Unit 14 Working with and Leading People Assignment Solution

Programme	Diploma in Business
Unit Number and Title	Unit 14 Working with and Leading people
QFC Level	Level 5
Credit value	15 credits
Unit Code	M/601/0908

Introduction

XYZ Pvt. Ltd Company requires a person suitable for the job of HR Administrator’s post as the earlier person resigned from the post. A job description is needed to be framed for the post of HR Administrator’s post and the desirable candidate is required to be hired for the same. Following the legal and ethical considerations the recruitment process should be done in order to avoid any kind of violations of law and ethical rules. For controlling the environment of the organization an effective leadership quality is required in a person which plays an important role for the organization. A great motivation is required by the leader for his/her team for achieving the desired goals. The high work productivity is a result of an effective team work hence it plays an important role for the organization.

Task 1

1.1 Prepare a job description and a person specification (using the seven-point plan approach) for the HR administrator’s post, identifying the main duties/responsibilities and employment conditions.

The seven point plan approach for the job description and person specification includes:

• Develop recruitment plan
• Develop job description
• Replacement
• Select by resume
• Review applicants
• Initial phone screen
• Interview

Given below is the job description and person specification for the post of HR administrator’s post for XYZ Pvt. Ltd:
Post: HR Administrator
Department: HR
Work Description: investigation, collecting information, help the HR for decision making, analysis and informing the higher management regarding the HR data.
 Duties and responsibilities:

• Recruitments to be done by following the process of screening, interviewing, and testing applicants; explaining the internal opportunities available for the present staff; arrangements done regarding the temporary staff from the agencies.
• Maintenance of proper records
• Preparation of pay rolls for the employees of the organization; distribution of cheques.
• Regular check for student loan, medical insurance, savings bond, and disability programs by advising employees of eligibility; providing application information; helping with form completion; verifying submission; notifying employees of approvals.
• Proper monitoring of unemployment claims by reviewing claims; substantiating documentation; requesting legal counsel review.
• Maintenance of human resources records by recording new hires, transfers, terminations, changes in job classifications, merit increases; tracking vacation, sick, and personal time.
• Informing new employees by providing orientation information packets; reviewing company policies; gathering withholding and other payroll information; explaining and obtaining signatures for benefit programs.
• Documentation of human resources actions by completing forms, reports, logs, and records.
• Updating job knowledge by participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications.
• Accomplishes human resources department and organization mission by completing related results as needed.
• Preparation of MIS report.
• Vendor Management.

                          (National Careers Services, 2012)

1.2 Determine the legal and ethical considerations that will impact on the recruitment and selection process of the above post of HR Administrator.

The persons having the desired ability for the achievement of organizational goals needs to be selected, the process involved for the same is known as selection process. The candidates are required to perform in the selection process according to the procedure followed by the organization in context with the job position (Bandura, 1977)

• The Equality Act 2010: Under this act it will be consider unlawful if any discrimination is made on grounds of the following:

1. age
2. race
3. sex
4. disability
5. pregnancy and maternity
6. sexual orientation
7. gender reassignment
8. marriage and civil partnership
9. religion or belief (University of Essex, 2011)

• The Data Protection Act 1998
• Asylum and Immigration Act 1996
• No sexist or racist stereotypes
• No stereotyping people
• No biased testing

Legal and ethical considerations-

• Age- A candidate should be Major.
• Document Verification- it is necessary to look that whatever information is provided by Candidate must be right & authentic in belief of candidate.
• Medical Fitness- Medical fitness Certificate is necessary document to produce at the time of appointment. This shows that a candidate is medically fit to get an Employment. He might not be differently able.

A high level of accuracy for the CV data given to the employer is required by the applied candidate for the particular position. Proper fulfilment is required for the employment history verification process of the candidate. The organization should follow the popular law of discrimination and there should be a prohibition of discrimination on the part of organization in context with the disabilities in any terms. (Gray, 2006)

1.3 Valuate your main responsibilities as the Human Resource Manager in the selection process for the post of HR Administrator.

The basic necessarily for the selection process is that the nature of process should be thorough and fair. Fairness includes the following:

• The process of selection should be traced in a specific manner to candidates.
• The selection process should not be affected by any kind of discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, diversity, etc.
• It is the basic duty to secure the confidentiality for the treatment of applicant’s information.
• There should be a fixed process, fair in nature, for all the desirable candidates which should be based upon job and person specification.
• The job prospects and conditions of employment used should be honestly exercised.
• The basic necessity of fair selection process involved short listing of candidates, arrangements made for interviews, interview session, test process, assessment, get references checking.

1.4 Using the seven point plan approach to the persons specification in 1.1, evaluate 3 points that you will consider in short listening two suitable candidates for the posts of HR Administrator.

Following points are considered to be suitable for the post of HR Administrator:

• Attainment: It includes education, qualifications, experience, etc. These are considered to be the most important things to be considered. Education and Qualifications help in determining the suitability regarding the nature of work. Whereas experience helps in efficiency.

But in some cases these are not considered to be as important. This depends upon the nature of the work. There are few works which does not require the criteria of education and qualifications. Only capability to do such work is the basic requirement.

• General Intelligence: It is said to be the fundamental intellectual capacity. According to me it is the important factor required for the post. The person should have such intelligence to judge what is necessary and how the things have to be managed. This intellectual capacity plays an important role during hiring process.

But somewhere it cannot be considered as important. As few works involves a proper pattern to be followed. There it is important that without any implication of intellectual mind only that fixed pattern is to be followed.

• Physical Attributes: This factor plays an important part for the performance of an HR Administrator job. It is considered to be very important that for this job a person should have good health, physique, appearance, bearing and speech. This is because the HR people have to interact with many people representing the company and for this it is really important that these factors should be present in them.

But somewhere it does not play an important role. The work where proper records of each and every transactions is to be made does not involve these features there the intelligence factor is most important (Taylor, 2008)

Task 2

2.1 Describe the skills and attributes for leadership needed for the post of HR Administrator.

For having a great leadership quality a person needs to have proper skills and attitude towards his duties. The nature of an HR administrator job is very important it involves many works like managing the team of HR personnel and along with it putting the efforts to bring human resource in the organization into an effective action. Therefore for the position of HR administrator a person would require a high level of distinguishing quality as a leader. The candidates would be short listed on the basis of judging the characteristic of work delegation, communication abilities, excellent character, motivation and good decision making power.
The person having a leadership quality should always try to motivate their team by setting the achievable targets and along with that appraising his team for their good work. This strategy would motivate the employee of the organization to achieve their set targets and will also increase their confidence level. The person should have the quality to manage, that the work assigned should be accomplished on time and along with that a standard of quality should be maintained in the work. All this can be achieved with proper process of work delegation. All this suggest that the entire responsibility of the work would lies upon the leader only (Knipe, 2005). The basic characterstic for handling the matters effectively for the position of HR Administrator is effective communcation skills, the person should communicate effectively with the people working with them and their subordinates. This includes listening to feedback, problems faced by the employees and giving clear message. The most important quality is to have an excellent character and moral values, this only helps in developing a good report among the employees working with him/her. Timely decision making can only be done when an HR Administrator possessed an effective decission making power.

2.2 Following a discussion with your team, you realise that some of them are confused about the terms leadership and management. In an email, explain the difference between leadership and management to your team, this explanation will be used as part of the induction process for the new staff.

To: Team Members
From: HR Manager
Date: December 5, 2014

In simple terms the job on manager’s part is to plan, coordinate and organize the things whereas the leader helps in motivating and inspiring the team. Given below are few basic differences:

• The manager administers the work whereas the leader tries to innovate things.
• The manager maintains things whereas the leader helps in developing things.
• The manager focuses on systems and structure whereas the leader focuses on people.
• The manager relies on control among the people whereas the leader inspires trust among the people working.
• The manager imitates whereas the leader originates.
• The manager does things right whereas the leader does the right thing (bennis, 2009)

             The given below table summarises the above mentioned differences and explain differences between being a leader and being a manager.

Subject Appeal to Rules Decision Essence Concern Wants Blame Style Conflict Focus Approach

Leader Heart Breaks Facilitates Change What is right Achievements Takes Transformation Uses Leading people Sets direction

Manager Head Makes Makes Stability Being right Results Blames Transactional Avoids Managing work Plans detail

(leadership vs. management, 2014)

Leaders should have an approach to solve the problems of the co-workers and along with this should focus towards people. They should have a mind-set of innovative ideas and take suggestions from the team members and effectively implement these ideas. For the development of any policy or process it is necessary for an HR Administrator to take feedback from the co-workers on a regular basis
Whereas on the other side the management team deals in managing the employees of the organization and along with this the adopt the existing state of affairs, especially regarding social or political issues and should not take any kind of risk. The management should concentrate on minimizing the weakness of employees of their organization and ask their subordinates to submit regular reports of their assigned work. (ghoshal, 1997)
With Regards

2.3 Analyse the leadership styles that you, as the HR Manager, would use in both situations

Induction process of the new recruits.
Communicating the vision of the company to the rest of the organisation
Induction process of the new recruits: Transactional leadership style would be adopted by them as an HR manager for handling the induction process of the new recruits. The induction process conducted by the HR manager for the new employees would include the introduction about the organization, rules and regulations which would be required by the organization need to be followed. Transactional leadership would be adopted in a form that the change element should not be needed while delivering the induction process of the new recruits’. Along with all this the basic characteristic an HR manager to posses is the judgement quality. This quality helps him/her in the selection process.
Communication regarding the vision of the company to the rest of the organization: For this there is a need to adopt an autocratic style by the leaders. For a proper communication with the stakeholders regarding the vision and values of the organization a leader should first clarifies his/her concept regarding the same. The vision of the organization can be achieved when each and every employee of the organization firstly is briefed about it and along with that a continuous efforts are needed from their side for the achievement of the vision. All this will help in developing problem solving capacity, which is necessary for a team leader for managing his team effectively.
Comparison : The two involved leadership styles are totally different from each other. On one side where the transactional leadership style does not involve much change and innovative ideas, and the leaders implicating this leadership style includes the involvement of other stakeholder regarding the decision making. Whereas on the same platform the autocratic leadership style involves only the individual leader regarding the decision making process. But in both the situations a leader should have the capacity of stabilizing emotions (nussbaum, 2006)

2.4 Following the restricting of the organisation, you have noticed that the staff morale is low in your HR department. Describe three different methods that you will use to boost the morale of your team in order to help meet the short term objectives of your department.

For the attainment of set targets and the vision of the organization, the employees of the organization needs to be motivated on regular basis so that the work assigned should be accomplished on time and with a standard of quality maintained. The HR administrator needs to focus basically on motivating the employees and with regard to the motivation process below mentioned strategies could be followed:

• Benefits for the achievement of objectives: for the attainment of the short term objectives of the organization the leaders in the HR team should effectively prescribe the benefits given to the employees by the organization. These need to be explained to the employees so that they could perform the work in an inspiring way for the achievements of the set objectives.
• Clear explanation of expectations: the organization expect a standard of work from their employees, these expectations are need to be clearly explained to the employees for their effective fulfilment. The setting of goals should be done in a realistic manner and proper guidelines should be framed for the employees in regard to the fulfilment of the set goals.
• Rewards and recognition: inspiration of the employees can be done by giving them a proper recognition for the work done by the employee and along with this an adequate reward should be given in return. This encouragement will give the employees a spirit of work in regard with the fulfilment of the short term objectives (Herminia, 2003)

Task 3

3.1 Based on the organisation you chose in task I, assess three benefits of team working for the new recruits within the chosen organisation.

Each organisation has its own culture, values and working ethics. It is required that each employee working for the organisation must follow it. New recruits are unaware or have little information about these things and it takes some time for them to blend in with the organization. The most important part for the new recruit is working in team. The benefits of working in a team for new joiner are listed below:

• Support: Support plays a key role in any team. Support among the team members is essential for any team to be successful. Mutual help and support helps in motivating the team members who have recently joined and helps in enhancing their performance and achieve their short term goals.
• Learn new skills: New joiners are not in acquaintance with the work done in the organization and hence need to develop skills for the work done in organization and it takes time to develop their skill set. For this they require timely guidelines and help. Working in a team will allow them to learn and become dextrous with the help of other team members who are working on the same project.
• Creativity: Creativity should be exhibit by every team member, even if it is normally manifested in different ways. Unusual creative solutions can be used for unstructured approach and trial using for enjoy fully handling the raised problems in a team (TMS Worldwide, 2014).

3.2 Some trainees tend to learn better by example. Provide an example of when you have worked within a team as a leader and team member to complete a task or project.

Situation: Leadership comes with added responsibilities, as one needs to lead from front and set an example for the other team members to follow. Working with and leading Next Pvt Ltd as the human forecasting and recruitment head was a big responsibility. For the expansion and prosperity in the new market it’s very big challenge for the human resource department to forecast the demand and supply and recruitment of human resource. As per the need of organization, we successfully forecasted the total number of human resource which was required by the organization in next 12 months.
Occurrence : I was managing 10 people under me in HR department, out of which 6 were part of the recruitment and selection team while the other 4 people were working in the forecasting team. Mr X, the member of the forecasting team did a superb job as he came up with a realistic number of human resources by doing research in market and collecting the industry data.
Strategies: I assigned the roles and responsibilities to all the team members as per their skills and performance, which helped them perform their task efficiently and this helped in improving the overall yield.
Learning: I learned a lot from this project in terms of assessment of human resource requirement in an environment which is uncertain and hence difficult to predict. This involved usage of software to predict human resource requirement which helped in achieving the human resource recruitment targets without any compromise on the quality of human resource.
Leadership: Being a leader I gave instructions to work delegation regarding data collection, doing forecasting and validating the forecast, etc. It was clearly stated that any error in forecasting may cost significant loss for the organization.
Avoidance of Disagreement strategies: Timely team meetings were arranged so that each member can share their views, give valuable suggestions and feedback, share their problems which helped in reducing cases of conflicts and disagreement among the team members.

3.3 Organisational changes have been made as a result of the recession. Identify three quantifiable and three qualitative factors that you would use to review the effectiveness of the new team in achieving organisational goals.

Factors essential for achieving organisational goals:

• QUALITATIVE:

1. Quality of work: The quality of work done should be good. It is very important that the level of quality should be maintained in accordance with the time management. This should not be the excused to be made that due to the maintenance of quality of work, there is a delay made. A balance should be created for the progress of an individual along with the company’s progress.
2. Meet deadlines: Proper targets are to be set which should be achieved within the specified deadlines. Prescribing the deadline help in maintaining the work within time. These deadlines should be set by taking the margin period from the delivery to the clients. Completion of work within the specified period is considered as a great achievement for the company.
3. Output and productivity: It is very important that the team should produce a good output and the productivity should not be hampered. The team leader should plan effectively that the productivity of the team should not be influenced in any sense. As through good productivity only the clients could be satisfied.

• QUANTITATIVE:

1. Help and encouragement: The individuals should work as a team. This would affect the quality and quantity of the work. There should be helping factors involved in the team which should effectively help the needy one but keeping in mind their own work. Along with this the encouragement should be made by the seniors by appreciating the good work.
2. Trust and communication: Trust and communication is another important feature of a good team. There should be a trust maintain between the employees for the co-workers. Even they should not hesitate to communicate among themselves and have healthy discussions over the problems and other involved factors.
3. Idea sharing: This factors help in developing different plans regarding the work. Every involved employee should share his/her idea with the team so that an efficient work could be calculated. The person should feel free to express its idea and this freeness should be created among the work and business environment by the team leaders for every employee.

Task 4

4.1 As the HR Manager, write an email to your director explaining the factors that you would use in the planning, monitoring and assessment of work performance of the new trainee following the successful completion of their probation.

To: HR Director
From: HR Manager
Subject: Factors affecting the performance of the new trainee
Date: December 5, 2014
Hi
This is to inform you that an organization would be required to monitor the employee performance and suggest feedback to improve used factors in the planning, monitoring and assessment of work performance of the new trainee till the successful completion of their probation. The organizational sustainability for a long term would depend on management of success and failure of the employees working in the organization. Below factors would be involved in planning, monitoring and assessment of the work performance for new trainees:

• Planning: The task assigned to new trainees should be planned in advance and they should be communicated with the expected level of standards which they need to deliver. In this way it would be easier for them to know their key responsibility areas where new trainee would focus. E.g. progression, training, development, projects for job, etc.
• Monitoring: Performance and work behaviour of the new trainee should be closely supervised on continuous basis. The feedback on the work responsibilities handled by the new trainees should be shared by HR manager. E.g. progress reports, deadlines, attendance
• Assessment: Among the employees working in the organization, multi-tasking, etc. characteristics would be observed to understand whether employees are having the skill set to handle the job role of their other colleagues so that organizational work does not suffer in absence of a particular person.  E.g. progress reports, performance evaluation, appraisal, etc.
  Kindly consider the above.
  Yours Faithfully
  John (HR Manager)

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4.2 With the changes in technology and budget cuts, you are to plan and deliver the assessment of the development needs of your staff before the end of the financial year

Plan to address the development needs of the staff

4.3 Write an article for an in-house newsletter aimed at Directors, explaining how would evaluate the success of the assessment process.

Following are the factors affecting the Evaluation of the Success of the Assessment Process:

• The assessment process is said to be successful when it results in success of organization.
• The workers of the organization are made to be satisfied with the help of assessment process.
• The assessment process should be gone through a relevancy check for perfection.
• The outcome and goals should be evaluated timely.
• A proper specified pattern of interview should be conducted with the participants
• An observation should be made through assessment process in regard with the effectiveness and efficiency of the work.
• Within a specified timeframe the assessment should be completed.
• The assessment process should be made in the form of questionnaire covering all important topics.
• A proper review should be made regarding the assessment judging whether it is fair, inclusive or not.
• Another helpful factor for assessment process is the performance appraisal report
• A proper check should be maintained regarding the reliability and validity for the assessment process (Fieldstone Alliance, 2006).

References

Bandura. (1977). social learning theory. saul mcleod.
bennis, w. (2009). on becoming a leader.
Fieldstone Alliance. (2006). Six Keys to Successful Organizational Assessment. Retrieved December 5, 2014, from http://www.fieldstonealliance.org/client/tools_you_can_use/01-10-06_org_assess.cfm
ghoshal, b. a. (1997). global strategies for mnc.
Gray, G. a. (2006). continuing profrssional development for clinical psychologists.
Herminia. (2003). working identity. Harvard business school press.
Knipe, S. a. (2005). why can't we get it right. Sage.
Taylor, S. (2008). People Resourcing. Chartered Institute of Personnel andDevelopment .
TMS Worldwide. (2014). A Model for Teamwork. Retrieved December 5, 2014, from http://www.tmsworldwide.com/tms12-3h.html
University of Essex. (2011). Recruitment and Selection.University of Essex.