A concrete example: Liège university hospital
Liège’s university hospital was recently the subject of analysis by François Pichault. A new human resources management model was required for this establishment, the biggest employer in the Province of Liège. "The question quickly arose concerning the vision and the model to be applied to the institution", François Pichault remembers. Even though there is only one institution involved, there are nevertheless several types of profession: administrative, technical, nursing and medical staff, etc., with a job that involves procedures for some, or a very prevalent hierarchy and protocol for others. “However, even if administrative and nursing roles may be perceived as different professions, they are actually quite close in organisational terms and, for these two, we could imagine a human resources management convention which is known as ‘objectivising’ in our jargon, clear rules, seniority, with salary scales, training plans for everyone, etc.”, François Pichault stresses.
On the other hand, the conventions are different for medical staff. “I can see two reasons for this: first of all, peers play a greater role and, then, there is a certain desire for independence.” Indeed, any efforts by the institution to take control of working hours would be very quickly rejected; as regards the choice of a departmental head, they are elected by peers. This is referred to as a ‘deliberative’ convention.
For the managers, we can envisage yet another convention, known as ‘individualising’, which is more focused on everyone’s performance, personalised training plans, variable pay, etc.
The implementation of this mixed model, composed of several conventions, took four years.
A number of obstacles
As we can see, the implementation of a new human resources management system is a long process but, above all, it is not a given. There are a number of obstacles, the first of which is overcoming formalisation. “I often remind people that SME represent 75% of our economy; difficulties arise when an SME grows too quickly and doesn’t coherently integrate human resources management. Flanders has done far better at managing the professionalisation of growing SME, while in Wallonia, it remains within the realm of paternalism and the discretionary in many cases."
Another obstacle concerns the individualisation of the HRM system practiced in the name of modernisation. The best example is the Copernic reform of the federal government, initiated in 2001 and abandoned six years later. Here, the lack of coherence between the objectives assigned to the top managers and the bureaucratic basis was blatant: “in a way, there is a discrepancy between HRM that makes a point of putting a lot of effort into its objectives and a structure that remains completely unchanged, rigid and bureaucratic. This is what caused the reform to fail, leading to a great deal of money being wasted and disappointment.”
Finally, it is difficult to show the impact of good human resources management on a company’s or SME’s success. “For more than 20 years", François Pichault observes, “many studies have tried to establish a correlation between the efforts made in terms of human resources management and a structure’s performance.” And the lack of a unanimous opinion is striking. The researcher sees several reasons for this, beginning with what is called ‘company performance’ and the way it is quantified. “You may have invested heavily in HRM and, at the same time, experienced a sharp rise in your raw materials’ costs, thus severely crippling your business.”
Therefore, it is very difficult to establish a relationship between these two notions. “The configurational approach recommends a vision of HRM as a series of interrelated variables rather than a series of isolated initiatives...”, concludes François Pichault.
