Policies and Procedures: Managing Harbor Staff

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Abstract

There are considerable amount of pressure in organizations to raise performance and productivity and current trends indicate that the masters need to redesign and reorganize personnel into working groups or teams working towards a common goal rather than the pupils working as individuals.

Teamwork assists in reducing cost, improving quality, and increasing productivity and satisfaction. The issue of employee performance has a strong basis upon organizational policies and procedures as opposed to only the leadership qualities. The nature of these rules or regulations helps in establishing the significance of a task and the importance of ensuring good results. Team leadership is integral to effective teamwork.

As Addison (1996, 5) arguments, most important element of the team is a leadership role because it hugely affects the team performance. According to Reid (1993, p. 91), leaders have the role of facilitating the behavioural change that assists in moulding individual trails into teams to achieve the set goals. In relation to the writing of Stott and Walker (1995, p. 16) it is necessary for a new senior leader to equip her/himself with necessary mechanisms, information and strategies of handling a new setting.

Thesis Statement

“Policies and procedures for employee management as opposed to self management” This paper is an analysis of the effect of implementing management policies and the procedures at a harbour, as well as their implication to future performance.

It is an analysis of the employee behavioural patterns in relation to the style of management and lastly it analyzes the available perspectives into controlling performance.

Objective/significance of the study

The main objective of the paper focuses on implementation of Harbour policies and procedures with the aim of enforcing employee performance and it is equally an analysis of the developmental problems associated with this style of management at a harbour.

Another significance of the study focuses on the global approach towards harbour management. The paper also forms an analysis over other probable choices in the subject matter. Are masters utilizing the appropriate measures to enhance performance? The analysis of what determines good guidance over customer services. Lastly, the research addresses the issue of utilizing the new professionally suggested measures to enhance employee performance.

The procedure of the study

The literature reviews will enable better understanding of the topic. Preparation of the research proposal over the chosen topic enhances and quantifies the research as a study topic and prepares for respondents.

Information collected tabulates and ranks the findings to broad areas and helps to narrow the scope to the objectives of the study analysis. The analysis then draws the conclusion from generally analyzed data in the literature review.

Purpose of the study

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the problem of employee performance to cover all customer needs and offer suggestions from the research on ways of reducing or eliminating this social problem.

Literature review

Duties of the Harbour Master

This is the person responsible for implementation of reasonable and practicable Harbour Board’s policies. She/he participates to preparation of the policies, subject to the employees’ requirements as well as the board of director’s tasks besides ensuring proper follow-up. The master ensures all harbour systems are working properly and enhance the necessary safety standards. The responsibility extends to ensuring all the marine workers understand individual responsibilities for their personal interest and that of the co-workers.

She/he ought to ensure systematic and accuracy of records inline with council procedures and this call for a bureaucratic role of encouraging the employees to actively get involved to meet performance requirements. The harbour’s board is responsible of all matters pertaining contracting but the master is in charge of the supervision.

As a manager, the master ought to set proper example to the employees on all maters pertaining performance management as a good leader does so by example. She/he is equally entitled to keeping abreast of development of rules, regulations and any legal requirement regarding employees. Beside other major responsibilities, she/he is also in command of regulating marine operations under the Harbour Docks Acts.

Policies and Procedures for Enhancing Harbour Employee Management

Beside the performance procedures, there are various harbour policies such as those of safeguarding the information of employees, ensuring their safety and privacy. Those governing performance entails:

Ways of determining the employment related actions and obligations through evaluation to ensure competence over the assigned field.
Having procedures to design, evaluate and administer compensatory and other human resource management programs.
The need to have rule that enhance integration of employee upgrading, retraining and evaluation programs
Ways of monitor and evaluate the conducts and performance of the employees
Procedures for keep an eye on customer satisfaction possibly by availing ways of getting feedbacks from the clients regarding services rendered.
Availing customer information, which is equally important for consultation regarding ones performance. This means that there should be measures of ensuring safe and accurate collection of such information.
Ensuring employees’ performance is highly dependent on the working environment and therefore there ought to be policies to enhance security, safety and health of the employees.
Policies to ensure proper, efficient, secure, flexible and accurate ways of data collection for instance availing business information such as those of potential customers, suppliers, contractors details, joint investors or business associates and employees performance details through the web for instance access.
Ensuring existence of rules to govern maintenance of past and present business records regarding joint ventures or partners, suppliers, investors, potential customers, associates and employees
Rules to govern auditing, financial records analysis, accounting and economical growth analysis procedures
Regulations that facilitate the Harbour’s communications, negotiations, transactions, meetings or conferences and compliance with the legal obligations

Precedence in policies and procedures

Considering that, the regulations are standard and applicable in the case scenario where the new Harbour Master finds employees’ self-management procedures in which case some duties remain unattended, the new manager ought to prioritize the imperative policies or procedures to implement immediately.

One of the most important policies regards performance. The increase of salary for the employees ought to be applicable, but the only bargain unit has its basis upon satisfied performance in terms of quality and quantity. The personnel policy and procedure committee determines the placement, eligibility for advancement in performance appraisal and are in charge of rating performance for satisfaction.

Every employee is governed by expectations specified in the job contracts thus failure to meet demands or to manage the personal duties automatically is determined and reported as an underperformance. Freedom of the employees does not facilitate personal definition and appointment of duties. Underperformance and negligence of duties assigned ought to suffer from penalties such as deductions of earnings or dismissal depending on the intensity.

Proper policies and procedures should support the performance based analysis, which ought to dictate that, if the employee fails to meet the job requirement rating, then the worker should not advance to the next level of career table, until the time they are able to earn the performance appraisal showing the ability to meet job satisfaction.

Insinuations for implementing policies and procedures to board and staff

Capacity planning and control

In employee management, capacity planning and control is an essential aspect. It entails the research techniques for addressing the issue of scheduling business applications, planning the allocation of resources, controlling performance through routing or queuing and having the problem solving techniques in place for various departments. (Vollmann et al, 38)

The planning and controlling approaches include optimization techniques. The function in this approach is diminishing or maximization of business elements, to meet the least expenditure objectives within a constrained operating environment. A big problem is broken down to ease complexity and thus speeding up computation. A problem can decompose to allow efficiency in and ability to handle the uncertainties adequately.

Secondly, dynamic approach allows the master to make decisions sequentially in a multi-stage pattern. A problem is recursively related to solutions to come up with most effective results or a conclusion. A complex problem can be decomposed to various sub-problems for individual employees to handle and the solution to one problem create a sequentially dependent framework such that the solution of a sub-problem emerges from the preceding solution meaning that the whole problem is one, broken into various parts but the preceding resolutions are independent of each other.

Sensitivity analysis

The other approach to problem solving entails sensitivity analysis. The master has to analyze hypothetically, logically or substantially, the most important functions of the harbour. This must be the key element of the business that triggers major changes in the business performance and examines the most important factors for the revolution.

The definition of this approach is a procedure of examining impacts over changes and their effects as outputs. (Dodds, 2008) One has to evaluate reasonable limits for change or the individual impact on other independent measures of business quality. This approach rarely features independent usage because it has the sole purpose of challenging other business points for optimal performance. Its main usage occurs after other approaches, to determine their viability or validity.

Probability and risk analysis

Lastly is the probabilistic and risk analysis approach. This represents a major departure from the main deterministic view. The analysis has a subjective basis on judgements made by the experts, business planners or analysts. The consideration entails correlations along with uncertainties to gauge cost and performance. (Carlberg, 24) Compared to deterministic or fixed-point approaches, the probabilistic approach offers additional information of chances and range sensitivity.

Professionally suggested measures for enhancing employee performance

These approaches entail some common techniques and the harbour master ought to base her/his decisions on the right method to implement, by checking on the primary functionality of optimisation or delineation of the differences in the approaches. They can also support their decisions on simulation based on the systems dynamics, analysis of scenarios, sensitivity and the probability of a risk. The last basis is upon decision analysis using various theoretic techniques. (Whetten, 32)

The main aim of these approaches is to analyse uncertainties in the harbour such as risks to develop comprehensive understanding on demands and create awareness within the harbour. Measuring capacity entails finding the distinction between the inputs or output measures of capacity. The best approach therefore finds the real capacity that depends on the exact mix of activities to be undertaken.

The effective capacity management is dependent on the disaggregate nature of the demand thus the reason for some adjustments to accommodate detailed planning.

Creating and managing a performance management culture

The main and frequently utilized measure of encouraging a performance culture in a firm entails methods of encouraging employees to question and seek guidance through departmental manages, workgroup heads human resource representatives or management. They should participate in decision-making and policy implementation procedures especially on matters concern with their performance requirements.

Leadership styles and discipline are the key defining elements for creation and management of a performing culture. Organizational culture is the systematic procedures regarding performance of duties. It is the guide of the employees’ thoughts, actions and feelings.

Policies and procedures are changes, decisions, agreements, commitments, creative ideas or plans focused upon a certain organization. Lack of proper management on this aspects or performance culture among employees’ means they become perplexed or stymie by some bureaucratic processes.

The culture has its basis on discipline, which promotes the decision-making and direct accountability over performance. With such discipline, there are clear expectations and commitments. There has to be management proactive measures to block abstractions of performance such as rewards thus the employees are truly engaged in their duties. Today emphasis on discipline has overthrown ancient style of “command and control” to enhance recognition of clear boundaries over the lines of duty and flexibility over performance.

Requirements for a disciplined and performing culture

Openness and reliance: – Existence of a trustworthy environment promotes acceptance, honesty, free interaction, group work, sharing of ideas and comments. This means that the organization is able to derive talents that are more valuable and promote competence or success.
Differences management: – A good working environment addresses conflicts and exposes the unfulfilled commitments. It provides alternatives and real opinions are encouraged.
Focus and simplicity: – Good policies and procedures are clear and precise. They define the requirements and expectations that are result driven. The results are not mutually exclusive but interdependence. In such scenarios, change brings about positive results.
Employees’ strengths: – The master should know and depend on the effectiveness and talents of the staff and has methods of eliciting them. This means that the employees focus more on learning and building on the strengths. Agility, confidence, speed and simplicity of the leader blend well with the technological leadership, financial and marketing ability to support the vision and mission of an organization.

Creating a performance management culture in the case scenario is not as important as implementing. When asked what made their competitive advantage, Michael Dell of Dell Inc stated the direct business model but was quick to emphasize on its execution since it existed for years. (Reid & Hubbell, 2005) Most people have the impression that a performing organization has highly hierarchical set of rules but it is not the case. The key determinants are clearly articulated strategies, disciplined personnel and clear core values.

In implementing the performance management culture, the harbour master should enforce the following:

Take and manage responsibilities by ensuring accountability of all the contributions by the employees to the success of the business. She/he should build consensus when required.
Continuously and constantly analyzing the needs of the customers, employees and other partners to ensure optimal satisfaction
Negotiating for clear expectations among employees in the aim of providing continuous feedbacks and guidance where required.
Periodically appraising performance where it deserves as a measure to investing in evident talents and plan for required successions.
Be reflective understand ones ambitions in order to guide others towards the same. A good manager seeks guidance over matters that may seem ambiguous or challenging and out of hand from the junior or senior co-workers.
Adopt a leadership system that encourage coaching with the aim of providing support for coherence, collaborations, communication and required change within the organization.
Providing measures that encourage and retains talent such as supportive and healthy cultures that helps to improve productivity, encourage innovation and leverage existing performance spirit.

Research indicates that most employees when given the chance would use it to explore better opportunities and demonstrate their competence. They are ready to learn and thus contribute more because they will be focusing on the best performance. They are in need of listening to respecting leader who is ready to support change and an environment that supports service excellence.

The degrees of preference for these aspects are quite different among individuals but a common phenomenon among them. A master who is in a position to respond to these needs is able to enhance performance culture among them.

The influences of human performance are interdependent and the combination gives the desired performance, therefore creation of a performance culture requires management of knowledge, feedback, motivation, recognition, skills, rewards, accountability and influence in the work environment. The benefits are for the individual, workgroup or the entire enterprise.

Conclusion

Today integration of various approaches is in use at most harbours with the aim of meeting the unique specification of a certain demand and at the same time integrates all of them to function as a single unit without leaving some tasks unattended. Arguably, the best fitting approach to most harbours would be dynamic approach to solutions incorporated with sensitivity analysis.

The objectives of this study were to establish policies and procedures and relate the effects on productivity, performance and interaction. Short term and long-term impact on company survival on all fronts is a likely cause for concern. To establish the most viable alternatives to the harbour performance entails either applying works sharing, communicating to employees about impeding tasks or engaging the employees in various duties without prior information.

These are the viable alternatives for a newly appointed harbourmaster. This will help define company strategy and in adopting the most viable methods of either to enhance employees’ performance level or work sharing as the best alternative.

However, this research is not without limitations. Key among the limitations is the demographic diversity of employees, and political influences and consideration of environmental factors. In addition, company management may not divulge sensitive information for implementation of the policies. In addition, the likely impact on employees subjected to such kind of changes and the impact on productivity and company good will on a global scale.

Works Cited

Addison, B. Team dynamics. Melbourne: Nelson. 1996.

Carlberg, Conrad. “Business analysis “. (Second Ed) Que-Consumer-Other Series. Que Publishers, 2002.

Dodds, B. Pandemic Planning and Business Continuity. 2008, March 31 Retrieved from https://ezinearticles.com/

Reid, Joanne & Hubbell, Victoria, “Creating a performance culture” IVEY Management Services Ivey Publishing, Ivey Management Services London, Ontario March/April 2005.

Reid, H. Managing teams in the workplace. 1993 Retrieved from American Management Association Web site: https://www.amanet.org/

Stott, K. & Walker, A. Teams, teamwork and teambuilding. New York: Prentice Hall. 1995.

Vollmann, Thomas. E., Berry, William L., Whybark, Clay. D. Editor. “Manufacturing Planning and control systems for supply chain management” The McGraw-Hill Publisher/Irwin series, 2005.

Whetten, Kim. S., “Developing Management Skills” Pearson Education Publishers, 2002.

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