Human Resource Management at HSBC

Unit 3: Human Resource Management

Introduction

Human resource management is known as a specialised branch of the organisation which is concerned with recruitment, training, selecting, on-boarding, managing people, and utilising human resources to satisfy the requirements of the staff and meet the goals of the organisation (Michael, 2019). This report presents the importance and processor of human resource management in context with a renowned multinational banking service, HSBC. It presents the role of HRM and workforce planning in HSBC followed by the several processes and functions of HR. it further presents the approaches adopted by the company for selection and recruitment. In the end, the report presents the importance of maintaining employee relation followed by employment legislation. It also covers the process of recruitment for human resource assistant followed by job specification, cover letter, interviews and job offer letter.

Section-1

Company Overview

HSBC is one of the largest Brash financial services and investment Bank Company, headquartered in Canary London. The company was established in 1865 and provides a range of commercial retail and financial banking services along with financial, advisory and discretionary services. The company has a broad network across 64 countries and territories in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and North America. The bank's structure is classified into four groups including Global Banking and Markets, Commercial Banking, Wealth Management and Retail Banking. The company generated $56 billion in revenue in 2019. There are over 233,000 employees working in the company in 2020. The mission of the company is to offer highest-quality services, products and solutions and deliver enhanced customer service to earn their loyalty and respect. The main objective of the company is to become the leading international bank in the world (HSBC, 2021).

Importance of Workforce Planning and Role of HRM

Human Resource department is one of the major units of the organisations that aims to provide and maintain strong balance between the workforce and their business operations. The HR department at HSBC is responsible for providing an excellent and encouraging atmosphere for employees so that they can work effectively and productively to meet the organisational objectives. At HSBC, HRM plays a crucial role in term of performing effective recruitment and selection, performance management, reward management and ensuring continuous improvement to the employees with the help of frequent training and development the company understands that by hiring and talented individuals for its organisation in the departments including administration, audit, branch and retail banking, communication and marketing, finance, technology and more, they will collectively contribute to satisfying the demands of the customers from all across the world (Novostavska, 2018).

Workforce planning is defined as the process of searching and keeping the employees who have right values, experience and skills to satisfy the business objectives. It collectively brings HR processes and employment management. The workforce planning at HSBC is conducted in several areas including recruitment and selection, safe staffing, succession planning and offering training to the employees. Working planning helps the company to ensure employee development by utilising the combined input from finance, HR, and business analytics. To make the operations of the banks running smoothly, HSBC implements several strategies related to workforce planning (Samwel, 2018).

Different approaches to recruitment and selection

Recruitment

Recruitment is known as the process of intervening, identifying, engaging, and selecting the employees for the company. From determining staffing need to filling it, everything is covered under the recruitment (Gardner, 2018).

Selection

Selection is the method in which the desired candidate is hired for a specific job profile. In this process, HR is required to examine various qualities of the candidate such as their capabilities, skills, and knowledge to hire them so that their qualities match as per the organisation requirements (Gardner, 2018).

Contingency Recruitment

This approach refers to the recruitment method which works on some approved conditions with the clients and selects the candidates on the required basis (KRAEV and TIKHONOV, 2020).

Strengths

• The employees selected through this approach are not required to pay any fees to the recruiter.

• The recruiters of the client company look for agents that do not demand their own resources.

Weaknesses

• In this process, the candidates are represented to multiple clients who may reduce the possibility to get hired at HSBC.

• HSBC requires making its selection process faster to compete with other organizations and their operations (KRAEV and TIKHONOV, 2020)

Section-2

HRM Practices in HSBC

Performance Management

Performance management is considered as one of the crucial processes in the HRM. It offers benefit to the employees and company as a whole. In this practice, the HR managers are required to evaluate, examine and address every aspect of staff performance. HSBC has implemented everyday development and performance culture to support high performance and contribute to the overall development of the employees. The company creates an effective and continuous feedback culture by performing everyday evaluation about the progress of the employees. Moreover, the company utilises the 360-degree appraisal method to determine the performance of the employees collecting feedback from managers, team leaders and their peers. This helps them to improve on certain areas and work to ensure maximum productivity, leading towards a successful growth (HSBC, 2021).

Advantages

• The company ensures workforce development by encouraging the employees as per their performance.

• It helps the employees at HSBC to reach up to their complete potential, thereby increasing growth for employees as well as the company.

Disadvantages

• It is a time-consuming process, as managers of the company spend 1-2 hours on evaluating their appraisals.

• Partiality is another major disadvantage in HSBC where certain employees are promoted and appraised than the deserving ones. This thus hampers the process of performance management (HSBC, 2021).

Learning, Training and Development

The other role of the HR department at HSBC is to provide proper training and ensure the growth of the selected employee. The success of a company largely depends upon how well its employees are trained for their particular job as well as what are their development and growth opportunities with the firm. HSBC regularly conducts orientation programs and offers extensive guidance related to their specific role and how to work in order to attain growth. Moreover, the company also provides e-learning platforms such as MyLearning (Bell and moore, 2018).

Advantages

• Training and development at HSBC support better economic usage as the employees know to utilise and access the required resources and equipment.

• In addition to improving the knowledge, it also helps the employees to understand about effective working with the team, thereby increasing the overall group efforts.

• It develops confidence and positive attitude among the employees which helps to enhance the overall result of the organization (HSBC, 2021).

Disadvantage

• As HSBC helps to keep its employees up to dates about the latest banking technologies such as e-banking and telebanking, the long training hours make the employees stressful.

• It leads to a waste of money and time as the organisation is required to pay equally at the time of training (Bell and moore, 2018).

Analysis of HRM to Bring Organisational effectiveness, Efficiency and Profitability

Compensation and other benefit

Employee compensation and benefits are viewed together, presenting a holistic approach on how the companies can reward and appraise their employees. To support the personal and professional development of the employees, HSBC ensures to provide fair compensation packages to its workforce. In addition to the base salaries, the bank offers annual bonuses and quarterly incentives as per the employees’ performance. The other benefits offered by the bank include health and personal development, leaves, transportation and food. Moreover, the company sponsors the Best Service Recognition program where the employees are appreciated by meeting their desired roles and reaching beyond expectation (HSBC, 2021).

Compliance

Compliance is common and prevails in most of the organisations. One of the best HR practises is to avoid any sort of compliance challenges is by adopting HR software and hire an appropriate individual to look after it in the HR team. In HSBC, its work environment is highly challenging and diverse. This is where the bank operates as a legal team and considers it as one of the essential parts of growing the business to great heights (Perucci, 2020).

Secure Environment

Creating a happy, safe and healthy workforce ensures that staff feels safe and work within the company for a longer time! The security of employees also offers various advantages to the organisation as it assists them in retaining its workforce. The safety and health measures are one of the significant concerns for the HR department of HSBC. The company improved processes and systems for hazard detection and remediation. Moreover, the company to focus on increasing the safety culture in their supply chain via their SAFER Together program so that employees remain protected throughout the working condition and perform effectively (Perucci, 2020).

Transparency

An effective Human Resource practice ensures to make fair recruitment as well as to be open with the workforce in relation to growth and loss of the organisation. HSBC provides an open environment for its employees for feedback and communication that helps them to feel trusted and valued. Moreover, the employee treatment at HSBC is fair, sustainable and competitive (HSBC, 2021).

Section-3

Significance of Employee Relation in Context with HRM Decision-making

Employee relation refers to the process utilised by the management to build and maintain a positive relationship with the employees so that they can stay within the organisation for a prolonged duration. This process goes a long way in motivating the employees to perform and work effectively and contribute towards the growth of the company (Naheem, 2018). The significance of employee relation in context to the HRM of HSBC is as follows.

Employees Add Value

A workplace must achieve benefit from their long-term workforce. For example, in the case of HSBC, the managers and team leaders ensure to effectively communicate with the employees related to work and other issues they are facing within the organisation. This thus helps the employees to feel motivated and place enhanced efforts to generate better results and outcomes (Petersen, 2019).

Promote Success

Competition is found at every level of the organisation. HSBC hires talented and skilled workforce which ensures to create excellent solutions and services at the company. The employees further ensure to meet the customers’ requirements thus enabling the company to reach ahead of its competitors.

Employee Satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is significant for a company’s growth. The crucial factor of workforce satisfaction is motivation. The staffs at HSBC in its all business units are encouraged so that they can work passionately throughout their stay. The leaders work closely with the employees to maintain a strong bond and attain business objectives (Petersen, 2019).

HR plays a crucial role in ensuring effective interaction with the employees. The HR department at HSBC measures and monitors the relationship between different levels such as managers and leaders and leaders and employees to oversee if everything is on track. The company further secures its workforce commitment through strong involvement and interaction and ensures compliance in terms of legal obligations (HSBC, 2021).

Key elements of employee Legislation and its influence on HRM Decision-making

Employment legislation refers to the regulatory entity of rules and regulations that looks after the relationship between the employers and the workforce. These policies and laws are imposed to prevent and protect employees from any unethical activities happening in the company. The HR managers are held accountable for mangling their workforce while adhering to government laws in the areas of employee rights (Hinton et al., 2018).

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974

This law presents a framework for managing the safety and health of the staff in the UK. It sets general duties of both the employees and employers along with managers, owners and workers in the workplace. HSBC ensures to offer a safe working environment so that the business operations are conducted wisely and safely.

Equity Act of 2010

Equity Act comes into force in October 2010 in the UK and merges all 116 laws as single legislation. This cat provides a licit framework to protect and secure the rights of workers and offer them equal opportunity. This laws intents to protect the workforce from any sort of unfair treatment and ensures to promote equal and transparent community. HSBC complies with this law and provides equal opportunity to all its employees including the disabled ones (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2020).

The Disability Discrimination Act

This law comes into force in 1995. This law aims to promote civil rights for individuals with disabilities and to further protect them from any sort of discrimination. It forces companies to avoid barriers in proving employment and access to services and products to the disabled people. The HR at HSBC ensures to provide additional services to its disabled employees in terms of housing, transportation and healthcare (Hinton et al., 2018).

HRM Practices in work-related Context

HSBC is one of the largest British finance and baking company that has employees 233,000 people globally in its four business operations. As per recruitment is concerned, HSBC ensures that it has the right number of individuals for its respective hob positions. This is where; it has implemented a structured approach for recruitment and selection to hire the candidates for human resource assistant (HSBC, 2021). The HR process at HSBC including job specification, job advertisement and interview process is mentioned in the appendix.

The rationale for HRM practices

It is the utmost responsibility for the organisation to select and hire people with relevant knowledge and skills to fulfil their organisation as well as personal goals. All of these HR practices, processes and functions are essential in HSBC as this will help the manager to manage various employees effectively and motivate them to meet their desired goals. Identifying these HR processes and implementing its processes are therefore crucial for improving the performance and growth. The HR department at HSBC places value in the development and training of the workforce and applies this value into their corporate culture. The company further arranges reward ceremonies and drives to help individuals to generate competencies for their job roles.

Conclusion

From this report, it has been concluded that human resource management plays a significant role in effectively managing people and hiring new talent at the workplace. HSBC is one of the renowned and leading banking and finance company in the UK and has a global presence in several countries across the world. The HR department of HSBC is well-implemented and has several professionals looking after the recruitment, performance management, offering compensation and benefits, conducting both online and seminar-based training to ensure the growth of the employees so that they can successfully meet the goals and objectives of the company. The company further adopts various approaches to recruitment and selection and adhere to employment laws to generate an excellent working environment in the company.

References

Bell, B.S. and Moore, O.A. (2018). Learning, training and development in organizations: Emerging trends, recent advances and future directions.

Equality and Human Rights Commission (2020). What is the Equality Act?. (Online) available at: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/equality-act-2010/what-equality. act. Last accessed on: 23^rd January 2021.

Gardner, A.K. (2018). How can best practices in recruitment and selection improve diversity in surgery?. Annals of surgery, 267(1), pp.e1-e2.

Hinton, S., Wood, L.C., Singh, H. and Reiners, T. (2019). Enterprise gamification systems and employment legislation: a systematic literature review. Ajis: Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 23, pp.1-24.

HSBC. (2021). About HSBC. (Online) available at: https://www.about.hsbc.co.uk/. Last accessed on: 24^th January 2021.

HSBC. (2021). Performance Management. (Online) available at: https://www.hsbc.com.tr/en/about-hsbc/human-resources/performance-managament. Last accessed on: 24^th January 2021.

HSBC. (2021). Reward Management. (Online) available at: https://www.hsbc.com.tr/en/about-hsbc/human-resources/compensation-and-benefits. Last accessed on: 24^th January 2021.

KRAEV, V.M. and TIKHONOV, A.I. (2020). Modern recruitment approaches in personnel selection. Revista ESPACIOS, 41(12).

Michael, A (2019). A handbook of human resource management practice.

Naheem, M.A. (2018). Illicit financial flows: HSBC case study. Journal of Money Laundering Control.

Novostavska, O.I. (2018). HR-MANAGERS IN THE HUMAN RESOURSES MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. ??????? ??????, 61(9), p.259.

Perucci, D. (2020). A Comprehensive Guide to HR Best Practices You Need to Know This Year [Infographic]. (Online) available at: https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/guide-hr-best-practices/. Last accessed on: 23^rd January 2021.

Petersen, S. (2019). Why Are Employee Retention Strategies Important?. (Online) available at: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/employee-retention-strategies-important. 1241.html. Last accessed on: 23^rd January 2021.

Samwel, J.O. (2018). Human Resource Planning as an Important Practice to Anticipate Future Human Resource Requirements of the Organization–Literature review. International Journal of Research in Business Studies and Management, 5(3), pp.24-30.

Appendix

Job Specification

JOB PROFILE	Human Resource Assistant
HEADED BY	Top-level management
WORKING HOURS	8 hours per day
JOB TYPE	Full-time
LOCATION	Wilmslow, United Kingdom
SALARY	Competitive
RESPONSIBILITY AND EXPECTED ROLE	Contact the candidates for test interview and help them in test administration. Conduct part-time recruitment with outsourcing employee and a draft list of onboard verification. Generate computer for preparing statistics Ensure streamline workflow and process improvement to achieve business objectives.
CANDIDATES SKILLS, QUALIFICATION AND EXPERIENCE	Should have a bachelor’s degree Must have a one year of administrative support experience. Must possess presentation skills Must have strong organisation skills Must have a positive attitude and flexibility towards work Must have strong verbal and written communication skills

Cover Letter (CV)

Name of the applicant Address of residence Email Address CAREER OBJECTIVE: To get a growth-oriented position in a well-known organisation where my knowledge and skills can be utilised for the success and growth of the company. SKILLS Daily data recording Strong communication and leadership skills Should have decision-making skills Ability to handle a large number of candidates for selection EXPERIENCE I have two years of experience in Human Resource Assistant at Standard Chartered bank located in the UK QUALIFICATION DETAILS I have completed MSc in International Human Resource Management from the University of Essex Online, Colchester, United Kingdom I have received certification for Human resource training at Barclays, UK. DECLARATION I hereby declare that all the information mentioned above is true to my knowledge and bear the responsibility for the above-mentioned particulars. DATE PLACE SIGNATURE

Interview Questions

The candidates applying for the role of Human Resource Management at HSBC will be needed to pass pas the interview questions asked by the HR manager at the company. The question which is asked during the interview process is as follows.

Tell me about yourself?

Why do you want to join this organisation?

Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

How would you handle the candidates during selection?

Job Offer Letter

JOB OFFER LETTER FROM HSBC Date Recipient name HSBC Wilmslow, United Kingdom Dear (Candidate’s name), We are happy and proud to inform you that you have been selected as a Human Resource Assistant at HSBC. Based on your test and interview, your salary will be £ 7,000 per month. You working hours are scheduled as eight hours per day excluding Sundays. You will be offered multiple leaves including emergency and sick leaves. We are pleased to provide you with this letter to be approved and signed by you. You can begin the job from (date). We are looking forward to working with you. Thanks and Regards, HR Manager HSBC