An introduction to Group Perspective on Work and Hiring Process
Looking towards work from the perspective of employee groups, we see that teamwork is necessary for organizations that are generally without boundaries and are overall quite uniform. Teams are basically what we can consider the building blocks of organizational structures.
We can describe a team as selected and usually a small number of people who possess complementary skills that work together to achieve mutual goals for which all of them are equally responsible. The size of a team can vary from as small as five to as many as twenty. The higher range tends to be comprised of virtual teams that are basically collaborations on a big project where the members coordinate over the internet. Most teams have less than ten members with the ideal team having around five to six members. While work-groups tend to rely on a supervisor for direction, a team depends on its own members to lead and provide direction. You can also organize a team in the form of a department. The can be teams for sales, a manufacturing team, and a product development team. There are many types of teams that are being used by organizations nowadays. One of the most popular ones is known as the self-managed team.
Self-managed teams are being used by firms mainly to improve the quality and productivity of work while also reducing the costs of operating. Self-managed teams are responsible for producing an entire product, unit or an ongoing service. Usually, members of a self-managed team are inter-trained on the varying tasks that will be assigned to them once they are part of the team. Self-managed teams can also have members that have a complex skill set such as scientists with training in unique sectors. Managerial duties are a major part of self-managed teams, and they have tasks such as scheduling work times, the methods that will be implemented during work, getting a hold of materials, assessing the member’s performance and handling the members of the team.
When self-managed teams are established, human resource practices are inevitable to change in several ways. Firstly, instead of a supervisor, the peers of the group will be evaluating the performance of the members individually. Payments will probably go from being based on how senior the member is or the individual performance to the overall performance shown by the team. Instead of being exclusively based on feedback from the HR staff and company managers, decisions regarding new employees may consist of a substantial amount of input from the members of the team. Shared leadership etiquette will be adopted where the members of the team take turns being the leader of the team depending on the work being carried out, this is a trait of most self-managed teams with high performance. Shared leadership is often implemented when the teams are dealing with knowledge.
Companies have received significant contributions from using self-managed teams. While the members of a team usually do not have the skills required for adequate functioning of the team, within some years a self-managed team has the potential to develop into a fully functional group. A company can speed up this process by training the employees in the skills that are required of them, such as technical, administrative and interpersonal.
The Hiring Process
Once the staffing requirements of an organization have been decided, it has to hire the best possible employees so that the available positions can be filled. The hiring process is broadly divided into three parts: recruiting, selecting and socializing.
Recruitment refers to the process of producing a group of candidates that are qualified for a certain position. This starts with the company making an announcement both within and outside the organization regarding the job’s availability in the market.
Selection is the process of deciding whether to hire or not hire each applicant. During this process, the characteristics required to perform a job effectively are defined and then the existing pool of applicants is measured based on those characteristics. The managers then take into consideration the applicant’s scores on different tests, the impressions they have left in interviews and decide who they will offer the job to. Cut scores are the key part of the selection process and if an applicant has a score below them then they are no accepted. However, the staffing process is not and shouldn’t be complete when applicants are hired or promoted.
Socialization is a process that helps to orient new employees to the firm and the unit they have gotten a job in. This process helps an employee avoid the feeling of being an outsider in the organization and makes them feel as if they part of the team.
Challenges
Based on estimation, it is known that workers that are above average have a worth of around forty percent of their salary, which is more than what is received from employees that are average. For example, if an above-average employee is hired in a sales position with a salary of around $50,000, then their worth to the organization would be $20,000 more than what they would gain from an average employee that worked in the same position. In a decade, this exceptional worker’s additional benefit to the firm would be almost $200,000. Multiplying this supposed extra value across around twenty or fifty employees, one would conclude that the monetary value of recruiting employees that are above average reaches a total amount worth millions of dollars.
Bad decisions regarding recruitment have a tendency to create issues from the very first day. Workers that aren’t qualified or lack motivation will be likely to need focused supervision and an ample amount of direction. Even after extra training, it is possible that they might never be up to the performance level that is required in order to carry out the job tasks. There is also a risk of them giving out incorrect information to customers or even give customers a reason to choose to opt for a competitor instead. Employee turnover is also a result of bad hiring decisions. This is generally a great loss to the company as the average employee turnover costs around twenty-five percent of the annual salary plus benefits of the employee that has left the organization.