Tescos assignment

Managing Human Resources 4903

Critically Review the HR Strategy

10/29/2010

This report will focus on the role of the current Human Resource Management (HRM) practices employed to the UK

retailer Tesco’s PLC in the context of the work of Dave Ulrich and the ‘business partner’ concept. The report will the

further suggest how the HR role of the multi-chain retailer could be changed with the aim of better supporting the

current overall business strategy.

Contents Page

Learning Assessment Outcomes 3

Scope 4

Description, evaluation and analysis of the role of HR within Tesco Supermarkets PLC 4

How can the role of HR change to more fully support the business strategy? 6

Conclusions and Discussions 7

References 8

Employee Engagement Model 9

Building Organisation Equity Model 10

Dave Ulrich; The Business Partner Model 11

2 Managing Human Resources 4903 | Critically Review the HR Strategy

Learning Assessment Outcomes

Analyse theoretical perspectives, methods, and models in human resource management

Evaluate and apply these perspectives, methods, and models and recognise the role they play in understanding and managing human behaviour in the workplace

Explore the key roles required to manage human resources effectively.


his report will focus on the role of the current Human Resource Management

(HRM) practices employed by the UK retailer Tesco’s PLC in the context of the

work of Dave Ulrich and the ‘business partner’ concept. The report will the further

suggest how the HR role of the multi-chain retailer could be changed with the aim of better

supporting the current overall business strategy.

T1. Description, evaluation and analysis of the role of HR within Tesco Supermarkets

PLC.

n recent years, there has been an increase in the importance for the presence of HR

within organisations. This has resulted in the rise of competition from overseas

economies. Investment in employee development practices, such as training, talent

management, building ‘agile’ cultures and employee engagement has previously been greater

in such countries as Sweden, Japan and Germany, and thus prompting UK companies to

undergo a greater amount of investment and energy into their employees (Beardwell, I et all

2004). Over the past decade, Tesco’s have introduced, over time, an HR system designed to

provide a greater quality of training and engagement to their staff. The retailer operates in an

extremely competitive market where customers now have a wider choice of where to shop for

the groceries. To remain competitive, the retailer has expanded into CD’s, DVD’s, homeware

and electrical, as well as new markets, such as Credit Cards, insurance and Banking Services.

I

The traditional Business Partner Model, developed by Dave Ulrich, has been adapted over the

years by many large organisations when restructuring their HR policies in reflection of the

changing business environment (CIPD, 2010). Whereas the traditional model has four

departments as Change Agent, Employee Champion, Administrative Partner, and Strategic

Partner: the adapted model has Shared Services, Centres of Excellence and Strategic Business

Partner. This report will attempt to apply the retailer to both models where possible.

The HR department within Tesco has transformed from the role of the service and

administrative department (The Next Generation HR, (2010) & Mullins, 2005) to a


proactive role within the organisation to a strategic level by providing a greater allocation of

resources, training, and skills needed for the wide variety of job roles to the relevant people.

Maintaining this strategic role opens up a path for the enhancement of core competencies,

intellectual capital, and ‘organic’ learning and is essential to the organisations future success

(Treen, D. 2000). Keep, E (1989) states that ‘ongoing development of employees’ skills

underpin the wider business objectives’ This aspect within the role of HR can be found

within Dave Ulrich’s business partners model of the Employee Champion; where one role of

HR are listening and providing resources to and for employees.

Looking again at Dave Ulrich’s Business Partner model, we can see that HR further plays an

Administrative Expert role that provides a ‘Shared Service’ facility. This unit holds all

routine transactional activities such as Payroll, absence monitoring and the provision of

resources. They also provide expert advice on employee relation issues as well.

The retailer has adopted their HR strategy and cultured it to their overall business model with

a major role of their HR is the gaining of trust and loyalty from all of their employees through

engagement. This means everyone understands their individual roles within the organisation,

how they are a part of the overall strategy, and how their actions benefit or potentially

damage the organisations reputation (Beardwell, 1 et al 2004). The way in which HR

engages their employees in this instance was to introduce an Induction Programme to all new

employees to deliver this message across. The programme caters for a variance of cultures,

learning styles and varying commitments to the job. Whitlock (2003) states that all

employees have a duty to provide a high commitment to their customers and to turn their core

values into a reality on a daily basis. This is reflected in Next Generation HR: Time for

Change- Towards a Next Generation HR (2010), one of the HR functions are investing in

the allocation of resources to building organisational future sustainability, by going beyond

employee engagement to ‘authentic’ organisations that do ‘what they say they do’. This is

developing a transparent, talk-straight, and dialogue-cultured business. They also state that

trust needs to be deepened to an emotional level and is the building block to help people

develop trust in the organisation’s values by drawing on the day-to-day experience that

reinforces these.

Their high levels of dedication to their employees have helped them feel valued to the

organisation and therefore, feel the need to give a higher commitment to their work (CIPD:

Creating an Engaged Workforce, 2010). It could be argues that this culd be the Employee


Champion. This practice is reflected in Next Generation HR: Time for Change- Towards a

Next Generation HR (2010), where it states that this is one proposal which stems from the

need for organisation equity is to treat staff the same way as they intend to treat their

customers. Building honesty and trust to the forefront of relationships between employee and

customer helps to create a natural, customer-centric culture. According to a research paper

carried out by the CIPD: Creating an Engaged Workforce (2010) some of the benefits of

employee engagement to organisations promotes innovative work behaviour, intention to

stay, and to individuals, well-being and sustainability. The practices of engaging employees

through aspects such as talent management and training have been categorised into a heading

of Centres of Excellence, which is part of Dave Ulrich’s adapted model, or ‘three legged

stool’

2. How can the role of HR change to more fully support the business strategy?

eferring to the works of Marchington M & Wilkinson, A (1997), one of the best

skills an organisation can teach their employees are transferable skills. This has

stemmed from today’s economic stage, in terms of employment availability and

the evolving trend that no organisation today offers a job for life, this has resulted in

individuals feeling they have lesser job security but taking more responsibility for their career

paths. Employees are increasingly becoming more mobile and according to Harrison, R

(2002), top employees have more scope of choice of where to work and change of

employment for reasons such as better incentives, for example, promotion, better security,

better opportunities, and satisfaction. Harrison states that: to retain these key individuals, the

role of HR must create an environment suited to personal growth.

R

Becoming guardians and commentators

Tesco should also run a commentary, and become ‘guardians’ to what is ‘really going on’ in

their business, on how decisions and behavioural traits could affect their overall business.

The CIPD suggest three says of doing this; these are managing internal or external brand risk,

designing balanced HR policies that support progressive ways of doing business and

behavioural commentary. The focus on these principals is to challenge and open up debate on

behaviours and decisions of even the most senior management in the business. This is seen as

a key role to guardianship. To highlight this, successful organisations take up the role of the

Employee Champion as seen in ‘The Business Partner’, and keeping people-related issues at


the forefront of their thinking, decision-making and planning, (Delany (2001) cited in

Mullins, L. 2005:748)).

Future-fit leaders

Another concept that has been at the forefront of Organisation Development is Talent

Management and it is those organisations that can recognise it is an essential cornerstone of

to their organisations sustainability. According to Next Generation HR (2010), too many

companies are looking at insight-light, process heavy approaches to talent management,

which isn’t desirable if a business needs to know their workforces’, aspirations, mindsets and

motivations (Thomas Dando, Thompson Reuters, Year Unknown). Organisations need to

know how tomorrow’s leadership abilities might be different from today’s leadership

demands. The CIPD goes on to say those building healthy cultures [to the workforce] is not

enough to meet the targets of staying sustainable. They state that they need to build an agile

and adaptable culture to meet tomorrow’s macro-needs: here a business can respond quickly

to macro-environmental impacts and changes.

Here the role of Change Agent takes on the responsibility of managing this change as well as

taking on the role of the Strategy Agent to align the business’ position with the

microenvironment.

Conclusions and Discussions

ccording to the CIPD (2010), it states that there, on many occasions, is an overlap

between the roles depicted in the model: a strategic partner may, if applicable, be

the Chance Agent also, if there is a large organisational change-taking place. It is

important to note that, according to a survey carried out by the CIPD, less than 30% or

respondents of the sample apply this model in full, but instead many organizations have used

an adapted model known as the ‘three-legged-stool’ They compile three functions of; Shared

Services, Centres of excellence and the Strategic Business Partner.

A

Tesco need to maintain an HR system, which is people-focused, employee engaging and

adaptable to macro changes within their environment. An insight-driven organisation is

another key to sustainable HR practices and to the business as a whole, where HR has an in-

depth understanding of the key drivers, which make their business successful within the

climate in which it operates. This is achieved in the continuous building of an agile and

adaptable culture, and developing future-leaders for tomorrow’s business. An HR system to


enable a running commentary on different behavioural characteristics and decision making

practices and would be extremely advantageous if Tesco were to develop a system whereby

these could be measured against a set of benchmarks. This will enable Tesco to predict how

future-proof their organisation really is. It is becoming more common to invest in such

organisational equity resources and this would add value to the business.

References

Armstrong, M., 2005. A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice. 9th ed. Kogan Page, London

Beardwell, I. et al.2004. Human Resource Management a Contemporary Approach. 4th ed. Prentice Hall, Harlow.

Treen, D., 2000. Strategic Human Resources Ivey Business Journal, Vol 64.

Whitelock, N., 2003. Tesco’s new recruits see the big picture

Anonymous., 2003. Human resources deliver Tesco’s bright Future Human Resource Management International Digest, 7 (4)

Marchington, M. & Wilkinson, A., 2006. Core Personnel and Development IPD Publishing, London.

Mullins, L., 2005. Management and Organisational Behaviour. 7th ed. Prentice Hall, Pearson Education, Edinburgh

Keep, E., 1989. Corporate training: the vital component?’ New Perspectives on Human Resource Management, Routledge Press. London

Harrison, R., 2002. Learning and Development. 3rd ed. CIPD Publishing, London

CIPD, 2010. Next Generation HR. Time for Change –Towards a Next Generation for HR. [online] Chartered Institute for Personal Development, London. Available at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/nextgen [Accessed 5 November 2010]

CIPD, 2010. Creating an Engaged Workforce. [Online] Chartered Institute for Personal Development, London. Available at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/ [Accessed 5 November 2010]

CIPD, 2010. Flexible Working: working for families, working for business. [Online] Chartered Institute for Personal Development, London. Available at http://www.cipd.co.uk/ [Accessed 05 November 2010]


http://www.cipd.co.uk/


http://www.cipd.co.uk/nextgen

CIPD, 2010., Understanding and Attracting strategic HR Talent, A focus on the business partner role. Chartered Institute for Personal Development, London. Available at http://www.dipd.co.uk [Accessed 12 November 2010]

Goodge, P., 2010. HR Business Partnering. CIPD, [internet] Jan 2010. Available at http:// www.cipd.co.uk [Accessed 5 November 2010]

Steinbies, 2010. POINT OF VIEW : Barriers and open doors with “HR Business Partners”, An HR concept is translated into practice [Online] (Updated: Unknown) Available at http://www.stw.de/en/publications/transfer-magazine/transfer-022008/von-den-moeglichkeiten-und-grenzen-des-hr-business-partner.html [Accessed 11 November 2010)

The Employee Engagement Model


http://www.stw.de/en/publications/transfer-magazine/transfer-022008/von-den-moeglichkeiten-und-grenzen-des-hr-business-partner.html



http://www.dipd.co.uk/

Figure 1: CIPD, 2010. Creating an Engaged Workforce. [Online] Chartered Institute for Personal Development, London. Available at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/ [Accessed 5 November 2010]

The Business Partner Model


Figure 2 http://www.stw.de/en/publications/transfer-magazine/transfer-022008/von-den-moeglichkeiten-und-grenzen-des-hr-business-partner.html

Building Organisational Equity




Figure 3 CIPD, 2010. Next Generation HR. Time for Change –Towards a Next Generation for HR. [online] Chartered Institute for Personal Development, London. Available at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/nextgen [Accessed 5 November 2010]
