Human resource management principles and practices

Human Resource Management

Julie Clow's The Work Revolution: Freedom and Excellence for All, begins with an analysis of the traditional methods and ideologies for work within a corporate setting. The author spends the first two chapters of this manuscript recounting the staid, limited roles of managers and workers, emphasizing the conventionality and conformity to which both typically adhere. In many ways, this part of the book is the most insightful, since the author carefully deconstructs why these approaches are no longer applicable for working in the 21st century. However, she contextualizes this information in contrast to what she declares is the Work Revolution Manifesto: a setting in which individual employees are actuated by passion, excellence, success, trust and team victories. By alluding to the manifesto initially, she is then able to elucidate all of the reasons that the conventional methods of working and the environments that sustain them fail to achieve the goals of the manifesto. These failings are evinced in an atmosphere that enforces bureaucracy and procedures as opposed to results, disengagement instead of employee satisfaction, and an ensuing climate of inefficiency.

The rest of the book is dedicated to changing this status quo environment through actively empowering employees to maximize their potential and achieve the best results. To the author's credit, she references a number of competitive organizations at the forefront of this movement, not the least of which include highly eminent websites. Moreover, the author bases part of her reasoning on her own personal experience working at Google, as well as on meticulously conducted research that indicates that "employee engagement is highly correlated with business success, individual achievement, and better health, but only about 30% of employees are truly engaged" (Clow, 2012). Again, the author utilizes the context of the aforementioned manifesto to illustrate how the vast majority of organizations in existence, from large corporate entities to start-ups, can restructure their management policies to increase worker engagement and further success -- which is the author's overarching point of this manuscript.

Clow explicitly creates what she refers to as the new rules with which entities should use for management purposes to achieve the goals of the manifesto. These include fostering and encouraging creativity, utilizing unconventional methods that support individuality instead of conformity, and placing a premium on results instead of on processes. The new rules embrace autonomy and extreme flexibility in terms of scheduling, adopting grassroots approaches to problem solving and organizational governance, as well as creating positions and job responsibilities based on employee's individual strengths and assets. She also advocates companies to focus on specific aspects of their business that they can get right and obtain success in, instead of focusing on more comprehensive agendas that encompass facets in which they need improvement. The result of such a methodology, the author argues, is more personal success and satisfaction for the individual employees, which translates to more collective success and business value for the organization.

The most significant fallacy with Clow's work is her idea that, "rather than using job tasks as a starting point, start with the people" (Clow, 2012, p. 127). This tenet is exceedingly impractical and difficult to implement, because it would essentially require organizations to hire people prior to denoting their objectives and functions. In fact, the designating of job functions and the formulating of job descriptions is counterintuitive to this entire principle of Clow's -- which does not mean that her entire premise about facilitating employee engagement via empowering them to better help achieve the organization's goals is wrong. However, it is worth noting that due to advancements in communication and work processes, it is necessary to base technology as the principle centerpiece of designing job requirements and positions. Technology largely determines how an employee can conduct his or her job with a degree of efficacy. If organizations were to do things Clow's way, they would have to hire people, figure out what they were good at, and then design job functions for them. Instead, organizations need to denote specific business functions, then figure out how people can fulfill them and, finally, hire people with qualifications to do so.