Management and human resources development

Managers perform various functions, but one of the most important and least understood aspects of their job is proper utilization of people. Research reveals that worker performance is closely related to motivation; thus keeping employees motivated is an essential component of good management. In a business context, motivation refer to the stimulus that direct the behavior of workers toward the company goals. In order to motivate workers to achieve company goals, managers must be aware of their needs.

Many managers believe workers will be motivated to achieve organizational goals by satisfying their fundamental need for material survival. These needs include a good salary, safe working conditions, and job security. While absence of these factors results in poor moral and dissatisfaction, studies have shown that their presence results only in maintenance of existing attitudes and work performance. Although important, salary working conditions, and job security don’t provide the primary motivation for many workers in highly industrialized societies, especially at the professional or technical levels.

Increased motivation is more likely to occur when work meets the needs of individuals for learning, self realization, and personal growth. By responding to personal needs – the desire for responsibility, recognition, growth, promotion, and more interesting work – managers have altered condition in the workplace and consequently, many employees are motivated to perform more effectively.

In an attempt to both the fundamental or personal needs of workers, innovative management approaches, such as job enrichment and job enlargement, have been adopted in many organizations. Job enrichment gives workers authority in making decision related to planning and doing their work. A worker might assume responsibility for scheduling work-flow, checking quality of work produced, or making sure deadlines are met. Job enlargement increases the number of tasks workers perform by allowing them to rotate positions or by giving them responsibility for doing several job. Rather than assembling just the component of a automobile, factory workers might be grouped together and given responsibility for assembling the entire fuel system.

By improving the quality of work life through satisfaction of fundamental and personal employee needs, managers attempt to direct the behaviour of toward the company goal.

Managing Productivity

Productivity has become a day-to-day concern for managers because productivity indicates the overall efficiency of their firms. The unit of output can be anything:

• money

• units of products

• customers served

• whatever is meaningful to the organization

What managers attempt to do is to produce more output with less input. It means making more from what you have and working smarter rather than harder.

Today’s work force devotes only 40 hours to manufacturing. The other 60 hours go to completing forms, filing reports, processing payrolls and exchanging information, etc. Managers today must make some important choices. On the one hand, they are faced with bad news about foreign competition, increased costs of energy and raw materials, increasing government regulation and the changing nature of the labour force. On the other hand, technology and capital investment are not always the optimal solution to productivity problems. This means that better management may be the key to improved productivity.

The One-Minute Manager was written by Kenneth Blanchard, a professor of management at the University of Massachusetts, and the internationally known management consultant, which co-author Spencer Johnson, a medical doctor and the author of dozens of books in medicine and psychology. In the firs six months, more than half a million copies were sold.

The purpose of this book is to propose a new management style that consists of three steps, each of which takes one minute to perform. The first step is one-minute goal setting, each in which manager and employee agree on goals and transfer them to written form. Each goal is to be written in 250 words or less on one piece of paper so that it can be read in one minute. The second step is one-minute praising in which the manager congratulates the employee for a job well-done, tells him or her specifically what was good about performance and what it means for the organization. After that a handshake and some encouragement bring the one-minute praising to a conclusion. The third step is a one-minute reprimand in which the manager tells the employee specifically what was wrong with performance and how he or she fells about it, taking care to separate the value of the employee from the one mistake that instigated the criticism.