3.3 Peer Review

According to the reviewer (see Appendix 2), the strength of this section would be the Well-illustrated and adequately addressed assertions, with abundant relative literature reviews cited. Besides, the assertions were developed to my own points of view with further cultivating. In addition, the good sentence structure and correct spellings and grammar give readers a smooth reading experience. On the other hand, the weaknesses of this section lie in the disorder of organization which results from the large page of reasoning and theory stating that made reader’s eyes tired, and in the lack of specific examples like the organizational cultures of specific countries or companies in the reasoning, which degraded the persuasion of this section. It was the defects of these two parts that made the reasoning less convincing.

From then on, I paid extra care to the organization, and evidence of composing an article. For example, sub-headings at each step of the developing of reasoning were applied, with which a cohesive logic as well as a clear structure came into being. In terms of evidence of composing an article, I became conscious about taking specific examples to support my assertions, which were critical to the reasoning and close to the topic.

Hopefully I formed the habit of searching for relative evidences to support my assertions gradually. In this course, I studied the evidences and learnt to cultivate their underlying implications and I’ve gained insights into some professional knowledge and deeper understanding of some cases of certain organizations. For example, my sorting of the case on the company of Unilever about its measures upon enterprise responsibility helped me to learn about the sustainable strategies of this company. Now I enjoy applying to evidences relative to the given topic, so as to make my assertions clearly delivered to readers, and meanwhile, it may help me to cultivate the topic further.

4 learning on Workforce Reduction Strategies

With reference to the delivered presentation on strategic human resource as well as strategies on reducing workforce facing the macro-environment of universal economic troubles, the two measures to reduce workforce costs in response to the economic troubles in terms of people and organization management will be introduced in the following sections, and they are vacancy management and reducing pay bill costs. Moreover, the responses of the employees as well as the organization towards these two measures will be discussed. Last but not least, recommendations on which measures to select and which to be lessly focused will be given in the following parts.

4.1 Vacancy Management

Vacancy management means making up the vacancies of the company according to the needs of the development of the company (Gary, 2008). The management of vacancies refers to a basket of policies associated with satisfying the vacancy-filling needs of the some departments. It is a method to help the relevant units to gain workforces by different approaches, which can be full time or part-time jobs and can be accomplished by internal personnel deployment or workforce-lending from other organizations. To be more specific, it is operated primarily by means of internal promotion, redeployment, and secondment. They will be introduced respectively in the following parts.

Internal promotion, like internal referral, is frequently used by many enterprises, for it is endowed with the evaluation and guarantee of the company on the candidate, which can help to avoid mistakes and improve efficiency of the interview (Raymond, 2008). It can ease the organization that is in need of workforces of the burden of hosting a complex recruiting campaign. Instead, it can be relatively easier accomplished by internal mail reminders to show the vacancies and then it will attract candidates who are suitable for the job. Or, much easier, it can be a kind of direct promotion in that department, whose employees possess the equal right to compete for that vacancy.

And when it comes to redeployment, which refers to transferring employees from their original job to another position, or appointing them to finish additional tasks, organizations have to pay extra attention on choosing the right person, for it’s better that they know well about the candidates and at the same time they should be clear that whether the candidates accept the arrangement or not (Gary, 2008). It will win benefits for both of the employees and the organization if the two parties are satisfied with the redeployment and the efficacy the employee’s work meets with the needs of the organization, otherwise it may exert negative influence among the organization if the redeployed employee’s work performance is not satisfying.

Secondment involves in a transitional transfer of an employee to another job position of the same organization, so as to fulfill a specific goal in a fixed period of time (Buchanan and Huczynski, 1997). In terms of secondment, the organization is the proactive party who realizes vacancies and looks for candidates to fill the vacancies. In this way the organization realizes fluidity as well as self-efficacy inside itself with human resources fully utilized, and also it promotes the communication among its staff and motivates them to achieve higher job performance at the different position.