UNIT IV
Employee Welfare
Health and safety is of utmost importance to employees and to the organisation. Healthy employees ensure proper functioning of the organisation. When an organisation fulfills the health and safety needs of employees; it creates a sense of physical, mental, social and economic well-being of employees.
Organisations must adopt health and safety measures so as to ensure its efficient functioning. The following are some of the health and safety measures to be adopted by organisations:
1. Fire Protection: For protection against fire, the factory building should be fire proof. Fire alarms and fire extinguishers should be installed at the right places. Proper instruction manual should be prepared to create awareness regarding safety against fire.
Regular fire drills should be held, so that, in case of emergency every person in the factory must know what to do. Special exits and stairs should be provided to overcome the physical harm to the employees in the event of fire taking place.
2. Protective Clothing and Safety Gears: Protective clothing should be supplied to the workers to make them comfortable and to avoid accidents. The type of clothing
at the work place differs from industry to industry.
The employees must be provided with safety gears which include safety eye-wear, hand gloves, safety boots, face shields, helmets, etc. The safety gears help to minimize physical harm to the workers, and also reduce accidents at the work place.
3. Placement of Machines:
Accidents may take place due to over-crowding of machines and equipment at the work place. Therefore, there should be fairly safe distance between two machines. Also, there must be proper gangway so that the workers can easily move during the working hours.
4. Maintenance of Safety Devices and Machines: The safety devices should be checked from time to time. Any defect in safety devices should be removed before the actual failure. This will help in avoiding accidents.
The machines must also be maintained properly on a regular basis. This will help to reduce the down-time of machines, and as a result there will be smooth flow of production. Also, the cost of repairing the machines can be greatly reduced. Apart from maintenance of safety devices and machines, the management must also undertake proper maintenance of buildings, so as to avert building collapse; thereby saving life of the employees and the assets of the organisation.
5. Lighting and Ventilation:
Bad lighting can cause accidents and affect the performance of Workers. Therefore, the lighting systems in the factory should be carefully designed. Poor lighting or dim lights may adversely affect the workers, which may lead to accidents.
Apart from lighting, the work place must be properly ventilated so as to maintain good temperature and also to ensure proper flow of fresh air so that the working becomes more effective.
Good ventilation will result in the supply of constant fresh air and maintain even and bearable temperature in the workshops.
Artificial cooling of hot air especially during summer may be provided so as to provide comfort to the workers. If possible, the organisation may provide air-conditioning environment at the work place.
Other than lighting and ventilations, every organisation must ensure other working conditions which include:
•Hygienic sanitation facilities.
•Protection from noise, dirt and dust pollution.
•Disposal of all types of waste, especially toxic waste.
•Good decor and furnishings to enhance mental health of employees.
6. Safety Education and Training:
There should be proper training to the employees in respect of health and safety. Quite often accidents take place in the factory due to lack of training in respect of health and safety. There is a need to provide training to the employees in respect of handling the equipments and materials, and to use safety devices. Employees should be trained not only to prevent the accidents, but also to minimise the damage in the event an accident takes place.
7. Safety Engineering:
The organisation should adopt proper safety engineering. The main aspects of safety engineering include:
•Fencing of dangerous machines.
•Proper handling and flow of materials.
•Ergonomics - the science to improve man-machine environment.
•Good Housekeeping- sate passages, proper storage of tools, proper flooring, etc.
•Proper maintenance of plant and equipment.
Welfare facilities are vital in maintaining high motivational levels at the work place. It includes anything that is done for the comfort and improvement of employees and is provided over and above the salaries wages.
The Factories Act, 1948 states "Labour Welfare' refers to the facilities provided to workers in and outside the factory premises such as canteens, rest and recreation facilities, housing and all other services that contribute to the wellbeing of workers."
The principal Act to provide for various labour welfare measures in India is the Factories Act, 1948. The Act applies to all establishments employing 10 or more workers where power is used and 20 or more workers where power is not used, and where a manufacturing process is being carried on.
ILO states "workers' welfare may be understood to mean such services, facilities and amenities which may be established in or in the vicinity of undertakings to enable the persons employed in them to perform their work in healthy and peaceful surroundings and to avail of facilities which improve their health and high morale." Labour Investigation Committee states that "Labour Welfare is anything done for the intellectual, physical, moral and economic betterment of the workers, whether by the employers, by the government or by other agencies over and above what is laid down by law or what is normally expected on the part of the contractual benefits for which worker may have bargained."
Employees Welfare Measures:
The employee welfare schemes can be classified into two categories viz. statutory and non-statutory welfare schemes. The statutory schemes are those schemes that are compulsory to provide by an organization as per the laws governing employee health and safety. These include provisions provided in Industrial Acts like Factories Act 1948, Dock Workers Act (safety, health and welfare) 1986, Mines Act 1962. The non-statutory schemes differ from organization to organization and from industry to industry.
I. STATUTORY WELFARE SCHEMES
The statutory welfare schemes include the following provisions:
1. Drinking Water: At all the working places hygienic drinking water should be provided. Nowadays, organisations have installed hygienic water coolers to provide safe drinking water to the employees.
2. Facilities for Sitting: In every organization, especially factories, suitable seating arrangements are to be provided. The facility for sitting enables employees to rest during rest breaks.
3. First Aid Appliances: First aid appliances are to be provided or installed within the premises. The first aid appliances or medicines should be readily assessable in the case of any minor accident or physical hurt to an employee.
4. Latrines and Urinals: A sufficient number of latrines and urinals are to be provided in the office and factory premises. The latrines and urinals are to be maintained in hygienic condition.
5. Canteen Facilities: Cafeteria or canteens are to be provided by the employer so as to provide hygienic and nutritious food to the employees. It is compulsory to provide canteen facilities in factories or companies, which employs 250 or more workers. Generally, the employees are provided with subsidized food.
6. Spittoons: In every work place, such as warehouses, store places, in the dock area and office premises spittoons are to be provided in convenient places. The spittoons are to be maintained in a hygienic condition.
7. Lighting and Ventilations: Proper and sufficient lights are to be provided for employees so that they can work safely especially during the night shifts. Also, organisations are provided the employees with good ventilations, and air conditioning facilities, if viable for the employer.
II. NON STATUTORY SCHEMES
1. Medi-claim Insurance Scheme: This insurance scheme provides adequate insurance coverage of employees for expenses related to hospitalization due to illness, disease of injury or pregnancy. Nowadays, organisations obtain group insurance policies for the benefit of the employees.
2. Educational Facilities: Organisations may educational facilities to their workers. Some organisations set up schools for the benefit of the children of the employees and also for the employees to learn during the evening timings. Improved literacy of the employees may help them to improve their efficiency at the work place.
3. Housing Facilities: Some large organisations provide housing facilities to the employees. Employees residing far away from the work place may have difficulty in reaching the work place on time, and also they get tired in travelling. Therefore, it would be advisable to provide hygienic housing facilities nearby the work place, which will enable the employees to improve the productivity at the work place. It would also reduce absenteeism.
4. Transportation Facilities: Where the workers live far away from working sites and ordinary means of transport are not available at cheap rates, the employers should provide bus to carry the workers, who have to walk for long distance or use expensive transport facilities in order to reach their factory.
5. Recreation Facilities: Games and sports ensure robust health and bonding among the workers. Provision of indoor game can be enjoyed by the workers during mid-day intervals Superiors can also play indoor games with the subordinates This will help to develop a good rapport between the superiors and subordinates. Companies may also set up wellness centres for the benefit of its employees. The wellness centres may have a gym and other facilities. "
6. Medical Facilities: Good health of workers would mean better output and more profits for the employer. It is, therefore considered as the responsibility of the employer both from business and humanitarian point of view.
Free medical aid should be provided to the sick workers. It would be desirable on the part of large organisations to maintain a hospital with a few beds in the charge of a fully qualified medical officer and nurses. Alternately, the organisation can tie-up with a local hospital for the benefit of its sick workers.
HRM and IT
Significance of using technology in HRM
These days, all types of organizations are making use of innovation in their HR administrations. HR and technology must be integrated. In the present day, organizations are forced to be digital in practically every business area. E-HR enables data accessibility to directors and representatives at anytime and anyplace. Right now, an e-HR framework may incorporate enterprise asset arranging programming (ERP), HR benefit focuses, interactive voice reactions, director and employee entryways and web applications. An advanced e-HR framework permits us to analyze the data and decide, direct investigations, to communicate with others (without counseling the HR office).
Scope of IT in HRM
1. Human Resource Planning: With the help of innovation construct databases, voluminous information about the employees can be stored, which not just aides in distinguishing the involved and vacant positions, additionally it also helps determining if the individual is the best fit or not.
2. Administration: All the basic data identified with the workforce, like their name, address, email, contact no., capability, compensation benefits, encounter, date of passage in organizations, employment status (contract, perpetual, full-time, low maintenance, and so on), are incorporated in a database that can be recovered at any time.
3. Recruitment: The web has brought on the biggest change to the enrollment procedure in the previous decade, as it connects the companies and the job seekers.
4. Training and Development: E-learning is a progressive approach to enable the workforce to keep pace with a quickly evolving market. By connecting the evaluation process to the HR database, the e-learning framework can be used effectively.
5. Compensation and Benefits: The e-pay bundles offer straightforward, simple, precise and assessable data on the compensation structure of the employees.
Opportunities for implementing IT with HR function
1. Competitive Advantage: Giving customized applications through HRM portals implies that e-HRM can be a key technique in innovation.
2. Accessibility: Data is accessible to everyone, through web or intranet. Any employee can get any information effortlessly HR entryways permit the representatives to get to all the required data at a transgression click.
3. Rapid and Mistake-free exchanges: Technological innovations have expanded the pace of administration in organizations. Mechanical frameworks eliminate human errors.
4. Interactive Atmosphere: Technology enhances interactions among the representatives through the electronic gateways. Bigger organizations have more data needs, and they can take more points of interest from these data. With mid-size organizations, it enables data spread over various structures and locations.
Business Process Reengineering
Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy, originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aimed to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.
BPR seeks to help companies radically restructure their organizations by focusing on the ground-up design of their business processes. According to early BPR proponent Thomas H. Davenport (1990), a business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Re-engineering emphasized a holistic focus on business objectives and how processes related to them, encouraging full-scale recreation of processes rather than iterative optimization of sub-processes.
Business process reengineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management.
Business process reengineering (BPR) is the practice of rethinking and redesigning the way work is done to better support an organization's mission and reduce costs. Organizations reengineer two key areas of their businesses. First, they use modern technology to enhance data dissemination and decision-making processes. Then, they alter functional organizations to form functional teams.[citation needed] Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission, strategic goals, and customer needs. Basic questions are asked, such as "Does our mission need to be redefined? Are our strategic goals aligned with our mission? Who are our customers?" An organization may find that it is operating on questionable assumptions, particularly in terms of the wants and needs of its customers. Only after the organization rethinks what it should be doing, it does go on to decide how best to do it.
Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re-engineering focuses on the organization's business processes—the steps and procedures that govern how resources are used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular customers or markets. As a structured ordering of work steps across time and place, a business process can be decomposed into specific activities, measured, modeled, and improved. It can also be completely redesigned or eliminated altogether. Re-engineering identifies, analyzes, and re-designs an organization's core business processes with the aim of achieving improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.
Re-engineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented into sub-processes and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall performance of the entire process. Reengineering maintains that optimizing the performance of sub-processes can result in some benefits but cannot yield improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that reason, re-engineering focuses on re-designing the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers. This drive for realizing improvements by fundamentally re-thinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes the re-engineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement.
Downsizing and VRS
In today's business environment, organisations are restructuring to become more competitive by cutting labour costs and to become more flexible in their response to the demands of the market place. One of the ways of organisational restructuring is downsizing. Downsizing refers to planned elimination of positions or jobs. It involves retrenchment of surplus manpower through Voluntary Retirement Scheme and other schemes. Lately, several large firms have resorted to downsizing to save employee costs and to improve employee efficiency.
Causes of Downsizing
The main causes of downsizing are as follows:
1. Corporate Restructuring: In the recent past, there is the trend towards corporate reorganization due to acquisitions and mergers. Corporate restructuring refers to reorganizing a business firm. It is done to make best use of resources and to generate maximum return on investment. Hence, business firms undertake organisational restructuring by reducing the levels of management. Most firms now resort to downsizing and prefer flat organisations to reduce the cost of operations.
2. Surplus Staff: Many organisations, especially public sector enterprises are subject to surplus staff. Due to surplus staff, the overheads of the public sector units are very high due to salaries and other facilities provided to the excess staff. Hence, attempts are made by organisations to reduce surplus staff through downsizing.
3. Increasing Competition: Over the years, there has been increasing competition in the market place. Now-a-days, firms need to be cost-effective to remain competent in the market Therefore, firms are reducing the workforce, especially the semi. skilled, as the work can be done through automation. As a result of down-sizing, the company is in a position to reduce staff related costs.
4. Recession: Recession refers to decline in demand in the market During the recession time, companies have to face tough times to survive. Hence, during the times of recession, the companies may curb excess expenditure and may downsize employees.
5. Technological Developments: Modern world is witnessing continuous breakthroughs in science and technology, especially in the field of computers and electronics. The technological developments can pose a great problem to human resources, as their services can be displaced. A number of organisations are downsizing their manpower both managerial and non-managerial due to technological upgradation.
Downsizing of workforce is generally done through VRS. Under this scheme, the organization and its employees agree to voluntarily retire on payment of agreed compensation by the employer.
REASONS FOR VRS
From Employer viewpoint
From Employee Viewpoint
BENEFITS OF VRS
NEGATIVE OUTCOMES OF VRS
References:
