This essay will compare Human Resource Management principles to Operations Management principles, and the importance of professional service organizations in standardizing a profession.

 Human Resources Management began as a form of personnel administration in the late 1900’s and evolved to more of a strategy in the last twenty years. In addition, the globalization of business means that HR professionals will need to be more hands-on with issues such as: ethics, policy creation, work/life balance for associates. Changes in communication tech including internet, cellphones, etc. requires HRM models to become internationally compatible and to create best practices, proactive strategies and employment relationships (such as remote employment). 

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Operations management has been around for a long time, it can be said that ancient civilizations used it and still uses the same basic principles today. This includes resources management, scheduling control, and bringing together different tasks into a larger web to create a larger project.  New advancements have changed the idea of operation management to be more focused on schedule optimization. Henry Gantt was central in the modernization of project management by creating the Gantt Chart. This chart shows the phases of a project from beginning to end (Collins, 2015). In recent years computer-controlled options and processes have been developed. This has led to project managers completing tasks more accurately in less time. With the development of the 

 When comparing HRM and Project Management there are few things to consider. Human resource management includes plan and policy creation to maximize associate’s productivity. This involves proper hiring techniques and practice, but also establishing retention systems. These retention systems can include training tracs, productivity bonuses, or even just appreciation days. HRM also includes creating proper job descriptions, tools, and training for know what is expected of them and what needs to be done to succeed.  Project management is putting the people and resources in the right place at the right time in order to complete set tasks. Conducting meetings, following up with status updates, and resolving any project halting issues, changing workflows to improve productivity and reduce lag time, and keeping accurate timelines are also part of being a good project manager (Ashe-Edmunds, n.d.).

Professional service organizations also play an important role in standardizing a profession including establishing codes of ethics. A code of conduct is the platform in which a company bases their actions and expectations of their workforce. A code of conduct usually goes into detail explaining the who, what, when, and where of the company’s wishes on how to operate ethically, this often includes interaction expectations with customers, vendors, suppliers, and even the community. Additionally, a code of conduct is often used as to support employees in making their good business decisions every day. A code of ethics can also encourage employee empowerment giving them the ability to handle resolve ethical issues without the need to get upper management involved. A code of conduct assures the company’s customers by showing its high standards, ethical conduct and reducing risk, and can reduce the financial risks by demonstrating they established standards and practices to prevent illegal acts (Ethics.org, n.d.).

One scenario that I can think of is the attendance policy at Publix, the current policy is created on a store to store basis via the store manager. As a company, Publix strives to give an equal experience to their customers no matter the store, unfortunately this is not the case for their associates. An employee transferring to one store to another is often inundated by new policies and procedures for that particular store. Also, it has been proved that managers often do not enforce certain polices if the do not favor them or if it will make favored associates look poorly. For this issue I will make recommendations to resolve the aforementioned issues. To begin, I suggest a corporate attendance policy, this is not something that needs to be tweaked on a store to store basis. A uniform attendance policy ensures that associates know what to expect and there are no excuses for excessive days missed. To find the best policy the company should take the average days missed a year for associates throughout the company and consider this the as a baseline to start their policy creation. The next policy to consider is that of equality of treatment. Although this is an ethics issue that many would raise their eyebrows over, it happens all too often. Yearly reviews are completed by department managers and are subject to bias with little in quantifiable scores. Creating a policy of un-bias retraining will help reduce this but also recreating the evaluation forms to a more quantifiable so associates know what to expect. These policies will help associates and managers understand what needs to be done and how to properly do their assigned tasks. Although these policies are more Human Resources aspect, these can help all areas as associates will show to their shifts more often and know what is wanted while they are there. 

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This is an example of a company having a well-established code of conduct with set ethical standards but does not always to the best of jobs enforcing it. The main reason for this is because the sheer size of the company makes it difficult to see that every employee and manager is following the set expectations. In order to combat this issue, the company has set up a phone number that employees can confidentially report any ongoing ethics issues to the corporate leaders. This helps them maintain and see what is happening on a store level and a day to day basis.

References

Ashe-Edmunds, S. (n.d.). Human Resource Management versus leading a project team. Retrieved from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/human-resource-management-versus-leading-project-team-60749.html

Collins, J. (2015). A brief history of project management. Retrieved from https://www.ims-web.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-project-management

Ethics.org. (n.d.). Why have a code of conduct? Retrieved from https://www.ethics.org/resources/free-toolkit/code-of-conduct/

Hunt, J. (2003) The anatomy of organizational change in the twenty first century. Retrieved from Wiesner, R. and Millett, B. (2003) op. cit., pp. 3–4.