Human Resource Issues In Shell Canada Limited Essay.

Issues Faced by Shell Canada Limited

Question:

Discuss about the human resource issues in Shell Canada Limited.

This report has identified the human resource issues in Shell Canada Limited, which is a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. Shell Canada has been facing issues in managing diversity, employee turnover and employee engagement (Smalley, 2017). These are big challenges for global organizations as the needs of the workforce have rapidly changed. The younger employees belonging to the millennial generation have different expectation from their organization and job profile. These have reduced their length of stay in the organization. Moreover, replacing experience employees with new ones is difficult as it increase the organization cost structure and it would take them more amount of time to cope with their job role and responsibilities.

Diversity management is also an essential need of the Shell as the country is bilingual and workforce is of diverse nature. The young employees in today’s market give more preference to work culture. In order to mitigate these issues the Human resource management department will have to develop training programs to increase employee engagement, manage diversity, provide different skills to the employees so that they can grow both at organizational and personal level.  A survey was conducted within the lower and mid level employees in the organization to identify their varying needs. The result show that age is a crucial factor as employees belonging to different generation have varied needs. Another survey conducted to identify the turnover rate of the organization and diversity issues highlighted that younger employees have less tenure having an average tenure of 3 years where older employees have issues with diversity and cultural factors (Smalley, 2017). Thus, training and development is highly recommended for increasing the effectiveness, employee engagement and productivity.

Shell Canada Limited is one of the subsidiaries of Anglo- Dutch Royal Dutch shell. It belongs to the group of largest integrated oil company in Canada (Shell Canada, 2018). The major business of the organization is dealing with exploration, extraction and production of oil. The company also markets gasoline and other byproducts through its chain of stations in the country. The organization has its headquarters in Calgary, Alberta.

Issues

The main issue the organization has been is dealing with its workforce. The turnover rate of the organization is high and facing diversity management issues. Moreover, the organization is facing issues in using accurate performance management tools for engaging employees into activities so that employees are motivated, productive and stay with the organization. As the turnover rate of Shell Canada Limited is high, the cost structure has increased and diminished their profit margin.

Managing Human Resource Issues

Available solutions

The organization can provide the employees with high compensation package to motivate their employees that are in accordance to Maslow’s theory and ERG theory (Lazaroiu, 2015). However, the needs of the employees vary as different generations have different things to offer to the organization. Therefore, in order to identify the individual needs of the employees it is necessary to build up a training and development program, which will enable the managers to evaluate the individual workforce needs in a better way.

In order manage diversity in a better way; the workforce should be provided with training so that they are aware of the cultural diversity and the ways they can develop bonds with diverse team members. In order to create a diverse environment in the organization they will have to educate the workforce (Harvey & Allard, 2015). Diversity can be obtained by recruiting employees from diverse backgrounds but until and unless there is proper awareness, it will not reflect it on the culture of the organization.

The workforce is looking to grow both personally and professionally so they need to be provided with ample amount of opportunities of developing new skills. The employees will definitely leave an organization after stagnation, as they will find nothing new to learn within the organization.  Performance management deals with performance evaluation and appraisal, which is necessary for continuous improvement of the workforce. However, employee engagement is more essential as it motivates the employees to become more productive.

Constraints

The constraints for developing these training and development programs are low budget and time. In order to decrease the turnover rate it is not feasible to spent large sums of money on training and development, as it will ultimately increase the cost structure.

Training program analyses

In order to accomplish the objectives of the training and development program, the organization will have to develop multiple programs of multiple natures. The first training and development will include employee engagement where the employees will be involved various activities such as corporate social responsibility activities that will provide them with a sense of belong (Kadiresan et al., 2015). This will consist of group activities where the workforce will participate in various activities on weekly basis.

The next program will deal with performance management where the managers will be educated about the different types of performance management tools and how they should be effectively used for improving the performance of the employees (Hey, 2017). The managers should be trained to use the tools in effective ways to identify their gaps in performance so that they can improve.

Objectives of Training Programs

The third program will deal with increasing awareness about diversity, which will consist of interactive sessions. Workplace discrimination is a major problem which most of the organization which will consist of dealing with minorities within the organization. The minorities within the organization will be incorporated within the program including women, as gender equality in a concern in modern global organization setting (Tzabbar, Tzafrir & Baruch, 2017).  In the program, the mid level manager will also participate so that they are able to develop skills of dealing with diverse workforce and identify their varied needs. This program is linked with the performance management program, as knowledge in diversity management is essential for correct evaluation of employee needs and gaps. Thus, the managers will be able to motivate their workforce.

Initially these programs will be launched on a part time basis so that effectiveness of the programs can be examined. The parameters for evaluating the programs will consist of improvement in the productivity of the workforce and conducting personal interview to identify if these programs are assisting them in reaching their personal and organization goals more seamlessly (Clarke & Higgs, 2016). Moreover, there are many employees that retire on regular basis and replacing them, is a big task so interaction between young and old employees will increase sharing of knowledge within the organization.  However, the time schedule of the training programs will have to be monitored so that desired result can be reached within the given point of time. The tasks involved in the training program will be a mixture of cognitive and physical exercises where employees knowledge about the various will increased and skills will be developed by using both interactive sessions such as role plays and theoretical which will define the do’s and don’ts.

Target employee analysis

The majority of the employees are aged above thirty and fewer amounts of employees are young. However, the recent trends show clearly that majority of new employees joining the organization belong to the millennial generation. Therefore, they have different perspective about life so their goals and objectives are quite different from the previous generations. Even though the new generations have developed skills, they lack in experience, which can only be achieved by increasing their interaction with the tenured employees having considerable amount of length of stay.

Table 1: KSAO

(Source: As created by Author)

This KSAO matrix defines the various skills, abilities and personal traits the training program will try to develop within the workforce. However, similarly for mid level manager the performance and diversity management will be essential for improving their skills of understanding the needs of the workforce in a better way.

Learning objectives

The learning objectives of these training programs are as follows:

• To engage the employees of the organization into various activities to increase their sense of belonging
• To develop a diverse culture within the organization so that team bonding can be developed and different can be solved by diverse persons having different skills
• To increase awareness of the employees about workplace bullying, different cultural values and norms so that they can develop a bond within the workforce
• To train managers about diversity management and techniques of identifying the different needs of the employees
• To make managers ware of the different performance management tools and ways to assist the workforce in increasing productivity
• To monitor the overall training programs to understand their effectiveness

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded from the report that Shell Canada limited is facing issues with their turnover rate, diversity management and performance management. The training programs have been customized in such a way that it would suit the current needs of the company. However, all the training programs will be used on a part time basis and monitored to examine the positive impact on the workforce. The success of the programs will determine which should be included into the organizational business model permanently.

References

Clarke, N., & Higgs, M. (2016). How strategic focus relates to the delivery of leadership training and development. Human Resource Management, 55(4), 541-565.

Harvey, C. P., & Allard, M. (2015). Understanding and managing diversity: Readings, cases, and exercises. Pearson.

Hey, R. B. (2017). Performance Management for the Oil, Gas, and Process Industries: A Systems Approach. Gulf Professional Publishing.

Kadiresan, V., Selamat, M. H., Selladurai, S., SPR, C. R., & Mohamed, R. K. M. H. (2015). Performance appraisal and training and development of human resource management practices (HRM) on organizational commitment and turnover intention. Asian Social Science, 11(24), 162.

Lazaroiu, G. (2015). Employee motivation and job performance. Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, 14, 97.

Shell Canada. (2018). Shell Canada. Shell.ca. Retrieved 13 February 2018, from https://www.shell.ca/

Smalley, K. (2017). Top HR challenges of 2017 | Randstad Canada. Randstad.ca. Retrieved 13 February 2018, from https://www.randstad.ca/workforce360-trends/archives/top-hr-challenges-of-2017_601/

Tzabbar, D., Tzafrir, S., & Baruch, Y. (2017). A bridge over troubled water: Replication, integration and extension of the relationship between HRM practices and organizational performance using moderating meta-analysis. Human Resource Management Review, 27(1), 134-148.