People Culture and Contemporary Leadership †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the People Culture and Contemporary Leadership. Answer: Introduction The report aims at providing an insight into the people, culture and contemporary leadership in the context of a chosen organization. The organization chosen here is Woolworths Limited, a compilation of the divisions, chains, and brands of the Woolworths Group (woolworthsgroup.com.au 2018). The report will provide an overview of organization including the growth, vision and mission statement, structure, total strength of workforce and the branches. The report will also help in identifying the human resource (HR) strategy within the organization. The will also focus on the evaluation of the HR practices within the organization in terms of the structure, policies and the relevant activities. The report will also try to evaluate the present state of employee engagement within the organization along with a structured plan that will help in increasing the employee engagement overtime. Woolworths Group is one of the largest food retailers of Australia whose primary operations include liquor retailing, supermarkets and hotels and pubs under the umbrella of the Australian Leisure and Hospitality (ALH) group. In terms of growth, the net profit of the company rose by 37.6 percent in December 2017 (woolworthsgroup.com 2018). In terms of structure, Woolworth Group represents one of the second largest organizations in Australia in terms of the revenue. It also represents one of the largest takeaway liquor retailer and the poker machine operator and hotels in Australia. The mission and vision of the company lies in appealing to the customers across the world. Therefore, Woolworths Group focuses on building store and customer led culture and team. The company also ensures generating sustainable sales momentum in food along with evolvement of the drinks business in providing more convenience and value to the customers. Woolworths Group also tries to empower their portfolio b usiness for pursuing strategies and delivering them to the shareholder. The company also focuses on becoming a lean retailer through the adoption of system excellence and end-to-end process. Presently, Woolworths Group has employee strength of 202,000 (woolworthsgroup.com 2018). Woolworths Group has various branches in various parts of Australia and United States. HR Strategy of the Organization There is a dedicated human resource department of the Woolworths Group focused at ensuring the effectiveness of employee management of an organization. The company has designed and adopted human resource strategies based on developing and recruiting talent, matching the staffing with the requirements of the business, training, retraining and downsizing of the staffs. Woolworths Group also outsources some of the functions of the human resource and hence the organization follows a business process human resource (HR) outsourcing (Cascio 2018). This helps the Woolworths Group in managing the distinct activities of the HR that included payroll administration or recruitment. However, the manual, complex and aging human resources challenged the ability of the Woolworths Group in sustaining growth (woolworthsgroup.com.au 2018). The company thus started a human resource transformation program for achieving the mission of high performance through elimination of complicated paper supported solutions so that the HR primarily focuses on the four functional core areas of the company that revolves around leadership, talent, employee recognition and awards and organizational effectiveness. The Woolworths Group stands apart in bringing about transformation through empowering the HR manages that remain accountable in not only developing people but also providing the employees with the ability of managing and owing their careers along with increasing the both away communication process across businesses. Thus, for staying ahead in business meetings and the customer expectations the organization ensured an implementation of end-to-end human capital management system. Evaluation of HR Practices within the Organization There are three major levels of operations of a HR manager includes the functional level, operational level and the strategic level. At the Woolworths Group, HR practices are undertaken both the functional and the strategic level. At the functional level, the practitioners ensure the management of the employees whereas the strategic level mostly involves human resource and corporate planning by line managers. However, the functions of the human resources department of Woolworths Group in terms of policies, structure and other relevant activities involve: Selection and Recruitment: The quality of employee in Woolworths is dependent on the effective strategy of HR for the selection and recruitment of the employees (Armstrong and Taylor 2014). However, the strategy for selection as well as recruitment is not a smooth sailing process. Employers across the organizations can face issues like the advertising cost of job openings or issues related to the improvement of interaction between the recruiters and the hiring managers. This is where the role of HR comes into play. Development and Retention: The HR manager at Woolworths Group focuses on certain major practices for retaining the top talent (Goetsch and Davis 2014). The HR manager tries to recruit the most suitable employees at the first place and improve the line managers ability in managing the employees. The HR department also plays the role of providing necessary feedback to the employees on a continuous basis. The HR practices of Woolworths also help in empowering the employees towards moving forward in the path of career growth. They also help in increasing the productivity of the employees by increasing the level of their motivation. Being one of the most famous retail organizations the HR practices focuses on continuously improving the business strategies along with the retention strategies to ensure employee retention. Ensuring Performance Review of Employees: The human resource practice in Woolworths involves undertakes self-evaluation for reviewing employee performance. At Woolworths Group the employees are given time for evaluating themselves and understanding their performance (Kim 2014). Further, the HR practice also involves evaluating the perception of the employee about the job skills that helps them in calibrating their own responses and also provide necessary feedback. Current State of Employee Engagement Employee Engagement refers to the approach in a workplace those results in exact condition that motivates the employees in delivering their best performance in accordance to the values and goals of the organization thereby contributing to the organizational success (Haski?Leventhal 2013). There also persists an enhanced sense of well being amongst the employees. In Australia, employees tend to spend two thirds of their waking hours on job. Insecurity, work related stress and personal problems are some of the reasons that contributes not only to absenteeism but also turnover and low morale. This leads to the enhancement of the injuries due to time loss. This results in a situation where employees are present but are not productive. When the companies in Australia are looking for means of gaining competitive advantage, it is the workforce acts as the largest reservoir of potential. Presently, it is found that, 25 percent of the employees remains engaged, 25 percent remains actively disengaged while the rest of the 50 percent are trying enough for keeping out of the trouble (Suan, Mat and Al-Omari 2013). Thus, Australiahas a crisis related to employee engagementthat has potentially and serious lasting repercussions on the future innovation and the economy (Schermerhorn et al., 2014). In reality, when the companies focuses exclusively onmeasuring the engagement instead of improvingthe engagement they fail to discover the required changes that would engage the employees Initiatives of HR for Increasing Employee Engagement The initiatives that the HR can undertake for enhancing the employee engagement include (Evans, Chitnomrath and Christopher 2013): Focusing on the Business Outcomes: The HR is able to enhance the engagement of the employees through delivery of positive impact on the organizational performance. They can enhance business value of the engaged employees by adopting the following initiatives: Through setting up a meeting for discussing business approach, employee impact, risks, requirements of each of the staff members and employee segments Compiling the data for linking engagement scores to the business outcomes Ensuring steady course of engagement even when the organization seems engulfed by the unexpected waves Communicating well with the Leaders and Managers: The HR professionals should be able in crafting a narrative that helped in portraying the voice of the employees. This can be done through: Development of a communication plan for all the planned program and initiatives of HR. Ensure engaging the managers in the annual milestones of people planning Ensure the engagement of the key manager in dealing with the team challenges while increasing their understanding with the challenges of the overall business Development of the Management Strength: Frequent communication helps in fostering motivation, desire and awareness amongst the managers for engaging people. This requires further enhancement of the skills which they can do by: Reviewing the process of recruitment, selection, development and the reward process for the managers Through assessing the strengths of the employees on engagement Ensuring that they are able to understand relationship between the levels of engagement and the teams Initiation of the management and leadership development program for addressing the capability of employee engagement Conclusion The report concludes by providing an insight into the initiatives undertaken by the HR for enhancing the employee engagement. The report also discusses about the current state of employee engagement in an organization. The report also undertakes evaluation of HR practices within Woolworths Group along with providing an overview of the company. It can however be mentioned from the report that Woolworth has a dedicated human resource department and follows both the strategic and functional level of HR functioning. The organization also ensures maintenance of all the retention levers that has helped the organization in implementing a suitable method of performance review through self-evaluation. References: Armstrong, M. and Taylor, S., 2014.Armstrong's handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers. Cascio, W., 2018.Managing human resources. McGraw-Hill Education. Evans, R.T., Chitnomrath, T. and Christopher, T., 2013. Successful turnaround strategy: Thailand evidence.Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies,3(2), pp.115-124. Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014.Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson. Haski?Leventhal, D., 2013. Employee engagement in CSR: The case of payroll giving in Australia.Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management,20(2), pp.113-128. Kim, H.K., 2014. Work-life balance and employees' performance: The mediating role of affective commitment.Global Business and Management Research,6(1), p.37. Schermerhorn, J., Davidson, P., Poole, D., Woods, P., Simon, A. and McBarron, E., 2014.Management: Foundations and Applications (2nd Asia-Pacific Edition). John Wiley Sons. Schoenberg, R., Collier, N. and Bowman, C., 2013. Strategies for business turnaround and recovery: a review and synthesis.European Business Review,25(3), pp.243-262. Suan Choo, L., Mat, N. and Al-Omari, M., 2013. 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