Employing 131 Thousand People Reply To Another St
This assignment is to create an articulate response to another students Discussion Board post. Here are the rules when replying:
Replies
Reply to at least 2 classmates. Your replies must be typed in separate Microsoft Word documents. Your replies must include meaningful and substantive contributions to the discussion. Each reply must be 200–300 words. Include a reference page, and be sure to have in-text citations for the following sources:
- At least 1 citation from Mello (2019).
- At least 1 citation from Keller (2012).
- At least 1 citation from a related scholarly journal.
*** Here is the students original post that you are replying to:
Microsoft is a technology company that everybody knows that develops and supports software and well as business solutions to customers. Microsoft currently ranks 30 on the Fortune 500 list with $110 billion in revenue and $16.6 million in profit in 2018 and employing 131 thousand people (“Fortune 500”, 2019). They have had great success but they are also dealing with a lawsuit regarding discrimination with some employees stating that they do not trust the Human Resource (HR) department and they are nonresponsive to employee concerns (Zillman & Fry, 2018). Microsoft also utilizes a stack ranking system for performance ranking that employees feel is environmentally destructive and creates division and political infighting among employees (Gassée, 2012). Several HR related issues appear to be present in Microsoft’s culture that should be addressed.
Several different HR initiatives should be implemented to help change the culture at Microsoft and improve HR relationships. The first initiative should be diversity training to eliminate legal concerns and improve performance. All employees should be treated equally regardless of age, race, sex, religion, color, and national origin (Mello, 2019). This is a federal law organization must follow but it is also a decent ethical human relationship interaction that all people should engage in. Menna and Vanka (2017) state that Diversity brings “an increase in the skills, abilities, information, experience and knowledge” and the “interaction among diverse individuals leads to positive outcomes” (p. 915). All employees of the company should be reminded though the training that diversity fosters innovation and companies that embrace this position perform better than organizations that resist (Mello, 2019). Another initiative would be to change the culture from a traditional HR to a strategic HR. In this change, HR would be a partner for employees and fully realize that employees are assets and their needs and concerns should be addressed with urgency and compassion (Mello, 2019). Changing this position allows HR to be more effective and strategy with an organization rather than just pushing procedures and policies (Mello, 2019). Implementing a strategic HR initiative should change the way employees feel about HR, so employees begin to trust and utilized HR for the guidance and resources they are designed for. Keller and Alsdorf (2012) discuss that God calls us to serve others and with a strategic HR system, HR personnel has the opportunity to serve the organizational employees and create a better environment for them to work. The third initiative would be to remove the stack ranking performance system and replace with a performance feedback evaluation system. The stack ranking system can be unfair to employees and creates tension, create unhealthy competition between employees, and reduce trust between coworkers. More commonly utilized performance evaluation methods are results-oriented incorporating rating scales, key performance indicators, and management objectives and behavior-oriented integrating 360° feedback, behavioral based rating scales, and behavior observation scales (Chen et. al., 2018). Including elements of these into a performance feedback system would tie employee performance to organizational goals and objectives, improve teamwork and trust, and provide for a healthy more employee friendly environment (Mello, 2019). The performance feedback system is much less formal, provide engaging cooperative involvement between employee and manager, and fosters building relationships (Mello, 2019).
References
Chen, Q., Tsai, S., Zhai, Y., Zhou, J., Yu, J., Chang, L., . . . Wang, J. (2018). An empirical study on low-carbon: Human resources performance evaluation. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(1), 62. doi:10.3390/ijerph15010062
Fortune 500 (2019). Fortune website. Retrieved from https://fortune.com/fortune500/
Keller, T. & Alsdorf, L. (2012). Every good endeavor: Connecting your work to God’s work. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Mello, J. A. (2019). Strategic human resource management (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
Meena, K., & Vanka, S. (2017). Developing an empirical typology of diversity-oriented human resource management practices. Journal of Management Development, 36(7), 915-929. doi:10.1108/JMD-02-2016-0031
Zillman, C. & Fry, E. (2018, February 16). HR is not your friend, here’s why. Fortune. Retrieved from https://fortune.com/2018/02/16/microsoft-hr-problem-metoo/.
Gassée, J. (2012, August 13). How Microsoft’s human resources culture drove away talent. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology /blog/2012/aug/13/microsoft-human-resources-culture.