Introduction

Functions of Human Resource Management in Sainsbury’s will be analysed in this report, including the mission and vision of the company. A  HR department of any organization is significant to a personnel-oriented, inventive workplace in which employees are busy. So, it has to turn out to be a challenge for the business to keep its workers by satisfying their requirements. Through Sainsbury’s human resources management, the responsibility and tasks of human resource management in the radiance of Sainsbury’s business operations will be analyzed. This Sainsbury’s human resources management will hub on the role of HRM in staffing, selection and employee planning. This assignment will give a clear knowledge about the motivation and span of human resource management. There will also be a discussion regarding the effectiveness of HR at Sainsbury’s. The impact of it on employees and the organization will also be presented through the assignment.

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Introducing Sainsbury’s

Sainsbury’s is one of the key chains of supermarkets in the UK, and it has about 16% section of the supermarket industry. It was created in 1869 in London; the company became the largest retailer of groceries. Tesco overtook Sainsbury’s, intending to be the market head in 1995. Later than some time, Asda demoted Sainsbury’s to the third leave for a lot of the subsequent during 2014, then Sainsbury’s gained the preceding place. 

The vision of Sainsbury’s

To become the main valued and trusted business retailer. Therefore, the public can feel love for jobs and stores. It is completed by putting customers in the middle of the whole thing to accomplish and make an investment in it and by presenting the finest capable shopping sentiment.

Mission & Objectives of Sainsbury’s

• To give an enormous service.
• More closer to deliver
• Deal out an ever-improving advantage shopping acquaintance
• Enormous goods at sensible prices
• To turn out to be the consumer’s first choice

Functions of HRM in workforce management

The functions of Sainsbury’s HRM are separated into managerial and operational functions. The managerial functions include planning, organizing, directing and controlling, which are common in every discussion. But, the operative functions are:

Procurement: At Sainsbury’s, the personnel have to find the correct candidates from the activity and put them in the exact job to fill up the job. The procurement purpose consists of – human resource planning, selection and recruitment, training and job placement and promotion. In this section, the HRM makes the job functions of the workforce be planned according to the organizational functions (DeCenzo and others, 2016).

Development: like the retail division is continually developing, the staffs of Sainsbury’s have to be skilled and knowledgeable about the changes and latest technologies so that they are practised their job. Thus, it is the liability of the HR workers to teach the employees, plan performance appraisal methods and assists them in livelihood planning with the intention that they feel encouraged.

Compensation: The main motivational instrument for each employee is monetary rewards and settlement. So, at Sainsbury’s, the human resource management tactics the employment design of the workforce and plans a salary arrangement after negotiating with the workforce. Distant from the salary, the workforce also obtainable financial and non-financial incentives for their labour, therefore motivating the employees to perform superior. Compensation as well consists of the payment structure of the labour force.

Integration and Safeguarding: The major function of the human resource department is to inspire the workforce and make sure that their wants and well-being are being met foremost to soaring pleasure and preservation levels. So, the HRM function consists of the integration of some policies with the work role of the workforce to offer a favourable work environment. Furthermore, the HRM wants to uphold the modesty of the business by making sure a strong progression of joint bargaining exists among the workforce and the company.

Staffing- Sainsbury’s can grow to be extra efficient when they obtain competent persons, who are selected for a specific position together with the apt timing. It would generate an organization to achieve its aspire. The business attains such qualified staff an instance when Human Resource Department generates effectual recruitment purposes (Lussier and Hendon, 2019).

Purposes of Sainsbury’s Human Resource Management

There are various purposes for Sainsbury’s HRM.

Make proper utilization of available resources: it is important to make sure that personnel is using the available and important resources of Sainsbury’s properly.

Support organizational culture: It is the responsibility of the workforce to be present in the current culture of the organization and uphold the culture of Sainsbury’s appropriately.

Recruitment: recruit suitable candidates to make proper use of resources and increase productivity.

Comply with government rules and policies: formulate the business to value its tasks toward personnel depending on the circumstances in which they work.

Develop resources: It is necessary to make sure that personnel is equipped for the then object.

Join the workforce: it is obligatory to be established that the workforce work at its full excellence.

Those make the organization more strong and more focused on achieving success and accuracy.

Strengths and weaknesses of recruiting and selecting approaches

The two diverse approaches to recruitment and selection in this Sainsbury’s human resources management are the internal approach and the external approach.

Internal Recruitment:

From the perspective of internal recruitment, the workforce, which is a fraction of the accessible workforce, is recognized and shifted to fill up the positions. The kinds of internal recruitment and selection are – promotions, transfers, referrals and transformation of the nature of service (DeCenzo and others, 2016).

The strengths and weaknesses of internal recruitment and selection

Strengths	Weaknesses
The workforce is attentive to the organizational culture. Effective and time-effective procedure.Motivational tool.Less cost of training and development.High retention.	To fill another place, it vacates individual posts in the organization. Scarcity of talented people and the latest ideas.Presence of business.

External Recruitment:

The external method of recruitment and selection is distinct as the way of maintaining the exact employee for the precise job at the correct time from the group of applications expected from the applicants, not the division of the obtainable workforce. The ways of external recruitment are – direct recruitment, media advertisement, campus residency, and employment discussion.

The strengths and weaknesses of external recruitment and selection

Strengths	Weaknesses
The huge number of innovations with new talent diversity of options Huge network in the marketplace assists the industry by developing job opportunity	Lengthy and costly process lack of adjustment for new employees

Benefits of HRM practices in Sainsbury’s

Human resource practices can give a settlement to the workforce and the business.  Some of the most excellent practices of HRM are:

• Efficient team management- it is identified that combined effort is necessary for assembling goals. High-performance folks are essential for Sainsbury’s at what time it is available to gain achievement (Berman et al., 2019). Group works offer value as they include the public, who are and judge differently but are administration towards a recognizable goal. Therefore, a variety of ideas are shaped to help reach the goal.
• Reward or compensation- Originally, if one recruits faithful people, one wishes to compensate them more than average. The community will place almost all value on the organization. As a result, one wishes to grasp them and spend them somewhat. This is a fact that manages how unrelated top practices toil jointly to tender added value than they would independently. Providing the populace over the average, too, has many likely disadvantages (Lussier and Hendon, 2019).
• Security to the workforce- there are more than a few customs to make certain the security of the workforce. Consequently, the workforce can get the advantage of having a secure and healthy place of work. At what time is once-over security at risk, for example, when there is an improvement or shelve, this will correct away wave all through the organization. Service security as well as repays organizations as it helps them to maintain their public. Whereas the workforce is jobless, for example, it’s, on average, the organization that gives the value.
• Cautious hiring: The then HR’s main excellent observation is cautious hiring. This creates an organization to obtain in the workforce who place value. Hiring the right people is, after that, a key to making a competitive advantage. In this developed world, there are a lot of unlike recruitment mechanisms that one can utilize to generate a precise selection.

Contribution of HRM practices in terms of profit and productivity

Effective HRM practices play a significant role in right orient employees and engaging them in productive activities, which leads to organizational performance (Noe et al., 2017). In the below section, the effectiveness of HRM practices, as mentioned in the previous section, in increasing organizational profit and productivity is evaluated.

Efficient team management optimizes resource utilization & productivity: DeCenzo, Robbins, & Verhulst (2016) revealed that teamwork could play an important role in any organization to make a combined effort among employees to achieve organizational objectives. HR makes the best effort to encourage team management and team engagement, and the such result helps an organization such as Sainsbury’s to make the best utilization of resources. The best utilization of resources becomes possible because efficient team management makes excellent levels of collaboration, cooperation, information sharing, transparent and open communication, and constructive feedback. All of these impacts of team management help Sainsbury’s to make the best use of resources; as a result, the company results in good productivity.

Good Reward and compensation system retains talented employees: Another important impact of the HR practice of a good reward and compensation system is that it retains talented employees by making them motivated and encouraged (Bratton & Gold, 2017). When employees of Sainsbury’s are rewarded highly, provided with good compensation for their services, and treated fairly in the workplace, all these play a vital role in creating a good impression about the employees at the perception of employees. Such a positive attitude towards the company encourages the employees to stay at Sainsbury’s for a longer periods. Mello (2014) revealed that retained employees tend to be more effective and productive in the workplace than newly joined workforce because retained employees know the business, work process and policies. Thus, they can play an important role in enhancing the achievement of business objectives.

A secured workplace ensures confidence and attention to work: HR also assures that a workplace is secure and safe to work. Marchington et al. (2016) found that a secure workplace makes employees confident to work and such a work environment helps them to pay full attention to details and work. This is a great benefit for Sainsbury’s through effective implementation of this HR practice at the workplace. Employees will work fearlessly in such a safe work environment, and they can go into detail about their work. As a result, they can achieve better results and achieve the organizational objective by maximizing productivity and profitability.

Right-fit people arranged by HR are the most valuable resource for a company: Armstrong and Taylor (2020) found that right-fit people are the most important asset for any company, and such right-fit people can only be arranged by HR’s initiatives. It helps Sainsbury’s to get the right people who can make a great contribution to the organization through understanding the business objectives.

The importance of employee relations in HRM decision making

Employee relations refer to the relationship between employees and the organization and its owners (Morgeson et al., 2019). As the definition implies, employee relations have become very much important in the business world today because employee relations determine employee performance, a collaboration between employees and owners, transparent communication, implementation of organizational objectives etc. In fact, the importance of employee relations is on the rise worldwide because people are more concerned about meeting business needs by making employees satisfied (Amberg and McGaughey, 2019). The above analysis clearly shows that employee relations play great role in Sainsbury’s to make good collaboration and understanding between employees and the company as an entity of ownership and decision maker.

Friendly employee relation encourages employee engagement and gratification: A collaborative employee relationship helps a company to set a congenial, fruitful, transparent relationship among employees and between employees and the company as an entity (Renwick, Redman, & Maguire, 2013). It becomes possible because all employees extend their help to collaborate with each other. It highly supports HR decision-making in terms of programs such as employee engagement plans, promotional plans, training programs and mentoring programs. Such development programs helps the employees to enhance employee engagement through employee gratification.

Employee relations diminishes conflicts: Another significant benefit of employee relations is that it diminishes conflicts among employees by creating a congenial relationship with each other (Sparrow, Brewster, & Chung, 2016). Such a relationship is possible because employee relations is based on the principles of collaboration, mutual understanding and cooperation. Such cooperative working culture is very much beneficial for the HRM operating at any organization, including Sainsbury’s. It helps the organization to make decisions in regards to employee management because of good mutual understanding among them.

Provides a productive work environment: Budhwar, & Debrah (2013) found that good employee relation helps a company to establish a productive work environment and helps the HR of the company in making the workforce productive. The underlying principles of employee relations help Sainsbury’s HR to make the work environment productive by encouraging the employees to share information among themselves, being transparent in communication etc. All these make the work environment productive and help HR make a further development plan for employees to better achieve organizational objectives.

Main elements of employment legislation and its impact on HRM

There are numerous regulations and acts regarding the workforce of an organization. The government of a definite country passes those regulations and practices to protect the workforce under any type of situation within the business (Jerez-Gómez et al., 2019). The organizations conducting business in the control of the UK need to follow these collections of rules and policies to achieve effectiveness by their business management. The output of these systems mandate the decision-making course of HRM has been discussed in the part below:

1974 Health and Safety at Work Act:

The organization is accountable for the security and health of the workforce within the organization. They have to set up safety protocols and necessities for making sure the safety of the persons working inside the organization.

1991 Anti-Discrimination Act:

It is in the motive of promoting identical opportunities for all individuals inside the business by preventing them from uneven discrimination in exact doing areas and from matters of sexual harassment and other offensive areas. These assist the workforce in feeling safe inside the organizational grounds.  

1998 Human Rights Act:

This act compels organizations such as Sainsbury to give equal and flaxen opportunities to their workforce lacking given any other issue than their place within the organization. The workers are ensured of the career opportunities, prospects, and significance within the organization (Lussier and Hendon, 2019).

2010 Equality Act:

This prevents Sainsbury from differentiating amid the workforce and signifying partial behaviour to chosen employees. All of the staff requires to be treated evenly under professional relationships.

Application of HR practices

Selected job post:

Personal specification for the position of the job post:

A suitable candidate should feature with below qualities to be eligible to be called for an interview:

Firstly, a suitable candidate should be used to working in a highly dynamic business environment where business scenarios change frequently.

Secondly, an ideal candidate should be adept at using a large set of data and their complex interrelation.

Thirdly, a suitable candidate should be capable of turning vague problems into interesting questions so that he can clearly articulate the needs and preferences of consumers.

Fourthly, a good candidate should be able to collect consumer purchasing behaviour and the strategies are taken by the competitors to suggest the best scenario and suggestions to the company.

Fifthly, the candidate should be able to articulate and present complex information and data in a well-understandable manner so that people with no IT knowledge understand the information and message.

Finally, a suitable candidate should have good communication skills, and excellent presentation capabilities.

A selected resume:

Evaluation of the resume based on the job specification:

The presented CV belongs to Nick Freundel, who graduated in Economics and Marketing. The educational background meets the basic requirement of the job post because the job is about digital marketing. The candidate has experience in managing advertisement and promotional strategies of a range of digital marketing channels, and he also knows about the relative effectiveness of certain channels. He also has good experience in making email and other digital forms of marketing. The candidate also has expertise in making monthly reports of pro-activities.

However, none of the areas of experience or expertise closely covers any of the job requirements as mentioned in the above personal specification of a suitable candidate. The job advertisement requires someone who is good at the analytics of big data derived from social media channels about consumer and competition behaviour. In contrast, this candidate has experience in maintaining and managing social media platforms to promote the business of his company. Therefore, this Nick is not suitable for this job.  

Competency questions to be asked in the interview:

Some possible questions that can be asked in the interview for the jobs mentioned in appendix 1:

Question 1: Please explain what qualities you have had related to this job to make you a suitable candidate to select

Question 2: Please explain some of your weaknesses in managing a large volume of data on a database

Question 3: Can you please tell us your strength in regard to managing big data, data analytics, and retrieving information from data to make decisions?

Question 4: What are the biggest obstacles in converting a data or complex relationship into an easy term,s even for non-IT people?

Conclusion

It focuses on dissimilar HR practices and explains the significance of those practices in an executive context. The influence of those over Sainsbury’s has been affirmed.  Diverse legislation and maintaining high-quality employee connection is significant to maintain in the case of Sainsbury’s. The reimbursement of human resource practices depends on both the employer and the employee has been indicated too. Sainsbury’s human resources management is also focused on the significance of employee relations and requires to adhere to the chief employment acts and laws.

References:

Amberg, J.J. and McGaughey, S.L., 2019. Strategic human resource management and inertia in the corporate entrepreneurship of a multinational enterprise. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 30(5), pp.759-793.

Armstrong, M. and Taylor, S., 2020. Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers.

Bratton, J., & Gold, J. (2017). Human resource management: theory and practice. Palgrave.

Sparrow, P., Brewster, C., & Chung, C. (2016). Globalizing human resource management. Routledge.

Sainsbury’s, (2020). Insight Executive – Digital. Retrieved from: https://sainsburys.jobs/search-apply/insight-executive-digital-455773/ [Assessed on 18 August 2020]