There are many factors that affect the success of a company, among these are the external factors which the company cannot control like the economic condition, inflation, or rivals’ competition, and the internal factors which are under the management of the company like production process, technology, or personnel. One of the latter, human resources is the most valuable factor of the company. A successful company is the one, which has highly - qualified and highly - motivated staff. As a result, improving the staff quality is considered one of the most important missions of each company.
People are the most valuable asset, which can create the core value of an organization. Unlike other lifeless assets which can be imitated or replicated, human power is singled out by its creativeness, uniqueness and irreplaceability. The great industrial leader of General Motors has once said, “Take my assets, leave my people, and in five years I’ll have it all back.” Two companies can have the same scope of business with the same material and technology; however, they cannot have the same workforce with the exact skills and quality. With a large degree of assurance, we can say that the people make the business.
Research shows that 46% of business failures were due to wrong assignment and low spirit employees. As a result, every business has its own policy to recruit as well as to retain and promote the top – level talents. Basically, increasing the quality of personnel resources bases on hiring the right person for the right position, keeping them highly motivated, as well as getting the best from them. In order to reach these targets, on one hand, the recruiting process goes through many steps from short listing, quality testing, interviewing to professional training; on the other hand, a clear policy of benefits as well as promotion is drafted to satisfy the employees’ needs and desires.
In fact, there are many departments, with different kind of positions in an organization, which require people with specific skills, education as well as personality. The quality of workers 50% depends on the qualification of the people recruited, thus the selecting process has to go through very strict steps. First of all, it is the CV screening to drop out unqualified candidates. Secondly, a competence test should be carried out to check the real ability of the remaining applicants. A short-listed is then interviewed by the department heads to ensure that they are the most suitable person for the position. This is to minimize the probability of wrong hiring which is the main reason of dissatisfaction and layoff in the future.
Once hiring the best people, the issue moves to how to understand employees’ needs and desire as well as how to match their needs with the goal of the company. We all agree that company operates for profit, so the less money is paid out for compensation, the more profit it may earn. However, in the long-term view, the staff’s loyalty as well as the real value they create also contribute much to the company’s return. The most effective way is to reward workers based on the result of work. The company can design a performance appraisal for their staff that is the process of evaluating the work result, the behavior of the employee as well as setting up a plan for improvement after that. Besides, organizations can also encourage the competition between staff by giving special prizes for the most productive or the most creative people of the month. It is one good method to improve the working moral as well as to push everybody work harder as once the basic needs are satisfied; people can totally concentrate on working.
Besides the physical needs, unphysical needs, such as the working environment, the relationship between the supervisors and subordinates, also have big impact on the working spirit. Most people in an unofficial survey think that their managers are unfriendly, unwilling to neither share their power, nor give their supporters the right to make decisions as they are afraid of the risk of losing their positions. Actually, nobody can handle everything by himself but work should be shared and so is the power. Giving rights to employees not just reduces the burden of management team but also make people at lower levels involved in the decision making process. That is the reason why decentralization is now a growing tendency in almost every big organization.
With today increasing trend of globalization, companies have to compete in the more challenging business environment in which things change and new technologies are introduced every single minute. As a result, to survive and to succeed in this fierce international market, companies must have world-class employees who are highly qualified and who can adapt quickly to the changes. Thus, continuous training is an essential part of a good human resources policy to help the workers acquire new skills, new attitude as well as the latest concepts in the industry. There are two main methods of training - on the job training and professional education. The first one is a kind of informal training in which the worker learns and gets experience through the process of work; it does not cost much as the employees learn when they are working, there is no need to hire a trainer or to organize a class. The second type is a more expensive one that requires a teacher and a number of people to form a classroom, the knowledge given is then more theoretical. These two methods should be carried on at the same time to substitute for each other, and to give people both theoretical knowledge as well as hands-on experiences.
Another reason that leads to the low effective work result is the boring routine work that repeats again and again every day, it will kill the creativity as well as the enthusiasm. Rotation is one of the good ways to solve this problem. After a specific time working at one department, a person has a chance to move to try other different positions in the company. It is a good opportunity to test people in different kinds of work, and a good way to refresh their feeling after a long time doing the same tedious work. The changes not only help worker realize which department is the best appropriate one for them but also make employees get used to the work of different departments, so that they can support to each other when needed. Some experiments carried out at many organizations shows that after the test, productivity increases by more than 30%; the number of innovations also grows sharply.
In conclusion, as human capital is one of the most important factors that creates the competitive advantage of a company, setting up and promoting a strong, skillful, and enthusiastic staff are vital goals of every firm. Depending on its scope of business, the typical characteristics, as well as the causes that lead to the low quality of personnel resources, each company should design a specific strategy that best suits its situation. Once the company can control this valuable asset well, it can easily succeed and get profit on the international market.
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