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Case:

Human Resources Director Brief

You have been appointed HR Director for your airport. Your appointment is initially for a period of five years, during which time you will play a vital role in ensuring that your airport grows its revenues, profitability and reputation.

Responsibilities
You are responsible for ensuring that the airport has the right number and mix of well trained staff to enable your airport to achieve its strategic objectives. In addition to agreeing staffing levels with your operational colleagues, you have a key role in ensuring that staff morale is high, as this in turn impacts on productivity and ultimately on passenger satisfaction and airline service standards

Staff morale at the airport is currently low and falling, and you will be responsible for reversing this trend before it leads to industrial action and/or the loss of key skilled staff.

Staffing
In co-operation with your colleagues in the Engineering and Commercial roles, you will agree the appropriate staffing levels to employ to ensure good management and administration of the airport.
Note that you will incur recruitment and redundancy costs as your staffing levels change.

Staff become more effective if they stay with the company, so reducing staff turnover is an important consideration for you in planning your HR policy. With well trained, well paid staff you are more likely to have high morale and to retain your most experienced people.

You and your colleagues will need to decide on staff numbers in the following areas:

- Engineering and fire service
- Security and Terminal
- Car parks and buses
- Management and admin support (includes IT, Finance, Marketing)

Staff Pay
You are also responsible for deciding the annual % increase in salary to award your employees. The airport has collective bargaining through its Trades Union representatives. The Unions have a strong position at the airport. A long standing and legally binding agreement with the unions prevents you from reducing salaries, while any annual salary increase is applied equally to all categories of staff.

Note that you take over the airport at a difficult time. After several years of economic recession, with historically low inflation and interest rates, and low or zero growth, the airport management have only awarded very small pay increases in each of the past three years. As a result, staff morale is low and the Trades Union are threatening strike action if there is no improvement.

Training and Communication

You will decide how muchof the annual salary bill to invest in staff training. This will then impact on staff motivation and effectiveness.
It is also important that you communicate effectively with staff. Decide how much to spend per employee per week on internal communications

Planning
Your airport has a powerful planning model, which enables you to build your business plans andassess their financial viability.

Your Finance Director is responsible for managing this planning model and for ensuring that the financial implications of your decisions
and recommendations are fully understood.

In making your decisions on staffing levels and pay, you will need to consult with your FD to ensure that there is sufficient budget available to finance your HR plans.