Now it is your turn to design a high-performance work system (HPWS). HPWS is a set of management practices that attempt to create an environment within an organization where the employee has greater involvement and responsibility. Designing a HPWS involves putting all the HR pieces together. A HPWS is all about determining what jobs a company needs done, designing the jobs, identifying and attracting the type of employee needed to fill the job, and then evaluating employee performance and compensating them appropriately so that they stay with the company.

The Value of High-Performance Work Systems

Employees who are highly involved in conceiving, designing, and implementing workplace processes are more engaged and perform better. For example, a study analyzing 132 U.S. manufacturing firms found that companies using HPWSs had significantly higher labor productivity than their competitors. The key finding was that when employees have the power to make decisions related to their performance, can access information about company costs and revenues, and have the necessary knowledge, training, and development to do their jobs—and are rewarded for their efforts—they are more productive.

For example, Mark Youndt and his colleagues demonstrated that productivity rates were significantly higher in manufacturing plants where the HRM strategy focused on enhancing human capital. Delery and Doty found a positive relationship between firm financial performance and a system of HRM practices. Huselid, Jackson, and Schuler found that increased HRM effectiveness corresponded to an increase in sales per employee, cash flow, and company market value. 

HPWS can be used globally to good result. For example, Fey and colleagues studied 101 foreign-based firms operating in Russia and found significant linkages between HRM practices, such as incentive-based compensation, job security, employee training, and decentralized decision making, and subjective measures of firm performance. 

Improving Organizational Performance

Organizations that want to improve their performance can use a combination of HR systems to get these improvements. For example, performance measurement systems help underperforming companies improve performance. The utility company Arizona Public Service used a performance measurement system to rebound from dismal financial results. The company developed 17 “critical success indicators,” which it measures regularly and benchmarks against the best companies in each category. Of the 17, nine were identified as “major critical success indicators.” They are:

• cost to produce kilowatt hour
• customer satisfaction
• fossil plants availability
• operations and maintenance expenditures
• construction expenditures
• ranking as corporate citizen in Arizona
• safety all-injury incident rate
• nuclear performance
• shareholder value return on assets

Each department sets measurable goals in line with these indicators, and a gainsharing plan rewards employees for meeting the indicators.

In addition, companies can use reward schemes to improve performance. Better-performing firms tend to invest in more sophisticated HRM practices, which further enhances organizational performance. Currently, about 20% of firms link employee compensation to the firm’s earnings. They use reward schemes such as employee stock ownership plans, gainsharing, and profit sharing. This trend is increasing.

Researcher Michel Magnan wanted to find out: Is the performance of an organization with a profit-sharing plan better than other firms? And, does adoption of a profit-sharing plan lead to improvement in an organization’s performance?

The reasons profit-sharing plans would improve organizational performance go back to employee motivation theory. A profit-sharing plan will likely encourage employees to monitor one another’s behavior because “loafers” would erode the rewards for everyone. Moreover, profit sharing should lead to greater information sharing, which increases the productivity and flexibility of the firm.

Magnan studied 294 Canadian credit unions in the same region (controlling for regional and sector-specific economic effects). Of the firms studied, 83 had profit sharing plans that paid the bonus in full at the end of the year. This meant that employees felt the effect of the organizational performance reward immediately, so it had a stronger motivational effect than a plan that put profits into a retirement account, where the benefit would be delayed (and essentially hidden) until retirement.

Magnan’s results showed that firms with profit-sharing plans had better performance on most facets of organizational performance. They had better performance on asset growth, market capitalization, operating costs, losses on loans, and return on assets than firms without profit-sharing plans. The improved performance was especially driven by activities where employee involvement had a quick, predictable effect on firm performance, such as giving loans or controlling costs.

Another interesting finding was that when firms adopted a profit-sharing plan, their organizational performance went up. Profit-sharing plans appear to be a good turnaround tool because the firms that showed the greatest improvement were those that had not been performing well before the profit-sharing plan. Even firms that had good performance before adopting a profit-sharing plan had better performance after the profit-sharing plan.