Ray Willing, we are told, as Chief Executive of the National Roads and Motorists Association (NRMA), was a 27-year employee with the organization, and, since being made CEO in 1992, was "instrumental in a number of changes that the organization had undergone during that period" (NRMA Case Study, 1995, p.1). We are further told that he has accepted several major challenges that can affect the organization's human resources strategies. Those are:
Flatten the organization's structure, comprising 4,700 employees
Appoint nine general managers to control the financial services and the motoring association
Fold the life insurance, financial planning, and investment operations into a new financial service division
"The restructuring was done to reduce costs, by merging departments and trimming staff members" (p. 1).
Embracing all of these changes was a desire to institute a continuous attitude of Total Quality Management (TQM.)
Any one of these would pose a challenge for the HR services of a company. All of them combined create a number of critical issues that can be discussed in an analysis of the company's human resources capabilities.
Difference Between Personnel Management and
Today, many large businesses are undergoing fundamental shifts in the environment in which they operate, a shift that challenges key executives to new thinking about business organization. One of the results of this new thinking is that the department once called "personnel" is now usually referred to as "human resources." The name change is more than semantic. It reflects the concept that people, the human capital, are quite important, in fact, essential to any organization.
The key benefit of human resources management is that it greatly enables the concept of "expediting," which is directly responsible for making activities happen more quickly. This happens because strategic human resource management deliberately reduces the...