Hrm Case Study

Lesson:-11 Tutorial HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Case Study

What`s Next ? As forward-looking CEOs restructure their organization with flatter hierarchies and empower employees to make decisions in a less encumbered organizational setting, new approaches to describing the work of the organization need to be developed. Traditionally, job descriptions have been functional and narrow, discretely detailing the scope and depth of a job and fitting the person to the job rather than the other way around. But the new environment of information-driven work and changing technology dictates that “decisions must be made at the drop of a fax.” To maintain productivity and flexibility, managers depend increasingly on utilizing the com-plex skills of the people they manage; they cannot afford to have them “boxed in” by narrow job descriptions. One organization that is grappling with this situation is the Exploration Division of British Petroleum (BPX), with locations all over the globe. The third-largest oil company in the world, BPX was typical of large-scale organizations in that it had accu-mulated layers of bureaucracy. Career advancement was based on time-in-grade, and career success was equated with man-agement titles. So, to advance to the top levels of the company technical people such as engineers had to move over into management. Expectations of growth were built into the system. Senior management decided that a radical change was needed. What they envisioned was a strategic shift to a more dynamic system that would challenge employees to gain and apply new skills demanded by the changes to the business. But if they abandoned the old job descriptions, what would take their place? Without formal job descriptions, how would people know what their responsibilities were? The answer at BPX was to develop a new framework, a set of skill matrices. “Each skill matrix describes steps in the career ladder-from the lowest level to the highest-along thevertical axis, and describes...