Motivate Employees through Human Resource Management

Customizing Scheduling to Motivate Employees

Some companies have implemented more flexibility in scheduling and workplace environments to motivate employees. Sometimes people cannot regularly commit to a standard Monday through Friday job during the hours of nine-to-five. Just because a person cannot commit to these regular hours does not mean that a person does not have skills that can contribute to a company’s success. In fact, it can be the opposite. Companies have utilized flexible scheduling to accommodate employees with these types of work schedule requirements. Flextime is a scheduling system that gives employees the ability to customize their schedules within a certain range of hours on a weekly basis (Nathan, 2019). Flextime scheduling is a relatively new concept that is utilized by human resource managers. The concept of flextime is to give employees the opportunity to have a better work-life balance. For example, a family that just had their first baby may need some time to adjust to increased family time demands and new scheduling to balance everything in their home lives. Depending on how the flextime schedules are arranged, operations can benefit from using flextime scheduling. For example, some employees might be available during the morning time and others in the evening. Operations could make a specific slot of hours available during both times of the day so that company can have coverage for more production hours per week, while accommodating individual schedules. Making flextime available for employees can have many benefits from both a human resources and operational management point of view without foregoing workplace productivity. Alternative workplaces and telecommuting have also been an implemented strategy for companies that allow this type of flexibility. An alternative workplace can include employees working from remote locations that are outside of a company building or headquarters (Russell & Taylor, 2017). Some employees might appreciate alternative workplaces for similar reasons why some employees enjoy the flexibility of flextime schedules. For example, having an alternative workplace or telecommuting can come with time and cost savings for employees that lives a great distance away from the main company office. Additionally, a company can benefit by decreasing overhead and expenses related to employees coming into a central corporate office to work. Human resources might actualize an increase in productivity, morale, and higher levels of employee and customer satisfaction by implementing alternative workplaces and telecommuting. Although it will also be equally important to make sure that the employees in that program can responsibly manage being out of direct supervision. Operational managers utilize different practices to ensure projects stay on track when their employees regularly work from alternative places and telecommute. For example, an operational manager might regularly use videoconferencing, chat messenger systems, and scheduled meetings to keep the team on track. Some companies might use online and cloud-based software to effectively manage remote teams and make sure projects stay on track.

Compensation to Motivate Employees

Human resource managers need to also consider proper employee compensation in conjunction with utilizing best practices to motivate employees. Typically, employees will be more motivated to do a job if they feel that their compensation is fair for the job they are performing. There are several systems that can be used individually or in combination to compensate employees, and includes hourly wage, piece-rate system, straight salary, commissions, gainsharing, profit sharing and other variations. Employees can be more motivated and exert higher levels of workplace performance because of an effectively structured compensation plan. Beyond compensating employees fairly for their work, human resources have other considerations. Some of these considerations include legal obligations, taxes, OSHA requirements, and more. Each of these considerations will also include collaboration with operational, project, and accounting managers to make sure all the laws and regulations are followed.

Analyzing and Designing Jobs

There are several cases where human resources and operations managers should work together to develop the most effective and highest performing teams. Job design and analysis are two key areas that department managers can work together to yield the greatest results. Job design involves identifying the elements of a job, task analysis, worker analysis, environmental analysis, ergonomics, technology and automation. In a nutshell, job design makes sure that an employee is the right fit for a job (Russel & Taylor, 2017). This takes collaboration of human resource, operations, and project managers to align the skillsets of employees with the demands a specific job function will require. Each of these job analysis elements consider all aspects of a job from making sure a task is a proper fit for a job, a worker has the skills to perform the job well, the working environment is conducive for producing the right results, and employees have the right training to accomplish a job that is given to them. Together, all parts of a job must be designed to put an employee and company in the best position to succeed at the tasks they are undertaking. Job analysis involves the study of various methods, processes, and motions that go into the performance of specific jobs and tasks (Russel & Taylor, 2017). Analyzing a job can give managers clues to help redesign, improve, and develop new jobs to help meet company goals and project objectives. Companies can utilize process flowcharts, worker-machine charts, and motion studies to identify opportunities and improve quality. For example, a company might conduct a motion study and find that by moving machines closer together can improve worker efficiency, reduce employee fatigue, and reduce the chances of workplace injuries.

Whenever a job is redesigned, changed, or added the company can expect than employee will go through a learning curve to accomplish the new task. A learning curve can be illustrated using a graphical representation. The findings of a learning curve indicate that employee’s performance improves as they repeat the successful performance of a task (Russel & Taylor, 2017). The general concept of a learning curve suggests that workers show improvement in performing a task over time because they will eventually learn how to perform a task better through repetition. Human resource, operational, and project managers can benefit by being aware of this process to better understand specific aspects of a project as it relates to the time it might take to complete a task. Taking the learning curve into consideration will help explain why performance will increase in time after a new task is given. This can help human resources to better prepare to provide employees with adequate training and aide in the operations team to more wisely allocate time for a task’s completion.

Collaboration’s Role in Motivating Employees

It is important for human resources and operations management to work together to achieve high levels of performance, motivate employees, and acheive the greatest results. Each department focuses on different sets of principles to accomplish their respective job functions. Human resource management involves several important functions such as hiring employees that are a good fit for a company, making sure employees are adequately trained for a job, legal requirements are adhered to, and employees are satisfied overall to be effective. Operations management focuses primarily on the day-to-day business within a company and aims to achieve the highest level of results and productivity. These two departments working together are important for the company to be healthy, functional, and achieve overall organizational success.