ASSIGNMENT # 1

Submitted by
Faryal Gul
Enrollment # 01-322192-003
Program: MBA Weekend (4)
Subject: Srategic HRM
Submitted to: Dr. Safa Riaz
Date of Submission: March 27, 2021
Question No: 01
Provide a brief overview of Halcrow Group’s strategy

The management team that comprises of five members leads each and every business group of
the Halcrow Group that operates in the eight regions around the world. All business groups,
whatever region they belong to, are supported by corporate support services also including a
support group for human resource along with other business support functions. A P&T staff is
also allocated to each group, whose leader’s responsibility is training and career development
of the involved team members. The Halcrow Group also launched a programme by the name
“Act Now” with the purpose of achieving a sustainable and dynamic growth of the group. The
change programs primary objective was to develop values, business principles and an
environment of employee behavior that improves individual’s performance which as a result
adds to a better business performance. The ‘Act Now” programme is not a course with a fixed
end date but in fact it is a continuous process where focus is on learning and sharing of good
practices.

Question No: 02
What obstacles do you think that Halcrow management will face as it
works to change the Group’s culture from one dominated by technical
excellence to one that also embraces commercial awareness?
Obstacles related to changing the culture highlighted in the case include:
 Presently there are 80% of Halcrow’s employees who have undergraduate degree are
classified as professional and technical staff and are also member of professional
institute but to ensure commercial skills the understanding of employees must also be
developed.
 The employees are more focused on the job well done rather than the commercial
success that is more important than technical excellence. The reputation of company
must also be retained as technically excellent but the commercial awareness and more
importantly knowing about the demand of customer is essential to compete in market
 As Halcrow’s customers are taking their technical excellence its technical excellence
itself is becoming an obstacle
Question No: 03
What hurdles do you think that Halcrow will have to overcome in its
attempt to ensure international employees adopt the Group’s codes of
behavior?
HR director was prompted to make the change by publishing the code of behaviors which
emphasize the need for honesty and , transparency and integrity. However, the absence of a
global HR custom in Halcrow implies that the HR director obviously has an enormous
undertaking available setting up the importance of the function and the mission that HR is
endeavoring to convey through the change methodology. This shouldn't imply that that the
workers will straightforwardly question the importance of the HR effort, yet focusing on it
completely is an alternate matter. Conveying a technique through changed worker practices is a
perspective with which most will be absolutely new. Obviously, there are the unavoidable social
and correspondence issues, which may endeavor to change worker practices

Question No: 04
To what extent does the data collected by the employee survey allow the
HR director to evaluate the extent to which HR initiatives are supporting
the Group’s strategic direction?
There are 30 questions relating to ten key areas of group’s strategic directions that are asked
from employees to comprehend their views. The questionnaires are designed to gather
information about include clarity about their job, client focus, their competence, resources to
do their job, empowerment, involvement, cooperation from others, feedback to them and
recognition other supplementary questions are added to evaluate specific issues the analyses is
done by comparing different regions. High response rates for the survey (over 67% of
employees worldwide returning their questionnaire in 2002 and 72% in 2004) mean that the
data collected are more likely to be representative of the group.

Question No:5
(a) How does Halcrow currently make use of primary and secondary
data to evaluate the extent to which initiatives to engage employees
within the Group are working?

By benchmarking the surveys of 2002 and 2004 it was observed that there has been
improvements made in all areas of strategic HRM that the employees considered were
 the important ones which are: feedback, recognition and involvement of employees this
was identified through primary data (2000 employees survey).
However the data from other sources suggests that there is still a room for improvement
for other aspects of HRM.
To calculate HR Enablement Index the primary data from employee’s survey is used that
helps to identify the extent to which employees are satisfied and level of engagement of
employees with their work on all ten key areas. Average scores are then compared to
highlight those aspects where there is less employee satisfaction and hence need for
improvement is identified, Comparison of the 2004 HR Enablement Index score with that
for 2002 revealed that there had been no significant change in employees’ engagement.
In the same time period i.e. between 2002 and 2004 it was observed that retention rates
were within context of declining labor turnover, the HR director was worried of the fact
that why has been the engagement remained constant only at the times when there was
shortage of qualified peopleThe answer to this question is currently being sought from a
range of primary and data including employee exit interviews, staff workshops around the
world to discuss issues associated with employee engagement and further analysis of the
employee survey data.

(b) What other measures do you think they might adopt?

There can be other measures can be used to evaluate the level of employee engagement
with their work. For example the previous data in HR records such as training courses held
and attended on technical versus organizational development, or the secondary data such
as, subject to agreement and issues of confidentiality, annual reviews between line
managers and employees might be developed to explore and feedback issues related to
organizational engagement. It was observed that Halcrow has only considered the
employee perspective on the issue of employee engagement, ignoring the fact that to
seek commercial awareness it is also important to consider their customer review and
feedback, with a bunch of focused group this information can be obtained through in-
depth interviews.