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Question
Explain the view that high performance work practices benefit both employers and employees when they are introduced or enhanced. Illustrate your answer with examples.
Solution
Concept of High Performance Work Practices
According to CIPD (2022), the High Performance Work Practices (HPWP) is identified as a detailed approach prioritising on mental, emotional, and physical health of the employees. Also, the authors of the fact sheet noted that HPWP implementation guide the increase in scope of resilience, successful employees engagement, reduced sickness absenteeism, improved performance levels and overall performance. As a best practice of the people practice professionals, CIPD (2022a) argue that the best practice is achieved by HPWP integrating purpose in championing of better working lives. Hence, collaboratively, HPWP has a direct implication in benefiting people, employers, economy and community development. According to Hauff et al. (2022) the gain of this entail creating a business environment which promote a state of being contented and benefiting all stakeholders in an organisation. For example, considering operations of Riyad Bank in KSA banking sector, after COVID-19 pandemic, different HPWP strategies were pursued. This contributed to reduction of the employees absenteeism, burnouts or stress levels and commitment scope in their allocated job functions. While providing appropriate examples of employees wellbeing approaches, CIPD (2023) identified employees assistance programs, mental health first aid capacity development, wellbeing championing and flexible working strategy. For the disadvantages, HPWS is majorly linked with a leverage on competitive advantages in organisations, hence neglecting individual employees. The outcome of this is increase in overload, burnouts and increased pressure to individual employees.
HPWP Introduced/Enhanced benefit to employers and employees
As earlier noted, there is no one-size-fits-all approach used to design health and wellbeing approaches. The contents and preferred approaches ought to be influenced by unique demands and characteristics of the organisations and their employees.
In order to understand the impact of HPWP to employers and employees, the approaches which can be put into account include;
Flexible Working Hours
The flexible working hours is defined in CIPD (2023a) as offering a flexible arrangement over where, when and hours of working by employees. As a strategy of employees wellbeing, this approach is used I managing the stress of the employees by offering them with an increased control over scheduling of their operations. For instance, in Riyad Bank, flexible working hours improve overall productivity, a smaller number of sick days off and increased loyalty and dedication of employees to their employers. In CIPD (2022b) report, it hypothesise that higher than half of the respondents at 51% had noted that flexible working plans is core in their operations and projected to grow going into the future.
For the employees, through flexible working as a strategy of HPWP, Silva (2022) note that flexible working represent a strategy of empowering employees interested with having substantial control over their working schedules. For example, in Riyad Bank, with the organisation increasingly targeting to venture international market, high-performing and flexible culture standing out amongst their competitors is instrumental. The rationale of this is that the most qualified professionals expect to work for the leading organisations. For example, for top organisations such as Microsoft, they enhance their employees engagement and efficient workforce investing in their goals and journey. The outcome of this in such an organisation is PerformYard (2024) ranking it as a high performing organisation than their competitors with an upward of 500 employees.
Considering the employers, flexible working as an approach of HPWP has a direct implication in improving the overall productivity, reducing absenteeism and turnover. Further, the employees morale and job satisfaction is enhanced translating to an increased commitment and readiness in execution of their functions. Further, this provide an opportunity for allowing an appropriate utilisation of resources and reductio of overhead costs for the employers. The rationale of this is informed by SHRM (2023) report which note that 81% of all employees are increasingly loyal to employees when they are offered with flexible working opportunities. The overhead costs are reduced as employers implement strategies such as shifting their work roles, on-call work, compressed working hours and hours averaging schemes (ILO, 2023).
For the negatives, as evidenced in Guardian (2023), through an implementation of flexible working arrangement, collaboration and missed opportunities would be evident hence reducing creativity and capacity to execute their functions as it was advertised. Some employees do not value flexible working more than even the pay which is offered to them. In an organisation such as Riyad Bank market dominance in the banking sector, flexible working would potentially negatively impact customers satisfaction.
Employee Assistance Programs….
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