How Microsoft’s environmental factors impact the application of SHRM nowadays?

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How Microsoft’s environmental factors impact the application of SHRM nowadays?

1. Introduction to the case company

• Company description and HR issues

1. Microsoft’s SHRM in a contemporary environment

• Microsoft global strategy

• Microsoft SHRM strategy

• Microsoft people management strategy

1. Internal and External factors that impacts Microsoft’s SHRM these days

• Internal analysis (Culture, Contracts of employment, flexibility, Job design, Motivation)

• External analysis (knowledge economy, Changing workforce demographics, Industrial environment, New technologies)

1. Conclusion

• Advantages and drawbacks concerning the SHRM

• Microsoft’s SHRM new perspectives

1. References

I.        Introduction to the case company

Microsoft is a multinational technology company founded in 1975, nowadays it’s one of the leaders of the computing market and keep growing through the years. Microsoft got a huge structure so the way they manage people is essential to reach their goal in term of cost efficiency. According to Miller (1987:352) SHRM are those decisions and actions which concern the management of employees at all levels in the business and which are directed towards creating and sustaining competitive advantage. The challenge for Microsoft in forthcoming years is to identify all the environmental factors, new workforce and his technological needs to keep competitive on the market, for that a new human resources strategy has been established to keep a competitive edge.

II.        Microsoft’s SHRM in a contemporary environment

With the rise of new technology in households and companies, Microsoft must ensure a technological watch on the social and cultural impact of emerging technologies, as well as their effect on day to day life. They need to make their product and services stand out from their competitors, because the market evolves rapidly at the same time as the skills, this is necessary to maintain a viable company. For that they decided to create a differentiation strategy focus on the Windows Azure Stack which offer a whole new service, a Cloud service dedicated to the households and another one dedicated to the companies, both improved by their new Edge Computing system which using electronic devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets and sensors to improve the efficiency of the cloud. Their goal is to create a competitive advantage by providing a high-end service, especially for the companies which needs a secured data center able to share data between the same companies all around the world.

Microsoft strategy is clearly based on the knowledge economy, they need knowledge workers who are experts in their domain to be able to sell their new products, create software and manage them. ‘Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaption, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change.... Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.’ (Malhorta, 1998: 59), that’s why Microsoft settled a Contingency approach because knowledge workers are essential for wealth of the organisation, so SHRM follows the differentiation strategy of the company by matching it with employee’s skills. According to the Telegraph in UK around 70% of the 200,000 graduated IT and computing engineer have found a full-time job in 2015, and in India, according to quota there is 40% of the 1,141,575 graduated engineers which haven’t found any job in 2014. That means for Microsoft that there is a stronger competition in northern country to find the best knowledge workers, and in the BRICKS a huge amount of engineer seeking for a job, to differentiate they can use their reputation in working conditions to find the best knowledge workers and with that increasing number of engineers by only hire the best.

According to Microsoft HR website concerning the people management strategy, they decided to commit expert workers by selecting candidate who will remain with the company for long term to convert cost incurred during the recruitment process to an investment for the company. To hire the best workers such as a software design engineer for example, there is a hard selection with 3 recruitment interviews to sort the best. Microsoft to invest huge amount of money on employee training and development. Thanks to that an employee career at Microsoft is more than just a job and it has become a path to increase skills, knowledge and capabilities. According to Networld, Microsoft has been named as the best place to work in IT in 2015, and the company maintains just 5% of labour turnover, that's proof that the company want their employees to be involved. Microsoft made the choice to hire people early in their careers and train them to be experts in specific fields, such as engineering or business. Also, performance reviews are designed to fit with cooperation and competition among the employees and careers include generally numerous promotions into similar jobs with increasing responsibility during the whole career. They receive long-term training to develop strong expertise, skill and high compensation is usually included a good benefits package to retain employees in the organisation.

III.        Internal and External factors that impacts Microsoft’s SHRM these days

Internal factors

Culture:

For the workers of Microsoft, their personality is highly competitive. Microsoft have the culture of competition so the people who are working in a competitive culture will become competitive. If they are not competitive when they are coming into the company, the culture will in any case make them competitive. As they are competitive, they know how to get money from customers by creating the most efficient product. Microsoft has always had an extremely competitive culture. When the company introduces new products on the market, they always make a huge amount of sales, and the team which created the products did not meet to celebrate because that’s normal for them, but they are trying to find what could have been done better just after the launching. The CEO Satya Nadella drive a culture of innovation and vision. Workers have always been looking for creating the best products. But Microsoft has been accused by seven current and former employees of racism, claiming that because they are black skinned they were less paid than white people and suffered of racial harassment. So, it remains some cultural issue such as racism, it’s clear that the competitive environment contributes to conflicts and it’s possible that some people consider themselves as “elites” and want to eliminate the potential competitors, and racial discrimination could be a mean to do that.

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