Organization Assessment Category V - Organization Workforce Management

Introduction

Workforce management is an integrated process to utilize the organization’s labor pool, to optimize its labor productivity, to forecast its labor requirement, and to create and manage staff schedule in its daily operation. A quality workforce management is purposed to create and maintain a high-performance work environment, to be adaptive to internal and external changes, and to engage workforce to be effective in contribution and in their own professional growth. The important aspect in workforce management process is to identify the governance roles and reporting structure to align workforce management with the organization’s strategic development implementation.

MBNQA Workforce category assesses an organization’s workforce capability and capacity needs that is aimed to reinforce the basic alignment of workforce management with the organization’s strategy, and to relate workforce planning with the organization’s strategic implementation, its excellency standards evaluation focuses are on two basic aspects in the process of workforce management: 1) work environment evaluation, 2) workforce engagement evaluation. (NIST, 2019)

This research is intended to assess the workforce managing structure and process of the Ten Thousand Villages (TTV), according to MBNQA’s standards of the workforce (category 5) excellence and to propose possible improvements.

Ten Thousand Villages (TTV)

Professor Vucetic wrote in her 2008’s book “Becoming a Successful Techpreneur” that a typical small company’s job candidate typically looks for a job’s bigger promotional potentials, higher responsibilities, possible wider spectrum in work experiences and professional growth, better opportunities to shine, better financial reward or more cooperative work relationship among colleagues.

On Ten Thousand Villages’ web page (https://www.tenthousandvillages.com/careers/), TTV states it offers power and meaning work for employment seekers, experiences of “be part of the story” for volunteers, and no salary & no-expenses-coverage professional development opportunities in Brand& Product, Designing, Fair Trade Compliance, and Photography Studio, etc. for internship opportunity seeker. TTV looks for candidates who are passionate to create economic opportunities for artisans through fair trading, and TTV needs motivated, determined individuals with skill, commitment and deep respect towards artisans to share TTV’s people-driven mission of building a better life for artisans and their families.

Workforce Environment Assessment

MBNQA standards on workforce environment are aimed to build an effective environment accomplish work and to support the workforce. It evaluates 1) workforce capability and capacity needs, 2) change management, 3) workforce support. (NIST, 2019)

As a non-profit organization, TTV centered its workforce strategy with its people-development mission which offers possibly wider spectrum work experiences which includes international trading experiences partnered with world organizations such as Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), EQUAL EXCHANGE, and the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), etc. Due to its limited budget, TTV builds its workforce largely on volunteers which increases its flexibility for its staff change management, but it also increases individual employee’s capability requirement and organizational support expectation for employees to adapt to their job-roles for their broader work responsibilities.

Field Analysis & Conclusion:

Role identification theories are theories relates the role identity formation process with the self-verification cognitive process and self-efficacy motivative process, and motivation theories are cognitive evaluation theory. TTV highlights fulfilling of self-actualization needs and esteem needs (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model) to motivate its workforce, a commitment & participation based human resource management “soft model” to fit its flat and non-profit organizational structure.

But, as a commercial trading company that centered by its artisan-clients’ people-developing strategy, TTV has not aligned its commercial trading strategic plans with its human resource management model to gain greater performance to achieve organization’s objectives through commercial developing business strategy, which may impact its evaluation on needed workforce capability and capacity, and its strategic planning for it workforce support.

Thus, the author of this report recommends TTV to improve its workplace role identification process by changing its current commitment-based workplace model to long-term employment and skill development based Human Resource Management model.

Workforce Engagement Assessment

MBNQA standards on workforce engagement are for the purpose to foster high performance, to strengthen core competencies, to help accomplish objectives and implementation plans, and to ensure organization on successful track. (NIST, 2019)

In a scale-5 company review conducted by indeed.com, Ten Thousand Villages got average 4.4 in the review matrix that included work-life balance (4.3), pay & benefit (3.3), job security and advancement (3.2), management (4.2), culture (4.4). Employees survey comments were “Great place to get educated about different parts of the world”, “Mission-driven non-profit”, 1) good working atmosphere and training support, 2) good employee health benefit but low salary; 3) a lot of concerns for not much business, less operation hour (to volunteer) and mostly only temp jobs are offered.

Field Analysis & Conclusion:

First, Workforce planning model, one the position-in-need decision model, is a human resource process model to “align the needs and priorities of the organization with those of its workforce to ensure it can meet its legislative, regulatory, service and production requirements and organizational objectives (Wikipedia, 2019).” From the previous analysis on workforce environment, TTV’s inappropriate alignment of its commercial trading strategic plans with its human resource management model may be one of the reasons for its employees' concern on the job opportunity.

And, employee engagement is a workforce environment culture building process that designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organization's goals, objectives and values, encouraged to contribute to organizational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being (Tutorials Point, 2019). From employees’ review, TTV is having a commitment-based workplace culture but lack of results-driven atmosphere.

Also, as Robert Quinn’s (1965) has explained in his research “A model of personality in the Competing Values Framework”, the most effective way to align an organization’s strategy implementation with its workforce engagement is through building its workplace culture.  Quinn has identified four culture values of an organization in its developing concentration, 1) Clan Culture which focuses on people, teamwork and cooperation, 2) Adhocracy culture which focuses on innovation, change, growth and entrepreneurship, 3) Result-Oriented culture that focuses on results, productivity, competition and profit, 4) Hierarchy culture that focus on order, procedure, structure and quality.

Ten Thousand Villages, as a non-profit organization, has a great mission-driven commitment-centered workplace culture which can be beneficial for its business plan’s strategic implementation, but TTV needs to enhance building a culture that is “fair trading is commercial operation” awareness and to upgrade its people-development objectives from only basic living improvement to include professional development as well.

Thus, author of this report recommends TTV to improve its employee engagement by upgrading its current clan culture business model to its mission uniqueness configured culture that focuses on results, growth, and entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on business structure and quality.

Conclusion -- Organizational Workforce Management Assessment

From published online secondary data documents about Ten Thousand Villages, this report’s author analyzed Ten Thousand Villages on the field of workforce management according to the standard of excellence of MBNQA award and found, as a non-profit organization,

• TTV has a great mission-driven and commitment-based workforce environment but lack in results-driven focus, 
• TTV has a great and attractive workforce recruiting strategy but lack of appropriate alignment between strategy implementation, human resource development, and workforce engagement, 
• and TTV is great in capability supporting training but lack in strategic human resource capacity alignment.

SWOT Analysis

Strength:

·         Great people-development centered organizational strategy.

·         Great workforce recruiting strategy.

·         Great mission-driven commitment workplace culture

Weakness:

·         Lack of small business orientation in the workforce environment.

·         Lack of objective-accomplishment based human resource management model.

·         Lack of workplace culture that focuses on results, quality, and growth.

Opportunities:

·         Great executive management team

·         Great mission-centered business strategy and implementation plans.

·         Great artisan participation.

Proposed Actions:

• To upgrade the human resource management model from commitment based “soft model” to control & commitment based “configurational model” to gain greater performance through implementing the organization’s business strategy.
• To provide staff training specialized on how to foster small business in community help.
• To establish a structure in workforce management to enable voluntary consultants helping system to support specialized help in small business developing.
• To build human resource supporting structure for the purpose to further help artisans’ professional development in the direction of commercial operation.
• To upgrade current commitment-based culture to a more results-focused culture with an emphasis on business structure and quality.

References:

Bothma, C, Lloyd, S, & Khapova, S (2015). Chapter 2 Work Identity: Clarifying the Concept. Retrieved from https://www.coursehero.com/file/22875041/

Indeed.com (2019) Ten Thousand Villages Employee Reviews. Retrieved from

https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Ten-Thousand-Villages/reviews

Online Talent Manager (2014) The Quinn Model: A model of personality in the Competing Values Framework. Retrieved from http://www.onlinetalentmanager.com/products/quinnmodel

NIST (2019) Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence Categories and Items. Baldrige Criteria Commentary. Retrieved from https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/baldrige-criteria-commentary
TutorialsPoint.com (2019) Human Resource Management Employee Engagement. Retrieved from https://www.tutorialspoint.com/human_resource_management/human_resource_management_employee_engagement.htm
Jelena Vucetic (2008) Becoming a Successful Techpreneur. Xlibris Corporation publishing.
Wikipedia (2019) WorkForce planning. Retrieved from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_planning
W A Weerasooriya (2016) Chapter – 3 Models and Theories of Human Resource Management. Retrieved from http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/155771/16/13_chapter%203.pdf

----Feb. 2019