Role Play of The HR Manager - British Airways

1.0 purpose and scope of Human Resource Management

1.1 Purpose and functions of HRM, applicable to workforce planning and resourcing in British Airways:

Planning process utilized at British Airways:

Figure 1: Typical organizational plan

Strategic plans: These are the general plans outlines the priorities and activities required to enhance the strategic goal of the organization. The strategic plan set by BA is achieving long term loyal of the customer or gaining customer retention (Benowitz, 2009). The BA believes that customer satisfaction is achieved through excellent customer services. And hence,British Airways first objective is to improve the image of the organization. The research conducted by the organization regarding customer satisfaction and employee interaction results that customers satisfy with positive behavior by staff. The negative contact (unfriendly and rude behavior) result in customer dissatisfaction. This can be avoided by conducting training program like “putting people first” for the staff who had direct contact with the customers.

Tactical plans: This aimed to achieve tactical goals and implementing parts of strategic plan. BA regularly arranges seminars, different sessions and training program for employees to enhance their performance and productivity (Gediz and Yalçınkaya, 2010).

Operational plans: Tactical plan set by the organization further implemented in daily operations. Each training program arranged by BA was monitored and executed successfully.

Forecasting: The competition in airline industry is increasing globally. Hence, BA need to anticipate such training program that fulfill future corporate needs of the employees. The organization need to aware employees about the competition and keep them focused on continuous improvement (Kemery, 2009). Significant factors needed for organization success are managing brand image, international competition, managing issues of joint ventures and so on.

The analysis shows that BA has implemented HRM planning process successfully. But, there are certain limitations to its HRM practices like ratio-analysis, contingency plan and trend analysis need be considered in future HRM planning process.

The significant functions performed by the British Airways are:

• Providing benefits, compensation and incentives to the deserving employees.
• Align strategies to establish a relation between Managers-employees-labor
• Developing strategies for HR planning, recruitment and selection processes
• Safety and health management
• Human resource research

1.2 Strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to recruitment and selection:

British Airways pays special attention to its recruitment and selection process. Actually it is a significant process for every organization because it helps in getting the competent candidate for an organization and makes them appropriate for the job. HR team at the British Airways prepares three major documents for inviting new candidates for particular vacant position. Job analysis would be performed before preparing these documents (Lawler & Boudreau, 2009). Job analysis is a systematic evaluation and study of the particular designation to determine their role and responsibilities of the job.

Strengths of recruitment and selection process:

Recruitment and selection process is key strength of British Airways. This helps organization in multiple ways. Continuous recruitment and selection procedures are run under various branches of BA and it has various strengths like employee engagement, sustained job performance and employee retention and low turnover.

Weaknesses of the recruitment and selection process:

Inefficiencies

Time spent on the searching and recruiting tools by the company that does not result in getting better quality candidates is the major weakness of recruitment process (Hargis & Bradley,2011). It gets difficult to approach the deserving employee as they already working in the

Internal recruitment: narrow ideas

The company sometimes uses internal-only recruitment process that restricts selection of candidate from outside the company. This creates job assurance among internal employees that promotions are internal. This prohibits the company from getting the new highly skilled and qualified employees. External hires would come-up with new ideas and approaches which can benefit the company. Excluding the external candidates also limits the organization from getting talent pool.

External recruitment: Time and expense

The disadvantages associated with the external recruitment are time and money required to complete the recruitment and selection process. Internal recruitment can be done through emails and job board positions at the company. British Airways spent lot of money on the recruitment of new candidates at various positions (Wang & Niu, 2010). Company’s significant resources and time spent on this recruitment processes like marketing and advertising, paying recruitment agencies to access the qualified external candidates. The screening process done for external candidate require more diligence as compare to internal candidate screening.

Online: Cumbersome

In the edge of internet online recruitment has increased which grows the application from lot of candidates. The recruiter hence, need to sort of various useless applications in order to search the right applicant. This is the drawback of recruiting candidates from online media.