Q1 Examination of HR function between organisations and a comparison of HR delivery in different sectors and organisations of different sizes.

The selected organisation for the topic is Tesco, which is one of the biggest commercial grocery store chains in the world in terms of both the number of stores and their annual turnover (The Guardian. 2020). It has stores in more than 12 countries both in the European and the Asian region. Currently, Tesco has over 5000 stores throughout the world.

Describe the HR function within the organisation

Tesco is a human resource management company, which empowers employees so that they can develop their skills human resource management is the Latest version of handling people and their strengths. The human resource mainly deals with the development, acquisition motivation, and maintenance of the employees (Gupta, Mittal and Mittal, 2019). The human resource management remains together however, the power and duties are decentralised among the various departments. The human resource tries to make Tesco a flexible work environment so that employees can be motivated to attain organisational objectives 

Running of the organisation

The HR system of Tesco runs on various factors such as transparency, job satisfaction, and training, problem avoiding and legal compliances.The HR always creates clarity between its policies and strategies so that employees can perceive it the transparency policy within the organisation is required for the company's success (Park and Kim, 2019). Talented employees are trained and this is high productivity, which increases the profit of the company thereby helps in the running of the business of Tesco. Tesco also runs on various advantages concerning legislation and laws of the UK.

What is the structure?

Tesco has a hierarchical organizational structure. The ones who are at the top of the pyramid of the business has the most authority and responsibility (Hierarchy Structure. 2020.). The hierarchal structure has a tall structure that works mainly in a long chain and is divided into a vertical command. The majority of the power lies at the apex level. However, this hierarchy is traditional, this type of structure it’s in creating a definite role for each and everyone thereby creating no confusion and chaos. Tesco also follows a structure of functional establishment concerning their HR as opposed to the geography girl structure, which is followed by maximum international retail stores.

Main duties/pressures of HR

The main duties of the HR of Tesco are Integration, training and development, performance management, provide leadership, monitor work and check the quality, discipline employees provides employee engagement, promotes diversity and equality and also check after the health and safety of the employees of Tesco (Locusassignments.com. 2020).. The major functions and duties of the HR of Tesco add to balance a healthy relationship amongst their employees and managers. The HR team also aims to make Proper industrial relationship with other companies in the market as well. Moreover, they also establish an applied program concerning fair activities and industrial relations. 

Underpinning with models and theories of HR

The Standard Causal Model of HRM

One of the best-known models of HR is a standard casual model of HRM. The model depicted a link, which is casual, and it starts from the strategies of the business and ends in the HR process with properly improved performance in the finances of the business. Hence, Tesco underpins the model so that the HR activities can be aligned with their strategies and this could lead to better organisational performance. This also helps HR of Tesco to be effective in the strategies, which are aligned with goals. Hence the strategies of HR are derived from the overall business strategy.HR of Tesco follow the HR strategies such as training, hiring, compensation and appraisal. These practices yield certain results such as quality output, commitment and engagement. The standard casual model believes that internal performance can be enhanced such as innovation, quality and productivity. This in turn helps the performance of the organisation financially concerning Tesco such as increased profits, better margins, return on investments and proper financial turnover. 

The 8-box model by Paul Boselie

A unique HR model, which is often used by the HRs are the 8-box model by Paul Boselie. This model states the various internal and externalfactors, which influences the effectivity of HR quality. The HR first checks the external market, external population andexternal institutions.These are the forces, which influences an HR externally.

When the skills concerning Tesco are lacking in the market the role of the HR comes into place, which influences the recruiting, hiring and sourcing techniques. The strategic ploy of Tescoconsists of the following variants such as:

Intended practices for HR: This shows the intention that the HR of Tesco has concerning their training recruitment and various other policies do it can be stated as the starting point of the model.

Actual practices of the Hr: Tesco HR might have great intentions but in execution and the cooperation between the HR and the management shows the actual achievements. 

Perceived practices of the Hr: In this method, the employee of Tesco’s, perceive what is happening in the organisation. No matter how good the manager and HR performance of activities if they are perceived in a wrong notion then they can create damage and their intentions might affect negatively. 

HR outcomes: The perceived practises of nature of Tesco can add to various outcomes for the HR. This is quite similar to the standard casual model, which is mentioned above. 

Compare it to organisations of different sizes and sectors

Public/Private

The human resource of Tesco focuses on recruiting, training, selecting and developing new staff. They focus on keeping all records, which they possess, and keep it confidential and applying the standards of the data protection act. On the other hand, Oxfam's human resource is responsible for various ranges of activities including advising the international regions of humanitarian issues, build regional capacity and also to respond to emergencies, read development programmes that work on main areas such as food security, public health gender protection, HIV and AIDS (Studymoose, 2020).

Size and Structure

TESCO being a multinational company has a huge employee structure and thus their HR structure is highly professional and they work on the hierarchy management basis. On the other hand, Davison Canners consists of around 100 employees hence their HR structure are not decentralised as compared to TESCO.

Global /National

Tesco being a global company requires a greater involvement of the HR individuals and has to keep in mind various international laws, Virgin media being a domestic company has lesser HR interventions, and they have to keep in mind about the national law only.

Question 2

Examples of organisational objectives that the HR function

There are various organisational objectives that an HR achieves some are described below.

Checking quality and monitoring work: They provide proper instructions and guidance should employees so that they can concentrate on the work details. The managers hence become the role models of the employees (Murtiningsih, 2020). HR makes it clear about the work standards and expectations from the employees as well as their behaviour and type of work wish they should do. HR of Tesco does develops the spirit of teamwork and provide equal opportunity for everyone in the team. These help the employees to evolve the organisation in various ways such as building the capability of the organisation through the performance of the people.

Employee discipline: The HR team of Tesco generates rules and policies, which are supported by the line managers. The rules made by the editors thereby control the behaviour and their performance. This provides seriousness and dedication in Tesco.It also helps to design jobs for the organisation. It also helps in staffing and performance-related objectives. This contributes to changes in the organisation.

Employee engagement: The HR focuses on employee's strengths and does encourage employees to use their full potential. They help them to work on the negative aspects and overcome their weaknesses. This helps to increase productivity and influence the employs to engage, cooperate and coordinate towards their common goal in Tesco. 

b) HR objectives can be delivered in many ways. Explain two significant methods.

Two ways in which Objectives of the HR can be delivered are through HR shared service and HR business partner

Question 3 

Evaluation of the case of the business case for managing HR in an ethical, professional and just manner.

The human resources of Tesco are ethically responsible for fostering in promoting justice and fairness for the employees within the organisation. This helps to create an environment that encourages the individuals of the organisation to reach to their full potential in a positive manner.

HR practices responsible for ensuring ethical business practice 

Ethics, which maintain business, is possible with the help of the HR executives. It is their duty to nurture ethics in an organisational culture and to see that the stars were recruited maintains an ethical tone and upon the values of the ethical surroundings created in the organisation. HR also resolves ethical conflicts when they occur within the organisation for handling problems limited to ethics HR manager should identify the in-world complexities and avoid issue escalation. They should also protect the reputational and emotional impact, which can occur due to the conflicts. A global perspective concerning ethical issues also needs to be developed by the HRs (Neves, Almeida and Velez 2018). Hence, indirectly HR professionals add value to the organisation through the code of conduct which day frame for the success of the organisation. This helps to create credibility, respect and strategic significance for the HR profession within the organisations and the business community. This also helps to assist organisation cheering their goals and objectives and educate the future and current employees about the principles and practices so that they can help the profession. Social responsibility also forms as a part of ethics and hence HR should try to implement them among the employees. The most important aspect of ethics is all the employees should abide by the law, which the HR should keep a track of (Celma, Martinez-Garcia and Raya, 2018). A proper reputation if an employer who is ethical and does not occur on his own. Policies which protects sexual harassment, discrimination, equal treatment of employees and putting managers and supervisors through training of ethics programs is the job of the HR. Most importantly, the ethics in an organisation is implemented to create a culture of dignity and mutual respect whereby decision-making is rewarded and valued.

HR should act professional and fair at all times

The intention of the management might be nice but their way of doing the practice is can be very different.Hence, the perception if not correct then it will not mirror what an HR practises. Certain practices, which the HR of TESCO follows, are:

• Acting fairly to avoid discrimination among employees:  The planning made by the human resource planning helps the team to realise that diversification in an office and non- discrimination will help to maintain an image so that customers can be accessed worldwide. HR at Tesco is to recruit the diversely qualified staff and provide them with equal opportunities’ irrespective of their age, caste, religion, colour and gender (Ashwood, 2017). 
• Provide credibility within the organisation: HR makes sure that the employees working are credible and their number is sufficient for proper functioning of the organization (Trullen and Valverde, 2017). Human resource of TESCO is considered as machine, which ensures that employees fulfil their organisational responsibilities.
• Encourage recruitment & retention: Tesco has an Information Storage System with the help of that the HR gets accessibility to the employees and their work quality. This way the supply and demand is presented in TESCO. The external and internal source consists of transfers and promotions,which includes recruiting new candidates and retention of the old ones (Zaharee et al. 2018).

- Reference to the CIPD Profession Map

Question 4 

Provide a short description of at least two major theories of change management.

Lewin’s change model.

This model has three steps for an organised change, which focuses to initiate, manage, and stabilize the process of change. 

The stage 1 involves Unfreezing:In this stage, TESCO should unfreeze the behaviours and attitudes of the existing employees.Here the employees have to go unlearn old ideas, habits and perceptions concerning the effect of change (Hussain et al. 2018).

The Stage 2 involves Change:In this stage, the behavioural change takes place. Employees change their old methods and adapt new methods of thinking concerning change and depict how the same might be executed and how it can a have a positive impact rather than a negative one (Burnes, 2020).

The stage 3- involves Refreezing: This is the last stage, which consists of process of maintaining the pace of change through fixing in the change, then making the situation stable for TESCO, then structure relationships then, consolidate the system, then support and evaluation and finally prevent from going to the previous methods(Cummings, Bridgman and Brown, 2016).

Kotters change model

This is a 8 step model concerning change in the organisation. The main aspect is the time limit, which is provided to implement the change through this model.  No steps can be skipped as that can create results, which are unsatisfactory. The stage involves:

Step-1 Creating a sense of urgency: The sense of urgency concerning the requirement of change is created in this stage. The need can be felt through market examination and competitors’ situation. The main opportunities are discussed with the potential threats and future prediction is also made in this stage (Chappell et al. 2016).

Step 2- Forming a team of power coalition: TESCO will have to build a team with proper authority and power so that they can encourage team unity.

Step 3- Creating a transparent vision: A vision is formulated concerning change and execution strategies are structured concerning the formulated visions(Galli, 2019).

Step 4- Communication of the vision: The vision is communicated in this step and guidelines are formulated for team unity and education.

Step-5 Empowering other to work on the vision: The barriers of change are removed in this step will thereby focus on risk bearing ideas and actions.

Step-6 Creating short-term wins: Short terms wins will be the foundation for a long-term change in the organisation. This stage aims to reward those to can meet targets (Small et al. 2016).

Step-7 Consolidating improvements and producing more change: The organisation examines what more improvements are required to improve the system further and structure, and policies, which are unsuitable for the vision (Mahmood, 2018). Development of employees is also done so that they can contribute towards the vision. New themes and agents are also reinforced.

Step-8Institutionalising the new approaches: This step assembles the achievements and shapes it into a solid structure.Corporate culture and new behaviour are aligned for development of leadership(Baloh, Zhu and Ward, 2018).

Advantages of TESCO for using these models are that it helps to process the entire change model by breaking it down, which in turn helps in transparency.In addition, it focuses on long-termchange, which is suitable for all kind of organisational frame works. Disadvantage of the step is that if one-step is missed by TESCO then the result might not be as expected. 

The outcome of using these models is that it will help TESCO to fight the challenges they face concerning their HR management and will help implement new ideas of change. The overall scenario of the organisation can be modified using these change models.

Question 5 

Evidential report of the HR function’s contribution to organisation success and development. 

There are various approaches for the evaluation of human resources. Some of the approaches involve balanced scorecard, benchmarking, service level agreement and key performing index. These can be checked as evidences of HR’s contribution for the success of Tesco.

Balanced scorecard: There are four aspects of a balance scorecard, which is customer satisfaction, financial performance, internal processes and capacity develop and learn. HR performance can be identified through the performance indicators of the organisation (Kaufman et al. 2019). This will help to identify how much the HR is contributing towards learning and development in TESCO. The scorecard will also provide a balanced picture of the HR performances. Through this, the HR can align their units for the overall success of the firm.

Benchmarking- Through this the practices of the HR can be Benchmarked and their critical practices from the TESCO’s perspective can be identified for benchmarking. This can be done by creating a team who can handle the process of benchmarking. This helps measure the employee engagement, which the HR creates(Veleva, Bodkin and Todorova,  2017). The data can be collected from the partners of benchmarking. Evidence of data of the HR can be analyzed and interpreted. A comprehensive report can be gathered.

SLA: Service level agreement helps to measure the improvement done against the Employee Service Management. This helps to check and Uplift the experience of the Employees. This also helps to evaluate the resource allocation done by the HR (Lyu et al. 2017).Recruitment and selection process of TESCO could be evidence through this process as well. This helps to examine the results achieved by the HR, helps to focus on the efforts made by the HR, and makes them deliver higher quality work. This is also judged from the compliance ratings found in the SLA. With the help of this, the insights can be further communicated to the top-level management so that proper rules and regulations can be forged and revised.

KPI’s: Key performance indicators are strategic metrics. The metrics having direct nexus can be measure through this (Gagarinskaia, Kuznetcova and Gagarinskii, 2019). It will help TESCO to measure averagecost of interviewing, average placement length, average service length, average salary, average training hours for each employee, average number of holidays per employee, average number of leaves which are unpaid, average age of retirement age, compensation cost,training satisfaction of Employees, ration of HR-to-FTE and so on, of TESCO. Hence the evidence of the HR evaluation is very important for the organisation and these can be done by checking the Key performance indicators.

Question 6

Summarising of the findings of the article and evaluation of its validity, reliability and persuasiveness.

Irrespective of the fact the strategic management of human resources have emphasized on the valuation of the integration of hr management within strategic management, the mechanism by which the strategic integrating of human resource functions is contributing towards betterment of the company’s performance are still not well known. It is a known fact that the human resource strategies cannot come into effect without the assistance of the employees and their commitment towards successful implementation of the strategies. The reliability of the study can be justified from the fact that the article takes active participation in focusing on the practises of higher involvement work, which will indeed be helpful for the employees to contribute towards managerial decision making as potential moderators of integrating Human Resource Functioning within strategic management as well as performance of the company (Kim and Sung-Choon, 2013). The validity of the study can be justified from the numerical findings which emphasized on taking a sample of 203 companies of Korea which are unionised. In this context, it could be identified that the moderation of the human resource functioning on the performance of the firm was often influenced by the higher involvement of working practises such as program of career development, participation of the union within organisational strategy, pay as per performance program and benefits associated with the contingency workers. The overall outcomes were suggesting that the strategic functioning of HR will not be advantageous without the involvement of institution related mechanisms fostering the involvement of the employees (Kim and Sung-Choon, 2013). In this note, it could be stated that the human resource related functions are directly subjected to how well an employee is performing and the employees will be able to perform only when there are proper facilities available. Henceforth, the overall contribution of human resource management cannot be ignored in the competitive era. 

Whether the article supports investment in human capital and high-performance working and for organisational success and performance. 

High-performance working creates a culture, which encourages transparency, communication and trust for all. There are three broad areas of the practice, which is high involvement of employee, human resource practices and commitment and reward practises. On the other hand, human capital is a platform, which is related to everything HR. In this platform, everyone gets involved from the management level to the employee level. This provides valuable information on the HR insights and develops a diverse pool of accountable leadership. Both are very important for the success of the organisation as it allows the autonomy of the employees and makes the structure decentralised (Ashwood, 2017). Information sharing also becomes easy and therefore Employees become more focussed. This also helps in development and learning of the employees and their skills are sharpened. With implementation of these processes employee, the HR. can also force support systems. Two major advantages are that these practises can affect directly towards the internal performance such as a good training given by Tesco can improve the performance. In this context, it can be stated that the article clearly supports the investing within the human capital and working of high performance for attaining organisational success. This could be justified from the conceptualisation in the article which stated that hr functioning is dependent on employee performance which is impacted through institutional mechanisms.