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The Impact of HR Strategies on Line Managers at Sainsbury

The researchers of the article, 'Critical assessment of the impact of HR strategies on employees’ performance' are Sana Anwaar, Ali Bin Nadeem, and Misbah Hassan, who researched alternative HR strategies to support line managers at Sainsbury's Bitterne, a superstore located in Southampton, London. All three researchers are from different study concentrations working on the critical assessment of the 'impact of HR strategies on employees' performance. The Sana Anwaar is an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), Ali bin Nadeem the founder of Canis Technology solutions. Finally, Misbah Hassan, a published scholar who mastered management sciences, embeds HR strategies' critical impact, line managers, and employee performance. The study's purpose emphasized on Line managers as the company's greatest assets and three economic factors influencing Human resources: global competition, privatization of public firms, and attempt to reduce unemployment through various strategies to facilitate the line managers to perform effectively. Throughout the article, we have seen how the organization maintains its competitive advantage by sustaining its value via HR practices.

Aiming to assess HR strategies to support Line managers at Sainsbury, the researchers of this case study used mixed methods in their research design. And both the primary and secondary data are used to accomplish the results. The objectives of this research are accomplished by conducting primary as well as secondary data. The research is based on semi-structured interviews conducted with line managers at various levels and across different departments of the company, aimed at exploring the perceptions and experience of the line managers in terms of HR devolution and the level of support provided to them by HR. The primary data, which is done through semi-structured interviews conducted with line managers at various departments within the company based on six key themes, revealed that most line managers are satisfied with the level of HR support because of the organization's friendly atmosphere and the non-hierarchical culture. In this report, however, the researchers have only selected three major themes out of six. At the same time, the secondary research “has been used to identify previous works on the topic of HR devolution as well as HR support to the line and to also identify the various strategies to facilitate the line managers so that they can perform their new role more efficiently.Anwaar, 2016. Thus, we see how the researchers used both the primary and secondary data to reveal the prominence of HR practices, including the skill level and emotional perspective, inclusiveness within the organization's culture, "fosters creativity and encourages collaboration" of line managers and employees. And shifting from the traditional aspect of HR to strategic thinking enables HR to enrich its outlook on the company’s success.

The fascinating point that the researchers focused on is on the 'Critical assessment of the impact of HR strategies on employees' performance.' The researchers provided an in-depth analysis as they compared and contrasted HR managers from the line managers. And the literature review shows that the researchers have built a conceptual framework that touched on the core concept of what potentially helps the organization "create value and achieve competitive advantage" against other organizations. Furthermore, "Ten interviews are conducted in total; and, participants are randomly selected from different departments of the organization."Anwaar, 2016(Anwaar, 2016). The interviews are recorded, transcribed to evaluate two main themes: areas of strong and weak HR support. That is because to correct the natural limitations and examine what people say.

While the case study did not clearly state what type of analysis the researchers conducted, whether SPSS or NVivo; for this research, however, the researchers used the NVivo method. This is because the authors showcased the contextual analysis procedure to examine to hold all-encompassing, important qualities of the HR practices and committed to supporting the line managers at Sainsbury Ltd. Therefore, we believed that the researchers used the NVivo approach to perform their analysis. NVivo, a software system used for both qualitative and quantitative methods to extract data for analysis. In short, it is a mixed-method used for the analysis; and such analysis can be unstructured text, audio, video, interviews, and journal articles. Simply put, the contextual investigation system is proper for this examination since it involves a viable investigation of a specific current perceptible truth in its real presence through different wellsprings of information Yin, 2004(Yin, 2004). By using the contextual investigation method, researchers are able to discover valuable information just from conducting ten interviews altogether; and, the line managers have arbitrarily selected. Later, the meetings "are recorded and deciphered to assess."Anwaar, 2016 (Anwaar, 2016). Even Atkinson and Heritage (1984)Atkinson and Heritage, 1984 recommend that recording and deciphering interviews not just assist with adjusting the common constraints of the memory yet, besides, permits careful assessment of what individuals state. Thus, the following inquiries questions partitioned into a few key themes: Strength of HR support and HR support's underlying weakness.

Results from the survey stated that 60% of respondents received solid help through Recruitment and Selection. Likewise, 70% of them notified that HR underpins them in learning and improvement; though, 40% said they get solid HR support in remunerations and 40% said that they have solid HR uphold regarding Discipline and Grievance.

This part of the exploration intends to break down the elective HR techniques to help line managers at Sainsbury's and highlights the information that has been gathered through semi-organized meetings from three stores of Sainsbury's in the Southern region. Ten people across different offices including one HR supervisor are interviewed altogether. Each meeting lasted for approximately half an hour. The individual interviewees have been working for Sainsbury's for 3 to more than 10 years so they all have some insight into the HR restructuring in the association.

Furthermore, some of the other results from the survey were that half of the respondents perceived reality as a weak region. Just 10% of respondents answered that they are content with everything as they have solid help from HR in the vast majority of the regions. From the information, obviously, line directors get minimal help from HR regarding approaches in light of the fact that a large portion of them are not even mindful of the apparent multitude of arrangements, and the ones, who know about them, don't have the foggiest idea how to follow or actualize them. This suggests that a large portion of the approaches are not conveyed to them in a legitimate way.

Thus after extracting the information from the article, we conclude that the Human Resource Department should provide more training based on the job description and specification which shall enhance the workers to perform well in their tasks. Moreover, the HR Dept. should give easy straight forward instructions so that employees can easily follow them. Furthermore, it was noticed that the workload tends to increase and pile up on the employees, and the best way to tackle that issue would be to evenly spread the workload so that no employees shall be having too much work to do for themselves.

As a whole, the article describes how new HR practices have impacted the line managers and their performance at work and from the survey, they realized that weak areas where HR can improve, what the employees value in the organization in terms of management, etc. Something that called our attention is the fact that they asked the respondents what areas they would like to see in the HR process and the most suggested one was “role plays”. We went through a process of analyzing other articles on the internet about this subject and none of it mentions something where the employees have the opportunity to give their opinion and propose a new strategy for HR, more exactly in the process of recruitment and selection. The original thought about why this is never asked is because since HR and the management team, in general, are responsible for creating the rules, the practices, the strategies, and everything related to the interaction manager-employee though when we saw these type of questions in the survey given we knew that this is the originality of the articles and that one thing that we had not seen in other articles and research.

Now, how does this contribute to existing research? As mentioned above, the fact that the article and the research include: ideas from the interviewers, for instance, role-plays, is the ideal strategy that they would like HR to implement in the recruiting and selection process. Most of the articles describe the lack of new effective processes that could contribute to these processes, however, in those articles, potential processes are not included so in my opinion, HR people don't have a start point where they can try a new method that can improve their current activities.

The research revealed and provided the researchers with a lot of data that lead to few conclusions, such as the satisfaction of the line managers with HR because of the easy and approachable communication that exists within each other, also that the HR practices allow them to make a good job. However, they mentioned that the line managers sometimes are unclear about the HR policies, and since the policies are created in the head office and that they don’t help to create them, they are only enforcers of the policies and for this reason, they feel that the policies are unclear, without a solid understanding of the reason of the policies. Considering that policies are the weakest part of the HR support that line managers are experiencing, we agree that asking for an example of unclear policies or ideal policies as well would help to make this research more complete even though the data provided was very helpful, adding more information such as examples on this part that was identified as a struggle could make this research even more useful for both line managers and HR since they have an idea of what the real problem is as well as a potential solution to this.

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