Executive Summary:

This report will focus on the human resources management problems that Canterbury Hospital been
facing. The report will present the analysis on the problems and the solution on how to correct the
situation using the four HRM practices. Generally, the main problem that Canterbury Hospital been
facing is their inadequate staffs treatment and lack of cooperation with the trade unions. The main
solution would be empowerment to the hospital employees to make them feel more wanted and to
cooperate more with the trade unions in dealing and negotiating the contracts and working
environments. With the help of the HRM practices, they can solve these problems and prevent any
arises negative externalities.

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Table of Contents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:................................................................................................. 1

INTRODUCTION: ............................................................................................................ 3

PROBLEMS IDENTIFICATION: ......................................................................................... 3

SOLUTIONS – THE HRM PRACTICES: ............................................................................ 5

CONCLUSION: ............................................................................................................... 7

REFERENCES: ................................................................................................................ 8
Introduction:
Canterbury Hospital, one of New Zealand largest and oldest health care center, located near
Christchurch. The hospital provides a wide variety range of medical surgery procedures and health
care services; the hospital employed more than 9000 staffs with hundred of professions. Due to their
poor HRM practices and struggles against the trade unions, they’ve been developing a poor
reputation about their management and operations.
The main problem lies with the hospital heavily bureaucracy management layers, which give low
autonomy to the employees and very little cooperation with the trade unions, and most of their
decisions is centralized, which make it hard to include the staffs into the decision making processes.
The hospital do employed a strategy to motivated the employees, the “Environment Stewardship:,
which allow the employees to contributes ideas to help improving the environments, however this
strategy isn’t as effective as they hope, since the selection for the participating staffs make some
staffs angry as they do not understand how the processes of selection was operate and how they was
chosen.

Problems Identification:
There are 3 main problems that Canterbury Hospital is currently facing regarding their Human
Resources Management and day-to-day operations.
1. Employees low autonomy:
Autonomy is the ability for the employees to control their working environments and conditions,
whether or not they will have a said in the company decision-making. Low autonomy might lead to
dissatisfactions, while high autonomy may encourage motivation and dedications from the
employees toward the company.
As stated by Mr. Steven Vamos, Chief Executive of Microsoft Australia branch, it’s the manager
responsibility to provide a sufficient working environment and personal support to the staffs in order
for them to accomplish their given assignments (Phillips and Gully 2011). Only when they receive
support and motivation then they would work harder and more effective in trying to achieve their
target. However, in the case of the Canterbury Hospital, the staffs are given very limited, if not at all
any, influences on the hospital decision, especially the one regarding them. As most of the decision
is centralized to the management level, the hospital staffs from time to time have to coped with the
decision that isn’t benefits to them, but because the management level think it does. For example, the
case study of Canterbury Hospital report how the hospital was trying to implement a new project call
“Environmental Stewardship” to get the staffs to be more involved in making ideas and decisions for
sustainability development. While many hospital staffs were eager to get involved and contribute
their ideas and plans, some staffs however become suspicious and distrustful toward the project
goals, since they’ve never been ask by the management to take part anything relating to decisions
making.
2. Bureaucracy management layers
According Raj (2007), top managers and employees should collaborate with each other regularly in
order to achieve the organization goals, only when they collaborate effectively, then the organization
will fulfill their targets. Therefore, employees and employers need to have a clear link of
communications and cooperation within the company for collaboration. However, in the case of
Canterbury Hospital, due to the complicated level and chain commands that existed in the hospital
for a long time, there had never been any collaboration between the top management and the hospital
staffs, combine with the process of every decision is centralized to the top, make it even more
difficult for the collaboration and communications between the management and the staffs. This lead
to the management not knowing much about the operations done by the staffs, as well as knowing
what to do when it come to making decision that will impacts the staffs. The complicated layers of
management also make it difficult for the staffs to communicate and share their ideas and wants with
the top management, this overall lead to dissatisfactions for the staffs and inadequate decisions
making for the management.
3. Conflicting relationship with trade unions
Trade union is an organization consisted of workers and union leaders that work to represent the
workers whom work in a particular industry in the economy. The union main functions is to protects
the workers rights, negotiates the paid and working conditions with the employers and enforce the
terms of collective bargaining against the firms when needed. Trade unions is a very important part
of the economy.
According to Booth (1995), trade unions can both provides collective and private benefits to the
workers and the employers, it can be assume that as the workers, the unions and the firms cooperate
effectively, that friendly society benefits will arise and be beneficial for all parties. Therefore, it’s
important for the unions to have a degree of power regarding their influences on the labor supply.
Todd (2015) reported that, in Cambodia, the partnership between the trade unions, government and
private sectors firms has generated an increase in minimum wage from 80$ to 128$, a huge
improvement for the workers standard of living and the economy. However, in the Canterbury
Hospital case, the hospital have been avoiding and ignoring the trade unions for a while, especially
when in come to making decision that could affects the hospital staffs. During their plan to
implement the “Environmental Stewardship”, the hospital received some distasteful messages from
the union, since the hospital did not counsel with them regarding the selection process of the
employees who will participate in the project, furthermore the hospital did not counsel with them
whether or not if the project would be a good idea to set up, and if it would benefits the staffs.

Solutions – The HRM practices:

The top management should cooperate with the HR department to come up with a strategy to resolve
the problems. These 4 HRM practices can be employs to help in solving the problems they’re
currently facing.
1. Employee relations and involvement:
As stated by Swailes (2006), employee relations and involvement are processes that would have a
strong impact on the relationship between the managers and employees in a company. Employee
relations talk about the communication links between the managers and the employees concerning
with business decisions, problems and solutions, while employee involvement talk about getting and
including the employee participation and votes when it come to making a decision or resolving a
problem in the company.
According to Bonias, Bartram, Leggatt and Stanton (2010), managers need to focus on ensuring the
effectiveness of the HRM strategy, policy and processes, so that they can fully support and motivate
the employees. Their study on around 500 hospital staffs in Australia shown a clear correlation
between the standard of patient health care services and employees empowerment, when employees
is give a degree of influences on their working environment, they become more motivated and work
harder than when they’re not. Furthermore, a study by Leggat, Bartram, Casimir and Stanton (2010)
prove that even the hospital staffs themselves notice the importance of empowerment regarding job
satisfactions and work motivations.
Therefore, in the case of Canterbury Hospital, the management need to establishes a stable
relationship with the employees as well as empower them the power to have a degree of influences
on decisions made by the hospital.

2. Industrial relations:
Industrial relations talk about the process human resource management, employment relations,
conflict management and employee attitudes and behaviours at work. As stated by Gardner (1991),
industrial relations is a very important aspect of day-to-day operation of every business, since it
ensure uninterrupted and continuity of production, reduction in industrial disputes, especially with
the trade unions and finally high morale for the employees and reduce wastages of resources.
In the case of Canterbury Hospital, their current industrial relation problem is disputes against the
trade union; they neglected and ignored to cooperate with the unions during decision-making.
Brigden (2009) stated that trade union is a very important part of the economy since they ensure the
negotiations of contract between employers and employees; defend the worker rights and initiates
industrial strikes and action when needed. In 2008, union who’s face frustrating process with
negotiating collective bargaining with company like Qantas or Telstra, initiated a wave strike, which
lead some economic consequences and employees suffered from unemployment for awhile.
Therefore, it’s important for Canterbury Hospital use industrial relations and cooperates more with
the unions in the future, so that they may improve their staffs working conditions and ensure the
fluidity of their service operations.

3. Leadership and management development:

Leadership and management development is a very crucial part of every organization, the leader
inspire and motivate the workers to work harder to achieve their goals, while managers organize,
plan ahead and coordinates projects and assignments. These two crucial contributors require training
and guidance in order to maximize their potentials and effectiveness in the organization.
According to Booth (2010), a good leader and manager will know the best methods to get to know
their employees and established a stable working relationship. If the leader or manager tries to
separate themselves far away from the employees, then they would be unable make the correct
decision that would be beneficial for the company and the employees, furthermore if they do not
understand or be able to relate to their employees, then they would be unable to motivate or inspire
the employees to work harder. In the case of Canterbury Hospital, due to the complicated layers
between the top management level and the employees, the managers have never been able to create a
steady relationship with the employees, combine with the fact that almost every decisions is
centralize, this lead to employees demotivation and refusal to take on extra responsibility when they
possibly could. Gloet and Jones (2004) suggested that knowledge leadership is the best way to
motivate the workers and increase productivity, since if the manager truly understand the
organization and its workers, then he will be able to plan and organize strategy that would be best in
generating positive private and society benefits. A study by Muenjohn and Armstrong (2007) shown
that when the employees is unable to anticipate or predict what their manager going to do next, they
become confuse and suspicious, like in the case of Canterbury Hospital project “Environmental
Stewardship”, thus instead of getting the desired outcome of increasing productivity, the efficiency
of the workers actually drop, from this we could see that it’s important for a manager to have a
decently close connections with their subordinates.

4. Reward management:
Reward management is term used for describing the monetary and non-monetary compensations or
rewards granted to an employee, rewarding for their works and services for the company. A study by
Smith (1993), shown that during the late 1980s, Britain saw massive rise in usage of reward
management regarding the adjustment of wages and salaries. This instantly resulted in the massive
rise of employees’ performances and attitude regarding completing their assignments and reach
organization goals.
According to Druker and White (1997), reward management system should be use base on
performances management system, which mean that staffs should classified into different group base
on their performances and workload, not just getting the same salaries and wages. For example, in
the case of Canterbury Hospital, there aren’t seem to be any sort of reward management forms
mentioned, however as mentioned, different staffs in the hospital should get different paid rates since
some of them have a more demanding jobs and positions or their performances is higher compare to
others. A study by Duvivier, Li and Renard (Applied Economic 2013), shown that as the Chinese
implemented better wages and salaries systems in their factories, it attracted many people from the
rural area to urban area to work for the factories due to better living standard and paid. Therefore, we
can see that Canterbury Hospital should employ reward management, both financial and non-
financial, to motivate their staffs into working harder.

Conclusion:
In conclusion, the Canterbury Hospital suffered 3 main problems. The first problem is low employee
autonomy, which mean they’re given limited, if not non at all, any influences on the decision making
by the hospital that could potentially affects their working environment and conditions. The second
problem is their complicated layers of management, which mean that there are to many layers of
management between the top and the staffs, this would make communications difficult as well as
limited relationship between the top managers and the staffs. The last problem is their conflicts
relationship with the trade unions, resulting from their lack of cooperation and communications with
the unions.
To solve these problems, there are 4 main HRM practices and solutions, which they can utilize. The
first one is employee relations and involvements, which empower the employees to participate in
decision-making and create a steady relationship between the top management and the hospital
staffs. The second solution is industrial relations, which would help them to create and improve their
working relationship with the trade unions. Next is the leadership and management development,
which improve the managers’ ability to connect with the staffs, so that they can make better
decisions regarding the hospital employees. And lastly, reward management, which granted reward
to employees, in the form of financial and non-financial, for their hard works and dedications to the
hospital, this can motivates the staffs more as well as to compensate any negative aspects of their
jobs.

References:
1. Bonias, D, Bartram, T, Leggatt, S and Stanton, P 2010, 'Does psychological empowerment
mediate the relationship between high performance work systems and patient care quality in
hospitals?', Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 319-337.
2. Phillips, J & Gully, S 2011. “Path-goal theory” In: Organizational Behavior: Tools for
success. Ohio, USA: Cengage Learning, pp. 434-435
3. Gazioglu, S &Tansel, S 2006, ‘Job satisfaction in Britain: individual and job related factors’,
Applied Economics, vol. 38, pp. 1163-1171