Introduction
Elite University is located in a western European country. In fact, the country has one of the strongest economy in Europe and its higher education system is considered as one of the most prestigious not only in Europe, but also in the World. However, for the last four decades, the government has been introducing market reforms in all sectors, including higher education, which were historically run by the public sector. Public funding for all these sectors has been shrinking, especially for last two decades.
Elite University is a collegiate university, which means, when defined as a mode of academic governance, “collective administration and shared decision-making by a group of peer, visible in university structure such as academic boards and various committees”(Kligyte & Barrie, 2006). The concept of collegiality is often contrasted with managerialism, where focus is more on centralised decision making by professional managers. Elite University is a world-class university which hosts colleges, private halls and the central University. Departments, research centres, museums and libraries consist the University. There are 42 colleges and 7 private halls (smaller colleges with less subjects) which are independently governed both financially and managerially, yet they are federally linked to the central administration.
Vision, mission, priorities
Vision: leading the world in research and education in a way which nationally and globally benefit society.
Mission: sustaining excellence in each field, maintaining and advancing itself remarkable with its historical roots, and enriching society at the regional, national and international level by its researches and graduates.
The colleges
The University
Congregation
Congregation is an authorized body of the University and it is highly involved in the crucial decision-making process. Congregation has some responsibilities:
Council
Primary body in the university which is responsible for implementation and advocacy of policy-making. This entity is responsible for promoting academic policy and strategy of the university. This Council consists of five major committees: Academic Committee, Administrative Committee, Personnel Committee, Planning and Resource Allocation Committee, and Research Committee.
Chancellor
The Chancellor, who is generally a well-known public figure elected permanently, is considered to be the head of the university, heading all major ceremonies.
Vice-Chancellor
The Vice-Chancellor maintains his position for five years and is the major officer of the university.
Pro-Vice-Chancellors
In Elite University, there are six Pro-Vice-Chancellors who focus on issues related to academic excellence; organizational development; education; human resource; planning and monitoring; and research. In addition, there are other ten Pro-Vice-Chancellors who hold unofficial positions to tackle many tasks on behalf of the Vice-Chancellor, such as representing Chancellor at degree ceremonies and heading electoral boards.
Elite University at a glance
There are around 24,860 students at Elite University, including 12,760 undergraduates and 11,550 postgraduates. Elite University is very competitive: around 20,130 candidates applied for around 3,520 undergraduate seats in order to get a place in 2015, meaning that Elite University usually receives around five applications for each place. The University spends around €8.4 million each year on outreach activities, which enables the university to reach around 80% of the country schools, in addition to the nearly €15.3 million of spending on financial support for undergraduates.
Graduate students compose around 46% of the total student population at Elite University. The University received over 26,400 applications for around 5,700 places within 330 different graduate degree programmes for entry in 2015-16. Very well-established scholarships attract the most talents around the world resulting in 63% of current graduate students come from outside the country.
Since the University has a collegiate system, the number of academics and individual tutor mentorship takes place. In order to manage this complex structure and highly talented students, the University employs around 2,000 academic staff, 5,000 researchers, 3,535 academic related staff and 3,250 support staff overall counting over 13,700, which makes the University one of the biggest employer in the region with highly competitive salaries.
Research Activities
The University is very much depended on external funding constituting the largest source of income which was 42% (€724.7m) of the total turnover of the University in 2014/15. Elite University steadily has the highest external research income comparing to any other universities in the country.
Funding
Elite University’s total income has reached around €1.8 billion by August 2015 increased by 21.7% comparing to the previous academic year. The biggest stake was generated by the external sources. On the other hand, government fund solely constitutes over 12% of the whole income of the University. Academic fees and other incomes are the other major source of income of the university which are together equal to around 33% of overall revenue. In 2015, Elite University had two different exceptional income comparing to the previous year. University Press contributed some €166 million to the budget. Moreover, by the Government’s tax incentive named ‘Research and Development Expenditure Credit (RDEC)’ helped Elite University generate around €118 million, which was the first time the University used this incentive to enlarge its budget.
Personnel Services
Personal Services in Elite University handle the tasks that are decided through Council's Personnel Committee when it comes to the strategic human resource development schemes, HR implementation processes, and review of HR policies and regulations related to the recruitment of all university staff. Personnel Services work closely with other departments to facilitate HR processes.
Strategic Plan of Elite University
One of the major challenges that many organizations face, including universities, is the process of alignment of strategic objectives with the processes of human resource department. As a matter of fact, human resource departments focus mainly on administrative tasks such as recruitment, personnel development, etc. without taking into consideration the strategic plan of the organization, which indeed require the involvement of employees. In the book ‘Strategy Safari’, the authors suggested ten types of schools of strategic managements. These schools are the Design School, the Planning School, the Positioning School, the Entrepreneurial School, the Cognitive School, the Learning School, the Power School, the Cultural School, the Environmental School, and the Configuration School. Within our HR strategic plan, we choose the configuration school which is mainly based on transformation of the current HR strategic plan in order to fit in the new priorities of the university. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to strengthen the alignment of HR processes with the strategic plan of the university.
Referring to Elite University’s strategic plan, there are two new priorities that the university is aspiring to achieve within the new strategic plan. The first priority is to enhance the university's position on the global market through the proactive commitment to initiate new ideas to promote the university worldwide. While the second priority is to strengthen the multidisciplinary approach of its degree programmes which increase the chance of collaboration within new field of studies.
HR Strategic Plan
In Strategic Plan, there are three commitments, which explicitly deal with HR issues. These commitments are following:
1. To hire and retain well-qualified staff from overseas if possible.
2. To boost diversity among staffing profile.
3. To develop all staff qualifications and skills through effective training opportunities and incentives.
The above mentioned three commitments and extensive consultation process led to five HR Objectives:
1. Recruitment of the best people – ensuring that University X is able to attract the highest quality people from the relevant employment market
2. Retention of talent– retaining the best people in the face of increasing international competition
3. Developing diversity- recruiting, retaining and promoting the very best people, whoever they are and ensuring equality of opportunity
4. People development– supporting people to improve their skills, knowledge and competencies.
5. Governance- ensuring good decision making processes on people issues and that our statutes, policies, procedures and resources relating to personnel issues are appropriate.
Implementation Plan
Attracting the best academic and administrative staff is critical for the Elite University to accomplish the vision of leading the world in research and education, as well as fulfilling the mission of teaching and research excellence and maintaining the position of a World class university. To achieve this strategic goal, we will implement the following plans. In the process of developing the action plans, the strategic group has consulted the University's Personnel database, heads of schools and departments, national and international data and report and been aware of the following challenges in academic profession that might hinder recruitment of the best academics. Metcalf, Rolfe, Stevens, and Weale (2005) and Santiago, Tremblay, Basri, and Arnal (2008) have listed the following factors. The first factor is low job stability, only a small proportion of academics have tenure, while most of them have the fix-term contracts. The second one is less competitive salaries compared to the private sector in some fields, such as engineering, IT, and business. Thirdly, it is perceived as slow and complicated promotion progress, making young career researchers less motivated to join academia. The fourth major problem is gender inequality. Another factor is job content, meaning the balance of teaching, research and administration in their overall work Responsibilities. On the other hand, some other factors could hinder the implementation process of HR strategy in general. Beer and Eisenstat (2000) have identified ‘Six Silent Killers’ that act as barriers to the full implementation of any kind of strategic human resource management(SHRM). The following are the obstacles to be considered:
● Top-down or laissez-faire senior management style
● Unclear strategy and conflicting priorities
● An ineffective senior management team
● Poor vertical commitment
● Inadequate leadership skills
Action plan 1 – Review recruitment process
The revision of recruitment process is necessary to ensure flexibility, meet the staffing needs in terms of quality, quantity and time. The following actions will be taken:
● Separate process for academics and administrative staff. It is essential to keep in mind that the two groups of employees need different process of recruitment due to the different in the nature of their work, their expectations, and their profiles.
● Analyse applicant pools. It is important to understand the patterns of our potential candidates to apply appropriate strategies for advertising our jobs, understanding their expectations to make our university a more attractive workplace, employing different interview practices to different groups of candidates.
● Develop guideline and framework to support head of schools and departments to make recruitment strategies for their teams. This guideline includes a clear and succinct recruitment processes for different types of staff; how to identify long-term recruitment needs in terms of quantity, skills and competences needed; how to develop job description; career path for different job levels; target of opportunity hires that allows schools and departments to recruit highly talented scholars in an ad-hoc manner according to their availability instead of going through the standard process.
● Human Resource Department takes the coordinating responsibility. Head of schools and departments are responsible for participating in the process, developing their recruitment strategy and disseminating the strategy to their staff. Staff at schools and departments are encouraged to participate in the process.
Action plan 2 – Sustain the University’s Prestige
It is very important to sustain the university reputation as a world-renowned workplace that fosters highest quality of education and scholarship. Thus, in order to attract the best staff, we must ensure that our university offers an inspiring, equal and attractive workplace and communicate that image well to the international pool of potential candidates. The following actions will be taken.
● Create equal opportunity for female staff, especially in senior positions. If the Elite University is successful in building a reputation of a women-friendly working environment, it will be able to recruit the best female academics. This will be achieved by recruiting and appointing more female academics to high level positions, providing them with leadership trainings to prepare them for taking the leading positions. Head of schools, faculties are encouraged to recruit more women staff. Job descriptions must state clearly the non-discrimination policies. Female applicants are encouraged to apply for all ranges of job titles, including the highest positions.
● Support integration for new staff, especially foreign staff and those transfer from other profession to academic profession. It is important to reach out to international labor market so as to recruit the best talented for a large pool of competitive applicants. Making foreign staff comfortable and quickly engage in the University’s culture is important both to attract international candidates and increase their productivity and retention. Furthermore, statistics of staff profiles shows an increasing proportion of academics with previous experience from other sectors. The transition from other sector into working in academia is critical for their engagement in the new job. This will be achieved through provision of campus visits for short-listed candidates, peer-mentoring programs in which experienced staff help new staff in career.
● Create employment opportunity and career development for early-career researcher. Taking into account of world-class education, we provide our PhD students, it is strategic objective to recruit our PhD students as faculty members. In such cases, the mentoring programs will be useful to help young academics integrate into new positions.
● Other measures to enhance the attractiveness of our employment are related to our retention strategy. Such measures include: Anticipating and accommodating employees' needs, providing career support and career development opportunities, negotiating balanced working hours between teaching and research, developing and implementing the Leadership Development Program for highly capable staff for senior positions, promoting the Dual Career Program to recruit employees’ partner or spouse, ensuring staff’s access to best quality facilities for teaching and research, including libraries, laboratories, lecture rooms, workstation, sport and recreation services, day-care centre.
All schools and departments are important parts of this action plan.
Action plan 3 - Diversifying channels of recruitment
It is to increase effectiveness of the recruitment process, reaching out to a broader pool of candidates and be able to respond quickly to staffing needs of the University. The recruitment channels include, but not limited to:
● Enhancing recruitment through Search Committee. The Committee is responsible for building a list of potential highly capable scholars and administrators, particularly for senior positions. It requires involvement of head of schools and departments, senior academics and all staff to propose candidates from their personal contacts and networks.
● Strengthen our relationship with Professional Associations and reach out to new partnerships in order to widen our network and chances of attracting bright candidates.
● Implement Dual Career Program where we recruit staff’s spouse or partner
● Establish Internal Temporary Staff Unit for immediate needs and giving new employment chances for current staff
● Establish funds to reward units that successfully recruit strong faculty members that contribute significantly to enhancing the University’s values.
This action involves Human Resource Department at the coordinating role, head of schools and departments and active participation of all staff.
Evaluation of HRM processes
Assessing HR performance is a crucial aspect that universities have to assign as a major task of the HR department. However, it is difficult to measure productivity and effectiveness of HR processes. Setting up the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is a mean to measure the performance of employees and HR processes within the university. There are common KPIs that are used in organizations such as are staff satisfaction, processes quality, staff engagement, career development, attrition rate, profit per employee, average income of employee, absenteeism and others (Vanderstraeten, 2015). However, it is significant to take into consideration the HR strategic objectives when creating these KPIs. Eckerson (2009) has provided a good description of what can establish good KPIs. Based on his research, he identified some effective KPIs which other scholars such as Gabcanova (2012) and Osei-Owusu (2013) have also endorsed. These KPIs are given below:
Sparse: The fewer KPIs the better.
Drillable: Users can drill into detail.
Simple: Users understand the KPI.
Actionable: Users know how to affect outcomes.
Owned: KPIs have an owner.
Referenced: Users can view origins and context.
Correlated: KPIs drive desired outcomes.
Balanced: KPIs consist of both financial and non-financial metrics.
Aligned: KPIs do not undermine each other.
Validated: Employees cannot circumvent the KPIs.
In Elite University, we established a set of KPIs that effectively measure several HR processes to ensure better performance and more productivity. The following are the established set of KPIs based on the HR strategic objectives and are given for each Action/Key Strategic Area (KSA), which we have given in implementation plan:
Action plan 1 – Review recruitment process
Employees’ satisfaction survey
Revised retirement policy
Performance of new recruits
Quantity of applicants
Time required and used to fill openings
Cost per applicant
Number of communications (town halls, walk-arounds, emails, calls, logins) increased
Degree of decentralisation and flattened management hierarchy.
Percentage of strategic competencies available
Action plan 2 – Sustain the University’s Prestige
Quality of applicants
Percentage of employees receiving regular performance and career development reviews
Percentage of female employee per year
Performance appraisals
Employees’ satisfaction survey
Evaluation of training activity (qualification index)
Action plan 3 - Diversifying channels of recruitment
Percentage of internal recruitment
Percentage of employees’ retention
Percentage of talent retention
Discussion & Conclusions
In order to achieve our mission we, at Elite University, clearly identified two priorities: global reach and networking, communication and interdisciplinarity. Based on these priorities, we developed our strategic plan, which was comprised of twelve commitments. Three of those commitments were exclusively related to personnel issues. Through extensive consultation process within Personnel Services and with other departments, schools, and Personnel Committee, relevant data and the three strategic commitments, which were related to personnel matters, we developed human resource strategy for our university. Thus we achieved the vertical integration of human resource strategy with our strategic plan. We further translated our human resource strategy into five objectives: recruit, retain, develop, diversify, and governance of personnel services. In order to successfully implement the recruitment strategy and achieve the five HR objectives, we proposed three important actions.
First, to review the recruitment policies and processes in order to expedite the recruitment process, remove the bottle necks and make the process more transparent and efficient. We decided to separate the recruitment process of academics and researchers from administrative staff, identify trends of applicants by analysing data, develop guidelines for heads of schools and departments to make recruitment strategies for their teams and finally assigning the human resource department mainly a coordinating role.
Second, to sustain university’s profile and prestige by meeting the recruitment needs of the university; thus we decided to ensure equal opportunities for females, support and integration of new staff including foreign staff and the staff which has come from other industries. In addition, we have created employment opportunity and career paths for young researchers and created plan for HR marketing and ensuring retention of our workforce.
Third, to diversify the channels of recruitment in order to hire academics and researchers from all over the world. We have decided to constitute a Talent Search Committee and Internal Temporary Staff Unit for internal hiring. Moreover, we have decided a Dual Career Program and a reward system for those units which are efficient in their recruitment processes.
As it is very important to evaluate the strategic and implementation plan, both ex-ante and ex-post, we have therefore identified Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for all of our actions. There are nine, six and three KPIs for our Action 1, Action 2 and Action 3 respectively. We have ensured that these KPIs cannot only be easily measured, but also their measurement should not create administrative or financial burden.
Finally, it worth mentioning that our university is the only university in the country where collegiality as a form of academic governance still exists. However, in addition to collegiality managerialism has also made some inroads. It can be argued in that Elite University is a classic example of consistency and change, where collegiality in its varied forms, such as collegial governance at college levels, going hand in hand with new managerialism. It is also an interesting case, because New Public Management, in spite of its success in other sectors of economy, could not be fully implemented in one of the elite institution this country. Strategic HRM, which emphasize on a proactive approach, is one of the tool of managerialism and need a careful implementation in a collegial environment. In Elite University, faculty, schools, and other researchers are involved in different processes to achieve strategic objectives. Personal Services at its best can play only coordinating role in a collegiate university. Thus strategic human resource management cannot be implemented in its letter and spirit here.
Reference
Beer, M., & Eisenstat, R. A. (2000). The silent killers of strategy implementation and learning. MIT Sloan Management Review, 41(4), 29.
Eckerson, W. W. (2009). Performance management strategies. Business Intelligence Journal, 14(1), 24-27.
Gabcanova, I. (2012). Human resources key performance indicators. Journal of Competitiveness, 4(1).
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Kligyte, G., & Barrie, S. (2006). Collegiality versus managerialism" the binary that binds us.
Metcalf, H., Rolfe, H., Stevens, P., & Weale, M. (2005). Recruitment and retention of academic staff in higher education: DfES Publications.
Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (2005). Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Mangament. Simon and Schuster.
Osei-Owusu, M. (2013). The Essential Elements in Defining and Selecting KPIs. Available at SSRN 2240886.
Righeimer, J. P., & Energy, M. Aligning Human Resources & Strategic Plans.
Santiago, P., Tremblay, K., Basri, E., & Arnal, E. (2008). Tertiary education for the knowledge society (Vol. 1): OECD Paris.
Vanderstraeten, A. (2015). The HRM Cockpit: an instrument for developing and evaluating sustainable HRM in an organization. Paper presented at the Sustainable HRM and Employee Well-Being.
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