A Case Study of Human Resources in General Motors Corporation

[Introduction] A company is made up of people. In today's changing environment, human capital has become the core competitiveness of enterprises, and it is imperative to establish a good human resource management system. How to select and train suitable talents is not simply copied from other companies, but needs to be explored according to the characteristics and practice of the company. Let's take a look at a series of unique human resource management practices of Shanghai General Motors.

With the driving of the first pile foundation, Shanghai General Motors Co., Ltd., a joint venture between Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation and American General Motors Company, officially settled in Shanghai in June1997+1October. Tight construction, tight recruitment and tight production, Shanghai GM has developed into a leader in Shanghai's automobile industry in just a few years. The success of Shanghai GM is self-evident, and all this has been completed by a series of human resource management measures since the establishment ceremony of Shanghai GM. Today, I will use the successful experience of Shanghai GM in openly recruiting employees from scratch, objectively and fairly hiring employees, reasonably training employees and comprehensively and accurately assessing employees to analyze the unique human resource management practice process of Shanghai GM. This paper expounds from five aspects: human resource planning, attracting talents, evaluating employment mode, building talent highland, and employee performance evaluation in two-way communication.

[Human resource planning]

Human resource planning is the main component of human resource management. The successful implementation of many human resource management practices depends on careful human resource planning. Through the human resource planning process, an organization can determine the skill set it needs in the future, and then use this information to make recruitment, selection, training and development plans. Unless the company makes an effective strategic plan and links its human resources development plan with it, its human resources development work will not realize its maximum potential.

The formulation process of strategic planning generally includes four parts: determining the mission of the organization, inspecting the environment of the organization, inspecting the strategic objectives, and proposing a detailed strategic plan.

Shanghai is taking off and Pudong is developing. Shanghai GM chose this opportunity to take root in Shanghai. The aim of Shanghai GM is: "Relying on a well-trained staff with a sense of mission and team spirit, implementing the principle of lean management, focusing on continuous learning and active innovation, and providing users with world-class products and services safely, Shanghai GM will become a leading domestic and internationally competitive automobile company in the 2/Kloc-0 century." First-class enterprises need first-class employees. Therefore, Shanghai GM's development vision and goal orientation are doomed to have high requirements for employees' quality: not only excellent production skills and management capabilities, but also outstanding self-motivation, self-study, adaptability, communication skills and teamwork spirit. It is undoubtedly a great challenge for Shanghai GM to recruit the first batch of high-quality employees objectively and fairly within one year. Shanghai GM faced up to it and implemented the "people-oriented" open recruitment strategy from top to bottom.

"Not to control, but to provide services" is the characteristic of Shanghai General Human Resources Department, and it is also a significant difference from the traditional personnel department. Faced with the urgent and high demand for talents from the employing department, Shanghai General Human Resources Department has entered the active preparation stage without complaint.

First of all, they determined that employees must agree with the company's purpose and five core values, namely, customer-centered, safety, teamwork, integrity, continuous improvement and innovation. If employees can't accept the culture of the enterprise, they can't give full play to their talents, and sometimes they may violate the major policies and do things that are detrimental to the interests of the company, so this is put forward as the first condition.

Secondly, according to the company's development plan and the progress of production and construction, the human resources department decided to make a pull recruitment plan and implement recruitment step by step from the company's organizational structure and the actual needs of various departments. In the first year, the recruitment plan of workshop senior managers, department managers, key engineers and other leaders was implemented in two steps; In the second year, the second-tier recruitment plan for team leaders and engineers was implemented in two steps. Recruit talents in stages, so that human resources will not be idle, and batch recruitment is also conducive to finding suitable people.

Third, according to the development goal of building a first-class workforce, formulate a recruitment policy for employees widely selected throughout the country. Shanghai, which is full of rivers and rivers, has gathered talents from all directions, and this era is also the era of producing talents. The opening of politics, economy and law has brought up many talents for Shanghai. On the other hand, although Shanghai is a highland of talents, there are many people in other places. Shanghai GM accepts talents, as long as they have the skills and can be used by me, they can come to Shanghai GM.

The determination of human resource planning has given Shanghai GM a preliminary recruitment goal and provided an important reference for attracting talents. It ensures that organizations can obtain people with appropriate characteristics and skills at any time and any place they need. With the planning, Shanghai GM has entered the stage of recruiting job seekers in full swing.

[Attracting talents]

Generally speaking, the recruitment of enterprises is divided into two types, one is internal recruitment and the other is external recruitment. Both have some advantages. Compared with external recruitment, the advantages of internal recruitment are that employers are already familiar with the qualifications of internal candidates, spend less, and can fill job vacancies quickly. Candidates are more familiar with organizational policies and practices, so they need less orientation and training. External recruitment can bring new ideas and innovations to the organization and reduce the friction caused by the role change within the enterprise.

In the early days of the establishment of the company, Shanghai GM mainly adopted external recruitment in the form of job advertisements. The job advertisement caused great repercussions in the society because of its excellent and special publicity, and also contributed to the expansion of the talent team of Shanghai GM.

Twenty days after Shanghai GM celebrated its founding, the advertisement of "looking for talents and creating brilliance together" was published in full pages in many influential newspapers such as Xinmin Evening News and Jiefang Daily. This is the first general mobilization of the Shanghai General Talent Project, which announced the company's goal to the world: "Shanghai General Motors Co., Ltd. advocates the spirit of teamwork and will establish a world-class management system while manufacturing world-class cars." Basic regulations are made for each type of talents in terms of personal ability, professional quality, education level, foreign language level and work experience. Subsequently, according to the recruitment plan and the characteristics of different positions, different news media were selected to publish recruitment notices many times. For example, the recruitment of marketing talents is generally in china trade news? Publish recruitment notices for the future; Computer engineer recruitment publishes recruitment information through the internet. In this way, we will further spread the company's purpose, values and "people-oriented" concept to all applicants and even the community.

Shanghai GM also has a brilliant recruitment strategy. While reporting in the newspaper that Shanghai GM will recruit a large number of talents one day, the manager of human resources department walked into the live broadcast room of Shanghai Radio Station to introduce the recruitment policy and answer questions. The next day, the number of applicants who arrived at the job fair reached 5000. People have commented: "Shanghai GM has warmed up the talent market in Shanghai."

In order to accurately and timely process the information of applicants, Shanghai GM has established a talent information database, and designed a job description table, an application registration form, a personnel evaluation table, an employee budget plan and a target tracking management table. In the next two years, the company received more than 50,000 letters from applicants, with a maximum of more than 700 letters a day. These letters come from all over the country, and some of them are foreigners from Australia and Europe.

Letters from thousands of applicants and baskets of applicants are the best test of the success of Shanghai GM's recruitment strategy.

[Assessing employment patterns]

Evaluation is the most important link in the workflow of Shanghai General Recruitment. Shanghai GM has set up a special personnel evaluation center, which is one of the important institutions of the human resources department, drawing on the experience of recruiting employees from the United States and China's personnel policy. Appraisers have received special training. The establishment of the evaluation center ensures the objectivity and fairness of the recruitment work.

Shanghai GM has established a standardized evaluation model. According to the company's purpose, values and the requirements of lean manufacturing system for personnel, the evaluation center has set four categories 19 specific behavior indicators as the evaluation basis. (as shown in the following table)

Personal qualities: learning ability, adaptability, work motivation, continuous improvement, attention to detail, initiative and quality.

Leadership: guiding ability, team development, self-management, planning and organization, and work arrangement.

Effective interpersonal and communication skills: establishing cooperation and partnership, communication skills, team spirit and customer orientation.

Professional knowledge and management ability: technical expertise, knowledge problem evaluation and decision-making ability, and things management.

For this 19 specific behavior index, it varies from post to post and is biased. According to the job description, the employing department makes five choices for each behavioral indicator of the candidate, namely essential, very important, important, useful but not important and unnecessary, and takes them as the weight of behavioral indicators. However, team spirit, customer orientation, work motivation and other indicators have the same requirements for all employees of the company.

Compared with other companies' employment tests (psychological ability test, personality test and work sample test), Shanghai GM's selection model pays more attention to the comparison and weight of the following two relationships.

The relationship between personality quality and job skills. High-quality employees must have excellent personality and good work skills. The former is the result of long-term education, environmental influence and genetic factors, which includes a person's learning ability, behavior habits, adaptability, work initiative and so on. The first personal quality in the above-mentioned 19 specific behavioral indicators is the content and elements of personality quality. The latter is obtained through vocational training and practical experience accumulation, such as special work skills, management skills, communication skills, etc. The two are mutually causal. But relatively speaking, work ability is easier to cultivate, while personality quality is difficult to cultivate. Therefore, when selecting and hiring employees, we should not only pay attention to their working ability, but also pay attention to their personality quality.

The relationship between past experience and future development. How a person views the success and failure in the past experience has a positive or negative impact on his future achievements. Therefore, we can predict and judge its future development by analyzing its past behavior.

When determining the standards, the procedures and links of evaluation are also stipulated. The successful candidate must go through the procedures of filling in the form, screening, written examination, target interview, scenario simulation, professional interview, physical examination, background investigation and approval of employment.

Each procedure and link has standardized operation specifications and scientific selection methods. Among them, the written test mainly tests the candidates' professional knowledge, related knowledge, special ability and tendency. The target interview is the self-evaluation information in the interview. The appraisers trained by international professional consulting institutions have a face-to-face question-and-answer discussion with the candidates to verify the existing information in the application form and further obtain the information. Professional interviews involving technical knowledge are completed by the employing department. Scenario simulation, that is, situational information investigation, is a series of methods to compile a set of test items similar to the actual situation of the position according to the possible position of the candidate, arrange the testee in a simulated real working environment, ask the testee to deal with various possible problems, and test his psychological quality and potential ability in various ways.

According to the statistical analysis of the data of the evaluation center, only 50- 60 applicants out of every 100 can enter the scenario simulation, and about 20- 30 people enter the professional interview. Only a dozen people were officially hired in the end, and some positions were even lower. Shanghai universal objective and fair evaluation principle, standardized and reasonable selection criteria, well-trained evaluators and scientific and effective detection methods have greatly reduced the influence of distortion and human factors.

In Shanghai GM, all the candidates who are hired must first be evaluated by seven evaluators and reach an agreement on their opinions, and then signed by the manager of the employing department, the head of the personnel department of the human resources department and the department manager respectively, and finally the admission notice can be issued. Because of the standardized operating procedures and scientific evaluation methods, the employing department and the personnel department have veto power, and the evaluation results and decisions of the evaluation center are the same. All candidates have to go through the evaluation process, and no one can open the back door. However, the company welcomes qualified candidates very much.

The strict evaluation system enables Shanghai GM to select truly suitable talents, which is fully reflected in the employee performance evaluation carried out later.

"Talent Highland Construction"

Modern management theory points out that elites are visible and successfully determine the fate of a company. A successful enterprise factory needs a team of high-quality talents. It is an important factor for the success of an enterprise to make great efforts to attract, train and use talents and establish a highland for talents.

Knowledge is the key to success, and training is an important way to acquire knowledge. Training is a management tool. As the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, General Motors has a complete employee training system and advanced training methods. Shanghai GM inherits the tradition, and implements the recruitment and training methods introduced by American GM from employee recruitment to training, and has achieved remarkable results.

Shanghai GM's staff training is synchronized with engineering construction and personnel employment. They seize the key nodes of the project construction, correspond the training work with the project progress, equipment installation and debugging, and personnel recruitment and appointment, formulate an integrated training plan, and comprehensively track and control the implementation of key node training projects. In this way, training has become a production leader. Through the corresponding training, the quality and skills of employees are continuously improved, the progress of engineering construction is guided, and "one step ahead" and "immediate supply" are achieved in terms of personnel. There is neither a backlog of personnel nor "fighting without fighting".

The formulation and implementation of training plan is the first step of training, and it is also the concrete embodiment of training objectives and training contents, which makes the training work operable. The overall training plan made once a year or half a year is generally implemented in Shanghai. This training plan not only fully reflects the training needs, but also incorporates the management idea of "people-oriented" in enterprises. The so-called "integration" is to systematically consider all the problems involved in the whole training implementation process, as well as the time and methods to solve these problems. Therefore, in the integrated training plan of Shanghai GM, we can see the following contents: equipment tree and supplier list, training resources and facilities requirements, training courses and implementation plans, and training budget. This is conducive to all-round tracking, control and implementation of training. In the process of formulation, bottom-up and top-down discussions are needed to form a training plan that combines the interests of enterprises and individuals.

Shanghai GM has incorporated training institutions into the personnel management system (as shown below), set up a training department in the human resources department, and set up part-time training coordinators in various workshops and departments. This model integrates planning, training, use and assessment, with clear training objectives, strong pertinence and strong practicability. In the whole personnel management system, personnel and labor wages will directly affect the interests of employees, which will greatly restrict the experience of department leaders and may give less consideration to training.

The training content is similar to management, engineering technology and workers, but it is more determined according to the job requirements of different levels.

First, introductory training. This is for new employees or new job requirements. Introductory training mainly includes: company profile, product market situation and technical characteristics, manufacturing and quality requirements, production safety and labor protection, corporate culture and employee code of conduct. At Shanghai GM, all employees need to receive comprehensive introductory education and an average of 65,438+00 weeks of training. Training formulated by the company: 1. Business training. Employees receive training on company profile. 2. Basic training. Employees receive industry-level training and learn the basic knowledge of how to do their jobs well. 3. experience it yourself. Select some employees to go to other GM factories to receive professional practical training. 4. While receiving professional training, OEM training staff participate in the preparation for commencement and equipment debugging.

Second, adaptive training. This is a new technology, new knowledge popularization and comprehensive ability training for all employees at different levels according to job requirements and comprehensive quality improvement. The purpose is to supplement new knowledge for employees, improve their quality and adapt to the development of new technologies. Shanghai GM will set the training content as five modules:

Unit A- topic of work standardization. The purpose is to make all employees master the skills of making standardized work list and continuous improvement through training, and correctly understand the importance of using standardized formation to carry out work and rationally arrange workplace.

Module b- quality theme. It aims to make employees understand and accept the concept of "quality is produced", thus ensuring to provide users with high-quality products.

Unit c- the theme of leadership responsibility. It aims to impart the basic knowledge and necessary skills of good leadership to managers and professional technicians at all levels.

Module-pull system and logistics management. The purpose is to let employees understand and master the specific application of lean management from customer order, supply, production, packaging, transportation, receiving, warehousing, kanban supply to dim light system.

E module-continuous improvement theme. The purpose is to enable employees to master and apply the principles and concepts of continuous improvement, and correctly understand and apply the six steps of planning, execution, confirmation and action cycle and their relationship with practical problem solving.

There are 20 courses in the five modules * * *. Each course is not only a part of the whole, but also can be set independently. It can be arbitrarily combined according to the needs of different levels, with flexible use, vivid content and strong practicality and guidance. Many employees said after the training that it was "the best training they have ever received".

Third, improve sexual training. Mainly for the promising backbone and senior managers to provide professional training in management skills and professional technology, so that enterprises can be further improved.

There are usually three training schedules.

The first is full-time training, that is, all training time is arranged during working hours. The training of five modules of Shanghai GM belongs to this training. Before new employees formally take up their posts, they must first receive five-day introductory training in the training center to understand the concept, values and production system of the enterprise, and then receive three-week job skills training in the training island of the workshop. After taking up the post, according to the enterprise requirements and personal development goals, we will continue to carry out multi-post skills training and five module courses training to continuously improve our skills. It can be seen that off-the-job training usually arranges management skills and job skills training. It is considered that it is directly related to the production and operation of enterprises and the quality of products, and should generally be carried out during working hours.

The second is the training that combines work and entertainment. It is not only a kind of knowledge-based training to improve quality, but also indirectly beneficial to enterprises.

The third is full-time training. Training required by ordinary employees themselves, such as academic training, cannot be carried out during working hours.

Another concept of training time is the annual training hours per capita. Shanghai GM stipulates that each person should be trained for no less than 40 hours every year. The enterprise puts forward the minimum training time for employees, which reflects the importance attached to employee training.

In the course design arrangement, paying attention to actual effect is the characteristic of Shanghai GM. In the "One-page Report" training course, employees participating in the training can learn to use and write the improved one-page report in a very relaxed environment through one-day training.

It is impossible to practice with ready-made teaching materials in society, because this kind of training needs strong pertinence and operability besides imparting knowledge. All five modules of Shanghai GM are equipped with self-made teaching materials. It is understood that in General Motors University of the United States, even professional and technical courses should generally be aimed at the most widely used parts of enterprises and combined with the actual situation of enterprises, so that enterprise training can achieve the maximum effect in the shortest time.

In order to realize the pertinence and operability of training, a variety of training tools and teaching steps are designed in the training course of Shanghai GM, and the whole process from introduction to discussion to summary is arranged, as well as key questions, video analysis, hands-on disassembly or calculation to ensure the quality of each class. In order to improve the practical ability of the college, the enterprise also introduced simulation teaching equipment to increase the intuition of training.