HR Design Decisions – Southwest Airlines
Design Decisions
| Choices | Analysis of how well each choice works | |||
| View of employees | South-West Airlines should view their employees as assets and not a cost that is expensive to maintain. Even though labor costs the organization as part of the revenue proceeds will compensate workers, their contribution cannot be overlooked. It is paid employees that help an organization make sales, attend to customer complaints, and advertise its products (Noe et al., 2020). If Southwest Airlines wants to remain profitable in the industry, it should treat workers as assets to help it achieve its set objectives in the long and short term. Therefore, the organization should perceive staff as assets for the reasons described and not a dispensable cost. | |||
| Employees as expenses | ü Employees as assets | |||
| Compensation | South-West Airlines should set its compensation to match that of the current market. Setting workers’ pay to mirror current competitors’ pay limits the susceptibility to high turnover from dissatisfied employees. This aspect would be experienced if Southwest Airlines adapted the below-market payment structure (SHRM, 2021). South-West Airlines could also embrace the competitive workers’ compensation technique, but this would exhaust its finances. The organization would also have to neglect other critical aspects, such as product development, to pay workers above the market rate; hence, this structure is not recommendable. | |||
| Below market | ü Competitive | Above market | ||
| Training and Development | South-West Airlines should adapt the planned training and development strategy to avoid interrupting employees when working. Telling workers spontaneously to abandon their duties to attend training would make them irritable, primarily if they were working on a critical project that needed their full attention (Noe et al., 2020). Training and development should be planned so that workers have ample time to assign their critical duties to other colleagues to clear their schedules so that they can attend sessions. | |||
| Spontaneous | ü Planned | |||
| Job Descriptions | South-West Airlines should give new hires specific job descriptions as they explain the sub-tasks they would be required to perform. If the organization adapts the general design, it would give employees basic details about their roles, work stations, compensation, and expectations (Noe et al., 2020). These details are insufficient in helping a worker perform their roles effectively, thereby necessitating for them to be given a specific job description by their employer. | |||
| ü Specific | General | |||
| Recruitment | South-West Airlines should embrace internal and external recruitment as they are advantageous in different capacities. The organization can perform internal recruitment by promoting or transferring employees to new positions advertised. This method of hiring is beneficial as Southwest Airlines will use less funds, time, and resources to access the new worker (Noe et al., 2020). However, internal recruitment means that a vacant position left by a worker must be filled, and this becomes frustrating when the employee is skilled and replacing them is difficult. In this case, Southwest Airlines may consider recruiting workers externally so that they do not experience problems replacing existing talent within the organization. | |||
| External | ü Mixed | Internal | ||
| Onboarding – Socialization of new employees | New employees should socialize extensively to help them learn South-West Airlines’ culture and policies quickly. If the above hires are limited, they will have a problem performing their roles and interacting with their colleagues because they will be half-trained, and this is problematic (Noe et al., 2020). However, if these workers are trained to be excellent team players and to conduct themselves ethically and professionally at work through extensive socialization, they will be well-prepared to handle their duties after their orientation period. | |||
| Limited | ü Extensive | |||
| Bargaining | South-West Airlines should have a collective bargaining approach to operations as it helps workers in the long run. Through the above method, the organization can be sure that it will be able to mitigate employee turnover because of issues such as dissatisfaction with the current compensation (Noe et al., 2020). Individual bargaining may not be effective at Southwest Airlines because of the few supervisors who oversee thousands of workers. Dissatisfied employees will likely quit work before they are able to get the attention of a supervisor, as South-West Airlines is a large organization. | |||
| ü Collective | Individual | |||
References
Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., & Gerhart, B. A. (2020). Human resource management: Gaining a competitive advantage (11th ed.). McGraw Hill Education.
SHRM. (2021, May 4). What are the advantages or disadvantages of a lead, match, or lag compensation strategy? https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/cms_024253.aspx
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Question 
Southwest Airlines is a well-known company featured in our textbook. Throughout the course, you will take on the fictional role of an intern at Southwest Airlines Human Resources. You will utilize the textbook and other professional resources to complete your assessments.
HR Design Decisions – South-West Airlines
Your first weeks on the job are filled with learning the ins and outs of Human Resources and the industry. Your manager informs you that one of your projects is to assist with a new HR strategy for the company. This strategy is broken down into 3 parts that you’ll work on throughout the course. They are:
- Examining current practices
- Talent recruitment and selection
- Strategy recommendation
Your first task for this competency assessment is to examine Southwest’s current HR practices, as reported in public sources.
Complete the worksheet with your review and rationale of the elements listed below to decide where Southwest Airlines’ HR practices fall.
- Employees as expenses vs. employees as assets
- Compensation below market, above market, or competitive
- Spontaneous training and development or planned training and development
- Specific job descriptions or general job descriptions
- External or internal recruitment, or both
- Limited socialization of new employees or extensive socialization
- Collective bargaining or individual bargaining
Instructions
For each of these 7 HR design decisions, check the box for the choice that most matches where you think Southwest Human Resources falls. While the organization likely does not fall cleanly into one or the other extreme, pick the one that it more clearly resembles. Then, in the right-hand column, evaluate how well that choice works.
Items to consider, but not limited to, in your analysis, include:
- The impact on company performance of the approach
- Effectiveness of the approach
- The impact on employee morale and engagement of the approach
- Alignment with the strategy of the approach