Managing the Flexible Workforce

Managing the Flexible Workforce

Introduction

Managing diversity seeks to build on many of the good initiatives undertaken under the banner of equal opportunities. However, the concept goes beyond equality of opportunity on the basis of ethnic origin and gender and considers other issues such as age, personal work preferences and personal and corporate background. Adopting a strategy of managing diversity means actively considering each employee as heterogeneous, rather than the traditional methods based around homogeneity. While this is a more labour-intensive approach than current ways of managing staff, it can, if properly considered, lead to a more motivated workforce which is more likely to stay with the organization.

The advantages of flexible working are often seen from the employee's point of view, but a flexible working strategy can also bring about substantial savings on accommodation bills and increased productivity for the business - provided it is implemented properly. The term "flexible working" broadly means allowing employees some freedom in either choosing the times they work, or the place they work in. A flexible working implementation that doesn't involve rethinking the business's approach to issues such as training, promotion and communication, however, is unlikely to be successful.

Problem

Flexible firms (with regard to human resources) are organizations that use their workforce with the aim of meeting industry demands — seasonal and other. The flexible firm was a concept first developed by Atkinson (2005) with the central concept being efficiency in the management of the workforce and being adaptive to ensure organization longevity (Volberda, 2009). This may include numeric flexibility, i.e. the ability to increase or decrease the workforce when required; functional flexibility, i.e. training the workforce to undertake multiple tasks; or outsourcing sections of the workforce, i.e. skills found and engaged from outside the organization to maximize the benefits of numeric and functional flexibility. Although all of these practices have advantages and disadvantages, they may not all be present in an organization at the same time.

The shamrock organization holistically brings together much of the flexible working organization. Generally it involves three three leaves: a central core that can include permanent, full-time critical employees; temporary hires, being part-time hires who are added and deleted as needed, allowing for numeric flexibility, and independent contractors, who are engaged to perform (specialist) key jobs and services as needed and can be thought of as outsourced labor (Handy, 2000). Most hospitality organizations could be described as operating within a shamrock frame at differing times and to differing degrees.

Numeric flexibility is possibly the most focused aspect of human resource management. It forms part of the flexible firm and is achieved in a hospitality organization by the use of the contingent workforce — staff engaged on an 'as-needed basis' — therefore the number of employees varies (is flexible). The ability to use this workforce allows an organization to manage/cope with seasonal business trends, e.g. summer resorts increasing numbers in summer and decreasing in winter or vice versa. There are reported issues that a high use of contingent labor can ...