<b>Book Extract: </b> Culture and recruitment

Delayering, team spirit and flexibility of work are some of the key elements of strategic human resource management at Nissan

Recruitment at Nissan is totally focused on getting the type of people who will fit in with the culture and be of the right quality. There are no compromises. The company will delay appointment rather than hire someone who does not fit the required characteristics of team working, quality consciousness and flexibility.

Nissan's version of strategic HRM has involved the devolution of many of the responsibilities conventionally assigned to indirect departments, such as 'Personnel', back to line managers. Production supervisors, for example, take part in the employee selection process and take responsibility for selecting the people who will work for them by personally giving them the job when the decision is made. This creates a bond between the individuals concerned, which is the first element in team building. These supervisors also communicate all matters of management concern on a face-to-face basis to the team, they carry overall responsibility for building-in quality to the product and they ensure continuous improvement (kaizen) of both quality and productivity. Attendance and timekeeping are also the responsibility of the supervisor, as is coordination of on-the-job training to ensure a matrix of skills in the team, the responsibility for cost control at the point of production and doing minor fixes to production line equipment to keep the process flowing.

A sense of 'oneness' is engendered through the adoption of common terms and conditions of employment that apply to all employees includ ing directors. The argument goes, why should a cleaner get less holiday entitlement than a production worker or the managing director? Common terms and conditions covers not only annual leave, but it also extends to pension arrangements and a salary structure in which everyone is fairly placed. Salary ranges and progression on merit apply both to manual and white-collar workers, and advancement in each is based on objective assessments of performance applied uniformly to all.

A single integrated bargaining body exists on which all groups of employees are represented, thus supporting the 'one company' ethos, and this is reinforced in practical ways by, for example, the company having only one dining room in which everyone, including the managing director, takes his or her meals. Nissan has a formal relationship with a single trade union in a deal that recognises the union's support of the overall company policy and aims. Although the agreement embodies a referral to ACAS, the British Government's Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service, if there is a failure to agree, both the company and the union are fully committed to resolving disputes 'in-house'. By July 1987, some three years after commencement of operations, Wickens says that no-one had invoked the grievance procedure, citing as the reason the powerful effect of empowering line supervisors to resolve disputes at shop floor level.

There are no job descriptions at Nissan, just generic titles within grades. Management grades are Engineers, Supervisors and Controllers and manual workers have the titles Technician and Manufacturing Staff. This avoids demarcation disputes and encourages flexibility on the job as well as between generic titles and grades. If, for example, there is a temporary shortage of a manufacturing grade on the production line, indirect workers such as material handlers would be expected to help. Similarly, a properly trained white-collar worker would be expected to do the material handler's job.

The idea of flexibility is also extended to the numbers of people employed by the company at any one time. Nissan carries a core of employees in numbers sufficient to deliver functional flexibility but hires-in temporary workers to meet exceptional production demands such as seasonal fluctuations in sales. These employees are hired a month earlier than needed to ensure that they reach the required quality skill levels and attitude in good time. They also form a pool of potential candidates in the event that permanent jobs are on offer. As Wickens puts it, 'Once you start on the path to flexibility, there is no logical limit'.

Nissan is a classic example in an industrial environment of the application of modern strategic human resource management practice. Even today, its north-east England plant consistently ranks amongst the most productive car plant in the world.

Reprinted with permission 'Service-Ability: Create a Customer Centric Culture and Achieve Competitive Advantage'. Published by Wiley. Copyright 2013 Herbert Kevin robson. All rights reserved

SERVICE-ABILITY: CREATE A CUSTOMER CENTRIC CULTURE AND ACHIEVE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Author: Kevin Robson
Publisher: Wiley
Price: Rs 2,616
ISBN: 9781422144206

Bureaucracy constructs functional silos: Kevin Robson

  We need to create organisations that work like one big team where everyone is able to relate to everyone else and where information flows virtually instantly by short-circuiting formal processes, author Kevin Robson tells Ankita Rai

In the book you write, 'service-ability' needs a different organisational design. Can you explain how to get it right?

Many organisations seem to be constructed around the bureaucratic model put forward by Max Weber in the early twentieth century. He advocated the principle of 'rational/legal authority' - the way a modern state is run, under the rule of law accepted as legitimate by those subject to it. However, I believe organisations are pulsating, living organisms. They are not machines; they are not rational-legal, although, obviously there needs to be some understanding of what is right and wrong behaviour - that is a given. That means structuring them in ways that allow people to interact with one another up, down and across the organisation. Bureaucracy constructs functional silos. We need to create organisations that work like one big team: where everyone is able to relate to everyone else (and that, of course, also means smaller business units in the case of very large corporations), where information flows virtually instantly by short-circuiting formal processes. That is the sort of organisation that is inherently employee friendly.

How can companies contribute in making it easy for employees to engage with customers while working in a high pressure environment?

An organisation is not a building, or a brand, it is a group of people working towards a common goal. But employees need to know what that goal is, and that is the leader's job. The organisation, however, must articulate values about its approach, and the people need to buy in to those values. You cannot have, for example, an attitude at the top that only sees customers as economic units from whom as much money as possible is to be extracted. An organisation like that is not going to engage with its customers, or with its people, and so the employees will fail to achieve engagement with their customers, the organisation and its aims.

What are the key leadership skills required to foster the culture of 'service-ability'?

Trustworthiness. Leaders must be capable of being trusted by their people to make the right decisions and to stand by people who make mistakes. We talk about empowerment but leaders rarely empower their people to do the job their way. I used to say to my employees, "I know how to do your job, but you are the expert at it, because you do it every day. My only requirement of you is that the job gets done legally, morally and ethically, but getting the right result is up to you." You see, people are capable of making as good and as rational decisions as senior managers are.

Kevin Robson
Chartered Marketer & Organisational Development Consultant