Flexibility in Employment Policy
Rapidly changing environment organizations require flexible employment policies to meet the needs of their business, The process of flexible employment policies can be described as the design, development and mainte¬nance of a system of coordinated activities in which individuals and groups of people work cooperatively under leadership towards commonly understood and accepted goals, and these activities can be easily changed according to environmental changes.
The process of flexible employment policies involves the grand design or redesign of the structure, but most frequently it is concerned with the organization of particular func¬tions and activities and the basis upon which the relationships between them are managed. The organizations are not static thing. Changes are constantly taking place in the organization itself, in the environment in which it operates, and in the people who work with. According to the recent surveys: "Some of the larger countries, such as Germany and Italy, have experienced a growth of more flexible forms of employment, while in France, Spain and the United Kingdom the growth of flexibility has been outpaced by the growth of "standard" forms of employment" (7th European Regional Meeting in Budapest, 2005).
Flexible workforce can be illustrate as multiple job holding and rigid formal relations, a greater incidence of part-time. For instance, Viacom, the giant media company, follows flexible employment policies in order to meet the needs of its customers and employees, and remain profitable in hugely competitive environment. Demographic changes in the society forces Viacom to find new ways in planning and organizing activities, taking into account flexible employment policies and their impact on leading and controlling processes. Successful flexible employment policies is important for Viacom because it plays a major and continuing role in the lives of people, especially with the growth of large-scale business organisations and the divorce of own¬ership from management.
Television and other media becomes a necessary part of a society which is also diverse, and serve many impor¬tant needs. In planning, Viacom establishes a set of defined standards of flexible policies against which the level of success can be determined. They include part time and full-time employment, flexible payment and social protection policies.
This includes measurements by which the degree and quality of goal achievement are determined. Planning of any activity is based on the needs of a particular group involved in this process. It takes account of gender and racial differences, age and status priorities. The objective of the planning process is to provide equal treatment for employees. To succeed on the global scale, Viacom manages cultural diversity and finds appropriate solutions .
It is important to note that every role is basically a set of expectations. These expectations are often implicit - they are not defined in the contract. Basic models of motivation such as expectancy theory and operant conditioning maintain that employees behave in ways they expect will produce positive outcomes. But they do not necessarily know what to expect. Typical contracts, however, are incomplete due to bounded rationality, which limits individual information seeking, and to a changing organizational environment that makes it impossible to specify all conditions up front (Campbell, 1997).
B. Different forms of flexibility have been introduced because economic changes require different workforce able to meet its needs of different organization. Recent years, the more difficult is to organize the environment the more power, responsibility and resources the human resources department needs. Traditionally, women and minorities occupied lower-paying positions and found considerable barriers to entering the labor market. This situation has been changed, because of flexible policies implemented by many organizations and in countries.
Flexible employment policies are necessary tools because of the nature of tasks they involved. For instance, "Flexibility and part-time work under regimes of significant protective and regulatory conditions such as minimum wage legislation is still a feature that is uniquely characteristic of the highly developed industrial economies" (Bharat, Lundall, 2004).
These features are being gradually reproduced in the newly industrializing economies as well but there has as yet been no systemic fervor on the part of the states within these economies to regulate these aspects of employment relations. If corporations are not able to put their policy into practice, it means that in some years they will be unable to operate on the global market. For instance, "Today's American workplace is dramatically different and more complex than the workplace of two generations ago." (Flexibility, Choice Are Critical needs, 2002).
Each difference is recog¬nized as a force within individuals that motivates their behaviors within the workplace. However, even within the U.S. workforce, researchers keep in mind that there are subcultures that can influence behavior. So, one of the important issues in flexible employment policies implies an attempt to understand behavior in the workplace. If this criterion is not met, it can lead to conflicts on all organizational levels. "economies, usually after the limits of further agrarian expansion have been reached as well as a reduction in agricultural sector employment has occurred, flexibility has generally" (Bharat, Lundall, 2004).
Different stages of economic development is another reason which explains the necessity of different forms of flexible employee policies. These changes play in determining the allocation of resources and the distribution of national product. Markets function without conscious con¬trol because individuals take their pri¬vate decisions in response to publicly-known signals such as prices, while these signals in turn respond to the collective actions entailed by the sum of al! individual decisions; in short, the price system is an automatically functioning social-control mechanism. For instance, "Wage reduction when the economy is below its full capacity level does not automatically lead to full employment from the supply side. Indeed, unemployment may rise due to lower effective demand at a lower real wage level, leading to a point at which macroeconomic tightening will lead to heavy costs on the labour market" (van der Hoeven, Taylor, 2001). This allow economists to compare differ¬ent values at any point in time. It is important to note that growth depended on the proportion of productive to unproductive labour. Frugality diminished the amount spent on personal services and increased the capital available to employ people in the division of labour.
The importance to have different forms of flexible employment policies is explained by the necessity to formulate a specific economic policy, according to economic fluctuations, and see that procedures to carry it out are effected. It general, organizations are functional responsibility for human resources. A logical approach to the consideration of this function is to look first of all at the problem of overall company organization and manpower planning, then the operations necessary to implement flexible employment policies.
C. Flexible employment policies are aimed to optimize the processes involved, remembering that whatever struc¬ture evolves it will be contingent on the environmental circumstances of the organi¬zation, and one of the aims of organization is to achieve the 'best fit' between the structure and these circumstances. An important point to bear in mind is that the organizations consist of people working more or less cooperatively together.
Inevitably, and especially at managerial levels, it may have to be adjusted to fit the particular strengths and attributes of the people available. The result may not conform to the ideal, but it is more likely to work than a structure that ignores the human element. It is always desirable to have an ideal structure in mind, but it is equally desirable to modify it to meet partic¬ular circumstances, as long as there is awareness of the potential problems that may arise. For instance, "Under the Employment Act 2002, a substantive employee may request flexible working if they have been working for the Trust for 6 months and they are making the request for flexible working in order to care for someone who, at the time of application" "Flexibility of Employment: Work Life Balance, n.d.).
Bearing in mind the need to take an empirical approach to organizing, as suggested above, the aim of the police design could be defined as being to optimize the arrangements for conducting the affairs. It was found that: "Flexible countries have high employment rates for youth as well as a high rate of transformation of temporary jobs into permanent jobs. Over a period of three years, around 65 per cent of temporary jobs in Denmark and 55 per cent in the Netherlands were transformed into permanent jobs" (7th European Regional Meeting in Budapest, 2005).
Organizations, in effect, commenting on the factors affecting organization structure. All organizations have some form of more or less formalized structure which has been defined as comprising all the tangible and regularly occurring features which help to shape their memberss behaviour. Structures incorporate a network of roles and relationships and are there to help in the process of ensuring that collective effort is explicitly organized to achieve specified ends. "This is done either by recurring to more flexible contracts and the extension of social protection to those flexible forms, while employment protection at the company level was maintained (Balancing Flexibility, 2005).
Fundamentally, the contract within flexible employment policies expresses the combination of beliefs held by employees what they expect of their jobs. It can be described as the set of reciprocal but unarticulated expectations that exist between them, "which need to be identified to allow and ensure a balance between labour market flexibility and job security" (Balancing Flexibility, 2005). The notion of a contract implies that there is an unwritten set of expec¬tations operating at all times.
It is possible to conclude that economic changes require a new look at how employment practices work. Flexible employment policies are able to meet the need of organizations and employees proposing opportunities for both, and can be successfully used in any type of organization at any stage of its economic development.