Changing attitudes, values and motivations are now the major issues before the organizations. Through appropriate HRD interventions, organizations can turn such change into advantages, ensuring quality of work life and keeping pace with the changing human expectations. The following areas of attitudinal changes require HRD intervention.
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(a) Attitudes towards perceived threats to trade union legality and other large scale efforts to reduce trade union power or cohesion
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(b) Attitudes towards methods of wage negotiations, whether by collective or local bargaining
(c) Attitudes towards working conditions and any administrative machinery for the discussion or regulation of such conditions
(d) Attitudes towards workers’ training or promotion and towards education, in general, as means of improving management and industrial skills
As explained earlier, economic restructuring, market globalization, international quality system standards, etc., have, inter alia, prompted the Indian organizations to go for radical organizational restructuring, which among others calls for the adoption of TQM principles in managing the human resources. TQM, inter alia, calls for total employee involvement (TEI), employee empowerment, development of small group activities (quality circle forums), value engineering teams, etc.
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To translate the TQM requirements into corporate practices, therefore, requires a lot of attitudinal changes at the top like, developing flatter type of organization, delayering delegation and information, organizational culture, where every employee needs to be considered as a member of a well-integrated family. To infuse these attitudinal changes both at the top and at down the level, it is necessary to adopt following HRD strategy.
(a) Employee Empowerment:
Empowerment is to give everyone—instead just people with certain positions or certain job titles—the legitimate right to make judgement, form conclusions, reaches decisions and then act. Empowerment, therefore, calls for employee participation in day- to-day problem solving and innovation. Traditional participative forums (Works Committee, Joint Consultative Machinery, etc.,) restrict employee participation in operational areas.
However, empowerment demands employee participation in each and every corporate function, so much so as to accept that the employee is not a mere seller of his time and labour for a contracted sum of money. The empowered employee acquires necessary skill and authority to make decision concerning quality and productivity. They initiate changes on their own. Empowerment changes attitude of the employee as it develops employee ownership and commitment.
(b) By Promoting Quality Circles and Developing the Culture of Total Participation:
This strategy is used to infuse attitudinal changes and to facilitate personal involvement of employees.
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Quality circles (QC) have been defined originally by JUSE (Japanses Union of Scientists and Engineers) as a small group of workers, voluntarily performing quality control activities within the workshop to which they belong. These small groups, with voluntary participation of each and every member of the organization continuously engage themselves in promoting quality control activities.
They have the total participation of the members of the organization, irrespective of their hierarchical levels. Quality circles, in reality, encompass the concepts of self-development and mutual development and, at the same time, reinforce quality control techniques.
Even though the concept of quality circles originated in Japan to survive under compelling circumstances, it has now been expanded far and wide, cutting across cultural and ideological barriers. It has gained popularity gradually in most of the industrialized nations and among the developing nations of the world.
India, being one of the fast developing nations, is no exception. QC can be related to the increased employee motivation and productivity, and hence it is used as an important HRD tool in an organization. Total knowledge, skill, creative abilities, talents and aptitudes together with values, attitudes and beliefs of the workers and/or individuals of the organization represent the human resources in more aggressive terms. QCs ensure total involvement of employees through a number of small group forums.
Experience shows that many organizations have succeeded to improve their productivity by QC activities. Increased productivity can be achieved by the increased employee motivation, which QCs can better ensure than any other methods like complex planning, rigorous execution, etc.
(c) By Imparting Knowledge and Value-laden Attitudinal Changes in Training:
Organizations need to focus more on training on human relations areas like, leadership, communication, motivation, etc. Such knowledge inputs gradually reinforce the attitude of the employees.
(d) By Focusing More on Team Spirit:
To integrate employees with the organization, the focus should be team spirit. This initiative is further strengthened when we simultaneously ensure a sense of belongingness among the employees.