission and Anti-Discrimination Tribunal. Then there were issues related with bullying
complaints made by a team member against an office manager in Melbourne. Additionally,
the systems and procedures that used to manage the limited number of employees are finding
it tough to put up with managing the diversity at ProService. Despite the value ProServices
business deliverables are providing to its strong customer base, such incidents carry a
potential to weaken the corporate brand image and reputation.
The way remuneration is being managed is disorganized and fragmented. People doing the
same stuff in different offices have different compensations. This is because the packaging
has been dependent on individual managers responsible for recruiting the staff, followed by
informal performance appraisals. Additionally, the departments dealing with the functional
area of the organisation viz. engineering, project management, etc. and technical experts
seem to have been paid significantly higher than those who work in the supporting
departments. Though this is being done with the intent of retaining the talented individuals in
the technical sectors, other departments tend to get demotivated. Finally, there have been
complaints about the work-life balance and some employees have decided to quit citing a
managerial pressure to be at least working from early morning to late afternoon.

Potential HRM Challenges

The board wishes to get its HRM structure reviewed holistically rather than investigating
each of the structural issues symptomatically. The priority of these issues shall be determined
through their capability of affecting tasks critical to business operations. The processes and
methods that assist with diminishing the discord between ProServices vision and strategic
goals and the stance of its employees are required to be identified. These issues relate to the
employees placing their personal interests above the organisations objectives and strategic
intent. Given the existing organisational diversity, developing a generic strategy shall be a
challenge for the HRM department. Following this, there is deficit and hence a requirement
of developing and implementing a uniform approach towards leadership and decision
making. This has been related to imbibing a feeling of being treated unequally and unfairly
among the employees. They feel that the management has been biased towards the way
certain people have been treated, which leads to them getting demotivated and disengaged.
Further, the job descriptions and task statements across the organisation have not yet been
made consistent through different countries. This causes a state of confusion and chaos while
describing and allocating tasks to a team member. Given the variety of tasks and diversified
jobs being done by ProService, outlining these tasks happens to be precarious challenge for
HRM. Additionally, there lies no robust way of assessing the employee performance and
obtaining feedback. Without this, it becomes difficult for the managers to provide critical
reviews and identify the gaps between an employees capabilities and those required by him
to meet organisational objectives which could potentially be utilised to identify the training
areas. Creating a methodology for performance management and analysis that covers a
variety of objectives, people, tasks, locations, and simultaneously is also consistent with
business objectives is not an easy task.
Generally, every issue been faced by ProService has been impacting it adversely, but the ones
to be considered first deal with motivating and engaging the employees and those directly or
indirectly related with customers. Importantly, the HRM department at ProService has tried to
make several attempts at developing methods and processes in past with little success. It has
also failed to communicate the vision and strategic intent across all of its employees and
departments at different locations. Trying to implement a unitarist perspective might hurt the
ethical feelings of certain individualist employees and also possibly cause clashes among the
organisational vertical hierarchy (Kessler & Purcell 2003). Developing a common strategy
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that is coherent with different employees coming from discrete backgrounds, cultures and
technicalities and equally motivating them to align themselves with organisational vision is
yet another challenge.

Recommendations and Initiatives to meet the priority

HR areas
ProService is aware that growth comes with an increased level of managerial complexity and
that the aforementioned issues are likely to get worse with anticipated progression and
mergers and therefore has hired us to provide consultancy services for having them developed
an integrated suite of HR strategies that provide an overall solution to the issues identified in
previous sections of the report. We recommend implementing the process of strategic human
resource management or SHRM (Fombrun, Tichy & Devanna 1984). SHRM refers to a
pattern of planned HR deployments and activities that enable any organisation to align
individual employee goals with proposed organisational intent (Handy et al. 1989).
It takes into account almost all of the issues been identified and enhances the organisational
performance holistically (see Appendix A). The organisation is the main unit of analysis and
the employees, viewed as social capital are considered to be an integral part of overall
budgeting and management processes. SHRM is an investment in human capital. Their
knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics are the attributes that affect the degree of
success an organisation shall achieve in the long run. It is due to this reason that the board
considers people are its prime assets in this organisation. The framework of HRM for any
organisation depends on several factors including stakeholders interests and the situational
factors that affect the HRM policy choices, which influence the HR outcomes and the long
term consequences. These consequences are refed and analysed in accordance with
stakeholder interests and situational factors which makes SHRM a dynamic and iterative
approach that gets better with each cycle (see Appendix B). The issues and challenges
identified in previous sections form a basis for formulating the strategy and assigning the
implementation roles to individuals (see Appendix C). These recommendations have been
illustrated in priority order in the following sections.
1. Based on this process, it is recommended that ProService must implement human
resource information systems which would acquire, store, manipulate, analyse,
retrieve and distribute information related to HR and hence catalyse their human
resource planning by providing a database of all of their HRM activities and processes
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and HR related information across each of the offices at a centralised location

(Cathcart & Kovach 1999). This information can be accessed by authorized personnel
and required transactional and decision-support analyses can be performed. This shall
further help in performing a better and goal-driven HRM planning, determining the
demand of employees for a task and forecast their deficit or surplus, improving the
efficiency and effectiveness of HR, enabling HR Planning at departmental, regional
and organisational levels and so on.
Additionally, different human resource strategies at ProService like staffing, employee
learning and development, managing performance and compensation will all be
integrated, thereby making the activities in each functional area supportive and
consistent with other HR areas (see Appendix D). Further, HRIS shall assist with
workforce profile analysis, workforce dynamics analysis, staffing, performance
management, learning and career development provide a centralised repository for
compensation and benefits (Mayfield, Mayfield & Lunce 2003).
2. Another recommendation shall be that of carefully establishing a link between
organisational culture, national culture and values that are used to determine
behaviour and decisions in organisations (Chuang & Liao 2010; Caldwell et al. 2011)
and describing the obligations and rights of employers and employees during the
employment and while terminating it. This shall help facilitate considering the ethics,
social responsibilities and local and global laws and embed them in ProServices
HRM suite of activities. The legal and ethical obligations of employees and employers
shall be clearly stated, which shall clearly state the dos and donts while in
ProServices premises thereby maintaining a safe and healthy workplace. Further, the
ethical and legal issues pertaining to privacy of information and non-disclosure
agreements shall be examined and made a part of HRM suite. Further, a description of
the legal environments in the country of operation and the conciliation and arbitration
system to be considered in case of a conflict be detailed in company code of conduct,
and each employee shall be made aware of its existence during their respective
induction (Farnham 2000).
The legislations and jurisdictions stating the employers duties and responsibilities
shall also be considered and clearly mentioned. This must also include the wages and
conditions and the contract of employment (Farnham 2000). It should be the
responsibility of HRM at ProService to make its employees aware and ensure an
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implementation of laws like the Equal Employment Opportunity, Equal Opportunity

for Women in the Workplace Amendment Act 2012, Racial Discrimination Act 1975,
Sex Discrimination Act 1984, Fair Work Act 2009, etc. This should also be considered
while making recruitment decisions. Most employers are subjected to both Federal
and State EEO legislations (Fombrun, Tichy & Devanna 1984, Rudin, Wingham &
Weaver 2004). Acts like the Fair Work Acts shall also help the employees develop a
safety net under the Fair Work regime, and cover the factors dealing with employee
representation and managerial unilateralism (Kessler & Purcell 2003; Teicher &
Spearitt 1996; Burstein 1998).
3. While formulating a new set of policies, the existing diversity at ProService and its
management should be carefully considered (Bledsoe, Oatsvall & Condon 2010).
Employees should be treated as separate individuals with their respective morals,
beliefs, faiths, backgrounds, knowledge and mindsets, which might be similar or
different among discrete employees. The new suite of HRM policies shall carefully
consider the concepts of diversity management and equal employment opportunity
and shall try to channelize both to facilitate organisational performance and
employees personal growth (McMahan, Bell & Virick 1998). The intent shall be to
allow all to maximise his potential and contribute to organisational goals (McMahan,
Bell & Virick 1998; Richard, Kirby & Chadwick 2013). Diversity shall be managed
using the strategic, managerial and operational initiatives and be used as a source of
innovation to generate a wider range of idea and frameworks that would result in
newer opportunities. Diversity trainings intended to mould employees attitudes about
diversity and develop skills required in order to work effectively with a diverse
workforce shall be scheduled and monitored through periodic cultural audits (DNetto
et al. 2014; Martin-Alcazar, Romero-Fernandez & Sanchez-Gardey 2012). Cases of
sexual discrimination and harassment cost to the employers in terms of negative
publicity and loss of credibility, hence any such behaviour should in no case be
solicited and severe chastisements including terminations should be imposed.
4. Policies related to sourcing, selection, recruitment and termination of
employment should also be clearly explained and must include a variety of cases
viz. how would an unfair dismissal be warranted and so on. Best practice
organisations keep careful records of verbal and written warnings given to poor
performers (Bergwerk 1988). Additionally, all possible measure must be taken to
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ensure the physical, physiological and psychosocial wellbeing of the employees.

These form an integral part of the Occupational health and safety laws as enforced by
different federal and state authorities in different countries where the business
operates (Abbaspour et al. 2012). Each of the formal and informal rules that regulate
the employment relationship and social processes that create and enforce these rules
should be established. Different cases where the processes like conciliation,
arbitration, unions, awards, enterprise bargaining, enterprise agreements and
collective agreements, etc. shall be considered should be thoughtfully described and
carefully included in ProServices codes of conduct and briefed to the employees
during their orientation.
5. Furthermore, the new suite of HRM policies should promote a work environment
that encourages the employees to achieve a work-life balance (Mescher, Benschop
& Dooreqaard 2009; Wang & Verma 2012; Mitlacher 2011). The leave arrangements
should enable them to have flexibility to handle family, personal and community
matters. It should recognize the impact of the needs of other family members and
dependents on attaining a work-life balance and provide the employees flexibility in
their career choices and options. It should also recognize that different employees
have different needs associated with maintaining a work-life balance (De Cieri et al.
2005). The policies should facilitate flexible working hours, part-time work, job
sharing, telecommuting or working from home, employee assistance programs,
relocation services and utilizing sick leaves for family commitments.

6. There is also an urgent need of analysing the workflow processes followed by job
analysis such that a gap can be identified between the tasks performed and the skills
required for the kind of services ProService is delivering presently and is expected to
deliver in the future (Siddique 2004). Accordingly, the organisational structure should
be reorganized, work profiles should be redesigned, employee selection should be
materialised, HR Planning should be done, performance management and job
evaluation should be done and employee training and development should be
implemented (Becker & Huselid 2010). This will help in developing a link between
strategic intent of ProService and the design of jobs. Various methods like PAQ, task
inventory analysis and Fleishman job analysis surveys can be considered for job

analysis (Becker & Huselid 2010). Once the job analysis has been done, processes
related to various recruitment policies, sourcing, recruiters role, and personnel
selection methods should be considered. Following this, the major determinants of
individual performance, criteria for measuring effective performance and purposes of
performance management, performance appraisal and performance feedback should
be clearly defined. Both effective and poor performances should be acknowledged
and corresponding measures should be clearly defined based on individual attributes,
organisational strategy, objective results and situational constraints (Becker & Huselid
2010).
7. Also, the remuneration should not solely depend on performance management but
also on factors like how well is employees performance aligned with organisational
objectives, does he have a clear articulation of work culture, does he have a clear
specification of how the results are to be achieved, does his style encourage
discretionary effort, simple processes and how is their daily workplace behaviour,
strategic congruence, validity, reliability, acceptability, specificity and so on. There
are several approaches to measure performance like comparative approach ranking,
forced distribution and paired comparison, attribute approach graphic rating scales
and mixed standard scales, behavioural approach critical incidents, BARS, BOS,
OBM and assessment centres results approach MBO and ProMES and quality
approach focus on customer orientation and prevention approach to errors (Travis et
al. 2002). Following this, activities dealing with training, learning and development
shall be considered (Armstrong & Baron 2000). A skill-based pay system thats based
on knowledge and skillset required to successfully perform their current job, is highly
recommended (Lawler & Ledford 1992; Jenkins & Klarsfeld 2002). The major
decision areas and concepts in the employee compensation management should be
defined specifically, considering the regulatory framework for pay in the country of
operations. Equity Theory states that people evaluate the fairness of their situations by
comparing them with those of other individuals (Edstrom & Lorange 1984; Huseman
& Hatfield 1990). They compare their ratios of outcomes and perceived inputs with
others and this decides their attitudes and behaviours. Theories such as reinforcement
theory, expectancy theory and agency theory should be considered.

Conclusion
The HR managers, senior executives and line managers should all work together to develop
and implement the SHRM methods such that they align with ProServices strategic intent.
The organisational goals should take into account employees needs and wishes for career
development and an equal opportunity for all, rather than considering a high remuneration as
the only way to retain skilled professionals. The support from top management for HR
planning and involvement of HR managers in business planning process shall aid in aligning
the two.

Appendices
Appendix A: Strategic Human Resource Management

Typical responsibilities of HR professionals

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How HR practices support high-performance work systems

Appendix B: Factors influencing SHRM

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Appendix C: Strategy formulation and implementation in SHRM

Appendix D: Use of HRIS in forecasting human resource requirements

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Appendix E: The balanced scorecard

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Appendix F: HR Challenges and practices

Appendix G:
Some of the right questions to be asked Shona and Alaine:

What do you think is impeding the process of restructuring of HRM?

Do you think there is a lack of employee engagement and motivation? If yes, is
something being done about it?
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What do you think can best be done to promote unitarism? What is making the

employees lack the feeling of ownership towards their work?

How difficult is it to explain the business objectives to the employees and train them

to think in that perspective?

Is the board expecting too much of specificity in a diverse business environment?
What has been done with regards to performance management and establishing a

feedback methodology?
How do you think the issues been put forward in the two-day meeting can best be

addressed and treated?

What is being done to draft a remuneration structure that takes into account factors

other than performance management? Are they even being considered?

Some of the right questions to be asked to the staff:
What do you think makes you feel disengaged from the organisation?
Are you satisfied with the remuneration structure?

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