Hi all,
Nice work providing the examples of scientific management, welfare work, and industrial relations from your personal work experience. As you saw when reading your classmates' post, all three of these schools of human resources management (and general management theory) are still alive and well in the workplace.
Scientific Management
Examples of scientific management abound today, perhaps most obviously in the fast food industry. We heard about examples from the design of kitchen or behind-the-counter work at Chick-Fil-A, Hershey's Chocolate World, Haagen-Dazs, and others. The division of labor into clearly defined prep stations, the training for each of these stations, and the fact that the design and training was carried out by "experts" in management are all classic characteristics of scientific management. And despite the bad rap that scientific management gets these days, many of you praised it for its efficiency in satisfying customer needs. Improved efficiency and productivity are the hallmarks of scientific management.
Recall that scientific management was applied not only to production jobs when it was first introduced, but to management jobs as well. In many ways, scientific management created the first clearly defined management roles. What we now term "human resources management" was born of scientific management in the form of the first employment (recruiting) and employee relations (shop disciplinarian) departments. The key point for us to recognize in terms of the development of HRM as a management practice is that rather than having line managers' and supervisors directly involved with hiring their employees and managing their performance, that work was split-out and assigned to other management roles. Scientific management's division of labor was applied both in production and management.
Welfare Work
Almost as many of you identified examples of welfare work in your posts as did scientific management. Just as scientific management provided the earliest personnel-related departments dedicated to recruiting and performance management, welfare work provided the first conceptions of what we might call today employee benefits (beyond pay). Meng Yao made an important connection between welfare work and efficiency. The same improvements in employee retention and performance she saw in her personal work experience were observed by early advocates of welfare work. Addressing employee needs beyond fair pay for work completed became an important part of the personnel management landscape. The first "welfare secretaries" were in many ways the earliest benefit administrators, a role that exists in companies today.
What works for One Company Doesn't always work for Another
Several of you also noted the wide variety of experiences across the class, including how one company can be effective seemingly based on scientific management, while another emphasizes excellent working conditions and benefits. If we examined these different examples in more depth, I suspect that most of them would include an effective blending of both approaches, emphasizing the best parts of each (e.g., efficient, happy and productive employees), while minimizing the downsides (e.g., treating employees like machine parts, or like children in need of parents). The right mix of management styles/theories and HRM practices depends on the company's external environment and its business strategy (including company values). This then is the challenge of HRM - to design HRM practices that serve to align employee effort and commitment to effectively execute the company's strategy, thereby achieving its mission and vision.
HRM as a Management Practice, not a Department
This brings us to a major theme of our course: HRM is a management practice, not a department. We can thank scientific management for separating the management practices we today label as HRM from the line manager's roles and responsibilities. Today, however, we are seeing an increasing trend toward re-integrating HRM into the line manager's job. Good managers want to use all of the tools in their tool box to recruit, develop, retain and promote excellent an excellent team and workforce. This makes HRM an integral part of that job (not the job of a group of people in another department). Yes, big companies will have HR departments for all kinds of good reasons that we'll discuss over the course of the semester. But we'll be examining HRM from the perspective of the line manager, providing you with the theories and tools you need to be a great people manager using effective HRM practices.
An Important Note About Unions
Finally, several of you reflected on the role of unions in today's workplace, most with very positive experiences. Unions play an important role in the development of the American workplace and labor law. As noted in your reading, HRM during the peak of the union movement was largely viewed as industrial relations, dedicated to negotiating union contracts and then working with union leaders to operate according to the terms of those contracts. The infrequency of your posts regarding unions, and the shift in HRM's focus as a discipline, speaks to the reduced role unions have in today's workplace. We'll talk more about that as the semester progresses.
Thanks again for the great observations and discussion. See you in class next week!
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