Human Resource management theory defines HR management ‘best practice’ as an approach which identifies a number of human resource management practices which lead to superior business performance no matter the business.
Below are 7 human resource management practices which are deemed to be best practice, these were suggested by Jeffrey Pheffer in the 1990’s;
- Providing security to employees
- Hiring the right people
- Self-managed and effective teams
- Fair and performance based compensation
- Training in relevant skills
- Creating flat and egalitarian organisations
- Making information easily accessible to those who need it.
As a manager, these 7 practices are quite intuitive and we can see how each would give an organisation a strong platform to grow a successful business. As usual it is the implementation of these practices which challenges management teams. Applying the practice to a specific business requires the balancing of the various conflicting components of the various practices to add value to the business.
With recent lock-downs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, most companies have been put under extreme pressure just to try to meet the first of these practices and try to provide a little security to their employees. What this has done though is made it very difficult to even consider the other good practices, nearly impossible to consider a recruitment program, difficult to compensate employees, hard to even determine what training is needed and in most cases, the unknown has meant planning is a guess and corporate communications flounder.
Well resourced businesses with large human resource functions, have capacity to attempt to put in place such programs and build a foundation for the future. Small and medium sized businesses generally do not have the capacity or the know-how to consider diverse and systematic HR programmes, so are at risk of being left behind as the restrictions are lifted and the economy turns.
E.L Blue’s embedded HR professionals draw on the capacity of a large HR department, to design and implement tailored best practice HR programs. This offers the smaller business the option to have a best practice HR function to see them out the other side of this crisis, while not blowing the budget.
