ryanair hrm case study

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Ricardo flies Ryanair: Strategic human resource management and competitive advantage in a Single European Aviation Market

• August 2020
• Human Resource Management Journal 30(3)

• The University of Western Ontario

• University of Bristol

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(2020). Ricardo Flies Ryanair: Strategic Human Resource Management and Competitive Advantage in a Single European Aviation Market (SEAM).

• Geraint Harvey , P. Turnbull
• Published 2020
• Business, Economics

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Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow: the ‘thick and thin’ of comparative (statactivist) research with a european trade union federation.

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Investigating symmetrical influence of economic expansion, oil price, and industrial production on trade deficit: a policy pathway toward three neighboring Asian states

41 references, ricardo flies ryanair: strategic human resource management and competitive advantage in a single european aviation market, human resources, human resource management, and the competitive advantage of firms: toward a more comprehensive model of causal linkages, market competition, hrm, and firm performance: the conventional paradigm critiqued and reformulated, the rbv theory foundation of strategic hrm: critical flaws, problems for research and practice, and an alternative economics paradigm, strategic factor markets: expectations, luck, and business strategy, can labor arrest the “sky pirates” transnational trade unionism in the european civil aviation industry, invited editorial: the four theories of profit and their joint effects, bringing the offshore ashore: transnational production, industrial relations and the reconfiguration of sovereignty, back to the future: implications for the field of hrm of the multistakeholder perspective proposed 30 years ago, “bearing all the hallmarks of oppression”, related papers.

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Ricardo flies Ryanair: Strategic human resource management and competitive advantage in a Single European Aviation Market

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HR learnings from Ryanair – look after your people, they are your service

As a result, there were massive adverse impacts, including a cost of $30 million and a 3% drop in Ryanair's shares, not to mention the thousands of disgruntled customers. While a number of factors were involved in this complex case, it shows how vital proper people management is for all organizations, particularly those whose livelihoods depend on delivering customer service.

With Ryanair’s example fresh in our minds, here are some important lessons to learn that will reduce risk and liability from employee absence – not just vacations, but all forms of absence.

In today’s services economy, people matter more than ever

As we move to a service economy where the trend away from owning assets to consuming services continues, successful businesses will have to change the way they operate. They will have to manage customer retention by delivering what the customer wants as quickly and efficiently as possible – which means they are more reliant on their people than ever before.

This means absence management is more critical today than ever. In the CIPD annual survey of UK HR professionals 2016, the overall median cost of absence per employee per year is estimated at £522 ($690). For organizations that struggle with people management and resource scheduling to accommodate shift patterns and projects, that very quickly adds up and the impact is all too real. A business may need to employ extra people to cover those absences which increases costs considerably.

Many employers do not have the right systems in place to manage their people properly, and therefore, they don’t measure the implications on the business' productivity and customer experience. One survey of 1,200 employers revealed that a mere 36% measure the bottom-line impact of absence on their enterprises.

Ryanair provides an extreme example of how failure to manage what at first sight appears to be relatively easy can end very badly. The disruption affected more than 315,000 customers and cost millions in expenses and share losses, not to mention damage to reputation. With proper systems in place to manage absence and schedule resources, information can be monitored proactively and problems avoided. At the same time, data can be used to improve efficiency and customer experience.

1. Ensuring statutory compliance

Globally, we see that many organizations struggle to manage tasks around human resource management within required timeframes. Our research shows that many companies don’t have visibility of who is off work and they don’t know when their absent employee is planning to return. Because of this, it is a big challenge to manage absences effectively and ensure compliance. Global organizations face an even bigger challenge –  with employees operating in multiple countries, they must comply with the regulations for each individual country.

2. Controlling absence costs

People-related costs represent the largest controllable expenditure for most companies in the world, and absence can threaten the ability to keep these costs under control. The average for absence days lost per employee is 7 days per year. There are some notable known trends, as absence is higher in specific sectors and situations.

Studies show that proactive absence management can significantly reduce absence for all organizations. The cost of absence does not just refer to the payment made to an employee while they are off, it also considers the cost of replacing the absent person to ensure business continuity and the impact on engagement levels of those absent and those impacted by the absence.

3. Reducing manual tasks

In many countries, there are no fewer than 23 manual steps in handling an absence from start to finish. Absence Managers spend many days working out numbers of days lost, calculating absence rates and trigger points, running reports, contacting employees, chasing doctor’s notes, arranging meetings, typing and sending recovery-plan letters, arranging cover and updating people involved in the procedure. We have found that 80% of these tasks can be handled automatically with minimal user involvement. North Atlantic Drilling is an organization doing just that, using Unit4 software for offshore crew planning, fully integrated with time Management and travel expense processes to effectively optimize scheduling and use of people resources.

4. Improving employee engagement

Studies show there is a direct link between how absence is handled for an employee (and those impacted by the absence) and employee engagement. Organizations should keep in contact with the absent employee, ensure tasks are completed on time, make adjustments to working environments and keep recovery plans. All this ensures absent employees are looked after, and this attention to detail can positively impact employee engagement.

For those employees who need to substitute for the absent person, planning and full visibility of absence duration can manage expectations and help the company proactively plan for absences, spot trends and make contingency plans to protect their business. For example, Unit4 supports crucial resource planning and time management at software and professional services firm, SAS Institute in Norway. They benefit from a constant overview of utilization looking forward which helps them manage projects and absences, and also provides a basis for billing clients.

New technology can drive your people advantage

New technology, such as bots, machine learning and business intelligence (BI), that self-drives and proactively alerts managers to potential issues related to people planning, can help to prevent staffing problems arising. Absence Managers and HR leaders have more intelligence available to them than ever before for proactively managing open absences and accidents, arranging appointments, sending letters, updating people involved, running reports and keeping track of all cases. Organizations can plan ahead based on absence statistics, such as absence rates and days lost.

Automation of these processes is possible to help manage the absence or accident from start to finish and ensure compliance with local statutory regulations including generating tasks, requesting doctor’s notes, generating documents, storing documents and automatically notifying management when trigger points are reached. For example, managers who use technology that uses BI and machine learning can measure absenteeism costs and track patterns of most requested days off or provide reports with insights on illness-related absences. Moreover, new technology like chatbots can be leveraged to help manage time efficiently and even encourage employees to take time off, and managers to automate vacation review reminders.

Final thoughts

Absence management and scheduling issues, whether they’re as extreme as those witnessed at Ryanair  or more mundanely routine, can be avoided with advanced self-driving technology that encourages proactive management of employees' time. Managers can use tools powered by today's digital technology to intelligently ensure that people in their department and team actually take the vacation they are entitled to take (and should take).

By taking these actions, managers can drastically reduce the impact of employee absence to enhance service delivery and the customer's experience. After all, in today’s services economy customers demand and expect constant value from their interactions and their purchases, at all points in the lifecycle. A business needs its employees in the right place and at the right time to deliver to those expectations.

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Home » Management Case Studies » Case Study: Ryanair Business Strategy Analysis

Case Study: Ryanair Business Strategy Analysis

Ryanair is an Irish low cost airline headquartered in Dublin founded in 1985. It operates 181 aircrafts over 729 routes across Europe and North Africa from 31 bases. Ryanair has seen large success over the recent years due to its low-cost business model and has become the world’s largest airline in terms of international passenger numbers. Taking Porter’s generic business strategies into consideration, Ryanair operates a cost-leadership strategy to drive itself into achieving its mission of being the leading European low-cost carrier (LCC). Throughout this essay the business strategy of Ryanair will be analysed and the sustainability of their model evaluated.

Ryanair’s objective is to firmly establish itself as Europe’s leading low-fares scheduled passenger airline through continued improvements and expanded offerings of its low-fares service. Considering their objectives and mission, Ryanair’s decision on their cost-leadership strategy was based on a few main factors which are discussed below.

A major influence was the deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 which removed government intervention within the European continent. Under the new rules, routes and fare decisions were made by individual airlines which meant that they could compete on other factors besides food, cabin crew and frequency. As a result of deregulation, a large number of new airline start-ups emerged within the EU and competition among airlines increased dramatically resulting in downward price pressures. Ryanair was established to take full advantage of these market conditions. By offering low prices, Ryanair entered a huge and virtually unlimited market.

Having seen the major success of the low cost carrier Southwest in the United States, Ryanair decided to follow in their footsteps by establishing a LCC for the European continent that targeted fare conscious leisure travelers and regular low cost business travelers. By doing this Ryanair became the first low-fare airline in Europe. However, they took the Southwest model further by offering no drinks and snacks at all and abolishing the frequent flyer program which Southwest up to this day offers its customers.

The evaluation of Porters five forces influenced Ryanair’s choice of a cost-leadership strategy, as the threat presented by new entrants and the threat of substitutes could hinder their success. The threat of new entrants is high within the aviation industry which meant that low fares would help drive away any further competition. The threat of substitutes to Ryanair had to also be carefully examined. Their primary market, Europe, had the availability of high speed trains and car holidays. For Ryanair to be successful, prices had to be low to attract the public, and resist strong competition from substitutes like Eurostar.

As Europe’s largest low fare airline, Ryanair’s competitive advantage remains in their ability to continue as cost leaders; providing the cheapest fares to its customers. This dictates that the company must minimize its own costs to ensure that they are able to offer customers the service at a price below their direct competitors. This leads us to consider some key functional strategies which directly help Ryanair towards their ultimate goal to be Europe’s leading low fares airline.

The marketing strategy is perhaps the most obvious and significant functional strategy of Ryanair. Low fares are designed to stimulate demand, attracting fare-conscious travelers, those who may have used alternative forms of transportation or even those who may have not traveled at all. Penetration pricing as it is called helps gain market share and simply, more customers equals more revenue. Tickets are almost solely sold on their website ‘www.ryanair.com’ which very importantly keeps sales costs to a minimum since very few phone operators are employed and computers are able to cheaply handle all functions of sales. With ever increasing accessibility of the internet globally anybody with internet access can buy airline tickets from Ryanair, so distribution practically takes care of itself through this medium. Ryan Air relies on low cost promotions and in recent times has concentrated on their ‘One million seats at one pound’ which is usually advertised through their internet site, national press and bulletin boards. It is the simplicity of this promotion which helps keep costs low since expensive advertising agencies can be entirely avoided and advertising can be dealt with in house.

Ryanair’s operations strategy determines how the airline will deploy its resources and the policies it will operate by. To keep costs low they operate a ‘no frills’ service onboard aircraft. This means the fare only includes the flight. There are however a number of other measures directly related to a no frills service. These include ticket-less boarding, unallocated seats, one class of travel, costs for check-in baggage, no refund policy, basic seats (to increase aircraft capacity) and charging for any additional service. All this significantly reduces costs to Ryanair. The Achilles heel of Ryanair is their greater aircraft utilization through super quick turnaround times. Essentially this means the aircraft spends very little time on the ground, they achieve this through their human resource policies and by having none or very little cargo in the baggage hold to speed up loading and unloading of the aircraft.

Logistics strategy deals with the flow of products into and out of Ryanair. Again there is heavy emphasis on cost saving and reducing measures. Ryanair fly to secondary airports which are potentially much further from the City centre but accessible enough by other forms of ground transportation. At these airports Ryanair are able to negotiate extremely aggressively and demand the lowest landing and handling fees. Additionally Ryanair is usually able to gain financial assistance with marketing and promotional campaigns at these airports.

As cost leader Ryanair strives to undercut all its rivals but this means very low income per fare and requires maximum utilization of its resources. Fortunately their financial policy ensures they are able to still profit handsomely from rock bottom fares. The aim is to break-even on fares but to make their profits out of ancillary charges and commissions from their partners. Ryanair has a number of affiliates such as Hertz car rental, Acumus insurance and booking.com all of whom are advertised readily on the Ryanair website. Since the website has high website traffic its partners are able to reach out to Ryanair’s huge client base and are prepared to pay good commissions to the firm for this privilege. Ryanair also generate income from advertising on board the aircraft. Ancillary revenue is generated from many of the services that traditional airlines wouldn’t charge for, such as large baggage into the cargo hold, allocated seating, snacks and drinks.

Ryanair’s strategy when purchasing aircraft is to buy new, uniform aircraft. This is beneficial for a number of reasons all of which directly help cost saving measures. Firstly, by being able to order same aircraft in bulk they are able to negotiate a better price per aircraft. Secondly, uniform aircraft mean that there are potential savings in staff training; air stewards being more familiar with all aircraft and maintenance will be simpler. Finally by buying new, the company has safer, more fuel efficient planes with lower maintenance costs. Safer aircraft also means greater consumer confidence, equating to more fare sales.

Furthermore Ryanair aggressively hedge and fix as many of their costs as possible, such as oil and aircraft prices so they are not subject to future price fluctuations which could adversely affect profitability.

The human resource policy is again directly related to reducing costs. Employees are expected to pay for their own uniform and equipment. Training given is the required minimum and staff utilization is among the highest in the airline industry. Many staff are employed on performance contracts and those who do not meet their expectations are readily replaced. Staff are also expected to take on a number of roles, cabin staff will also clean the aircraft prior to the next service, check in staff assist in boarding the aircraft etc.

Ryanair has successfully experienced years of growth both in the number of its aircrafts and passengers since its launch. However, with the global financial system recently suffering its greatest crisis in more than 70 years, existing business models of many aviation firms are coming under great strain. As this economic downturn bankrupts LCCs like XL and Zoom with more expected to follow, the question is whether Ryanair’s cost-leadership strategy is sustainable or not as it continues to offer lower fares in the face of high costs. Although Ryanair has posted losses along with other aviation firms for the latest quarter, it is expected to emerge from this downturn with fewer competitors because its â €š ¬1.8 billon balance sheet is one of the strongest in the industry. Additionally, as the credit crunch takes its toll, traditional airlines are not in a position to cut fares and the threat of new LCCs is virtually eliminated due to the lack of financing. Although Ryanair faces competition from substitutes like Eurostar, it is at an advantage because of Eurostar’s limited destinations.

Ryanair is sticking to its mantra, when the going gets tough, sell more seats for almost nothing. By offering low fares, Ryanair expects passengers to trade down to the low cost airlines rather than stop flying completely. This trend appears accurate so far based on passenger numbers as recession forces millions of passengers to focus on price. Additionally, the latest statistics from The European Low Fares Airline Association members show a 15.7% year-on-year growth in the number of passengers for 2008, indicating that the LCC model is robust, even in times of crisis. Consequently, there is no doubt that Ryanair looks poised for substantial profits and passenger growth in the coming years. However, in order to compete with other LCCs and maintain its continued market share growth in the future, Ryanair needs to improve its poor customer relations.

The sustainability of Ryanair’s cost leadership strategy also depends largely on the price of oil and how effective the firm is in cutting costs in order to continue offering low fares. According to the firm’s latest financial report, Ryanair will enjoy significantly lower oil costs thanks to their recent hedging programme, when most of their competitors are already hedged at much higher prices. These lower prices will drive Ryanair’s traffic growth, maintain high load factors and capture market share from higher cost fuel surcharging competitors. In order to cut costs, Ryanair close all its airport check-in desks and have passengers check-in online instead. Other cost saving methods not yet implemented include charging customers for using toilets on airplanes. These cost cutting ideas are not very popular among consumers and it means that Ryanair needs to improve its already tarnished brand image in the future which it had attained through negative press reporting and misleading advertisements .

The current strategy at Ryanair is expected to work so well that despite the recession Ryanair’s CEO has underlined the firm’s commitment to expansion. The firm is expected to grow at 20 percent a year because of a 180 aircraft’s on order from Boeing. These expansion plans for the future will require the company to increase its landing slots at airports and recruit more employees. Currently Ryanair has limited access to landing slots in major airports and the secondary airports are long distances away from city centers which could make it less attractive in the future. However, a remarkable cut in flights by other European airline carriers due to recession is creating enormous opportunities for Ryanair, as many major airports compete to reduce charges in order to attract Ryanair’s growth. Availability of skilled personnel shouldn’t be a problem for Ryanair due to recent high unemployment levels. However, Ryanair needs to improve its current low level of empathy for employees if it is to retain them in the future.

Even though Ryanair’s cost leadership strategy is robust and it looks set to serve them well in the future, there are some key areas within the business that can be improved on to enhance the firm’s profitability and brand image.

Ryanair has always been criticized for many aspects of its poor customer relations. According to The Economist, Ryanair’s “cavalier treatment of passengers” had given Ryanair “a deserved reputation for nastiness” and that the airline “has become a byword for appalling customer service … and jeering rudeness towards anyone or anything that gets in its way”. If Ryanair is to maintain its large customer base, it needs to ensure that it acknowledges its customers’ concerns and maintains a service focused attitude at all costs. Ryanair needs to invest in servicing customers better by providing a non-premium contact number, improving its non user friendly website, and simplifying the terms and conditions of the flight service. Ryanair should also create a frequent flyer program to establish a fixed customer base and encourage customer loyalty.

Ryanair is notorious for its high staff turnover which negatively affects its reputation as an employer. Over utilization of employees, poor remuneration package , and minimal training are a few other critical items to be considered by Ryanair if it is to retain employees in the future. Ryanair needs to understand that although it is currently possible to replace outgoing employees, but with time Ryanair’s overall image will be tarnished. Resultantly, attracting new employees could become impossible and this will hinder their expansion plans. Ryanair should incorporate a flexible benefits package solely designed to improve employee morale such as flexible working hours and extra holidays. To improve its image amongst employees, training at all employee levels must include exposure to similar techniques and methods that help promote the development of a uniform company identity.

Following huge success in Europe, Ryanair should consider introducing low cost transatlantic flights to support its expansion plans and attain a larger customer base. With a high demand for certain routes like London-New York and room for negotiation in airplane prices and airport slots mainly due to the current financial climate, it is an ideal time to further reap the rewards of the cost leadership strategy that has served Ryanair so well over the years.

Ryanair’s model looks set to survive the current industrial downturn through its lower costs and substantial cash balances. No airline is better placed in Europe than Ryanair to trade through this downturn. It will therefore continue to grow, by lowering fares, taking market share from competitors, and expanding in markets where competitors either withdraw capacity or go bust. By taking the recommended improvements into consideration, it looks like Ryanair’s cost leadership strategy seems ideal for the future.

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Ricardo flies Ryanair: Strategic human resource management and competitive advantage in a Single European Aviation Market

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HR contributes to business growth by activating profit-generating mechanisms under favorable conditions, creating competitive advantages through strategic HRM, industrial relations, and exploiting competitive imperfections in strategic factor markets.

What comes around goes around: Ryanair flight cancellations, corporate governance and (mis)management

• Friday, October 20, 2017
• Expert commentary , Research , Work and Equalities

Tony Dundon, Professor of Human Resource Management & Employment Relations at Alliance Manchester Business School and Work & Equalities Institute .

The fiasco of Ryanair cancelling thousands of flights because of pilot holiday rostering has brought to the fore many bigger issues about corporate governance and sustainability. Only several weeks after the UK government’s reforms to try to improve transparency and regain public trust in the corporate world, Ryanair seem to revel in its own crisis for media spin, displaying what may appear as a disregard for the value of people and service delivery. It is a case study par excellence in strategic (mis)management.

The flight cancellation debacle wiped some €1.4 billion off Ryanair’s shares within days, albeit partially restored since. It is estimated it will cost the company between €25-30 million. It is, however, doubtful it will have any long-term impact or improved institutional learning for an organisation that places bad reputation as part of its core mission.

Ironically, Ryanair’s woes are delivered under a corporate vision entitled ‘Always Getting Better’. While there has been an investment of around $US38 billion in new aircraft fleet since 2013, the gains are clearly skewed to shareholders (and, in particular it’s CEO, Michael O’Leary) and certainly not for its staff or corporate ethics. It can be suggested there are advantages to customers in terms of additional seat capacity and booking processes, but being stranded in another part of the world with no support and little advance notice will remain a painful experience which lives long in the consumers’ memory.

Consumer Relations, Employment Sustainability and Branding Ryanair has, for a long time, had a poor reputation in relation to how it treats staff. The flight cancellation issue has, however, made the degrading treatment of not only pilots, but all staff, much more public. It brings into focus the role of the consumer in shaping the employment governance and human resource management space to a much greater extent.

One classic own goal was when Michael O’Leary accidently (although publically) referred to Ryanair pilots as ‘glorified taxi drivers’. No wonder many left for employment elsewhere at rival Norwegian Air. If there are lessons to be learnt for other corporate leaders, then people are more than an abstract asset. No organisation should ever display such disregard for human feelings and emotions, particularly in service-orientated roles were the skill and engagement of staff becomes important, no matter how bargain basement the price it gets.

Going back to Wealth of Nations, the seminal 1776 tome penned by philosopher Adam Smith, the market is a known ‘social institution’ and not something that is governed by some innate natural law of the universe. Treating people badly is a lack of basic understanding about positional power. The poor treatment of people can inevitably come back to bite. In this case, pilots and cabin crew have the empathy of the public, as well as the affected customers. Their response is an equally importance case study par excellence: this time the capacity of collective labour mobilisation as a countervailing source of power to the unilateral dictate of corporate leaders.

Examples of poor treatment are now wide-spread and have long been known at Ryanair. Cabin crew sign on and work for 10 or 12 hours a day, yet only get paid for the time in the air, pilots have to pay for their own uniforms and other staff have been threatened with discipline if they don’t ‘sell’ enough products in-flight to boost revenue. The precariousness of such working is made all too clear to the customer with the current mismanagement of what is essentially a basic personnel arrangement: that of holiday rostering. Even more evident is that many staff are not direct Ryanair employees, but hired via a complex web of recruitment agencies; all of which is designed to avoid protective worker and citizen rights in favour of corporate greed. Michael O’Leary and Ryanair has been vocally non-union (if not actively anti-union) for some time, not because of a rational business model or logic, but because he epitomises the corporate ideologue who is power dependent. Had Ryanair bargained and consulted with staff through an independent forum such as a trade union, the chances are such a debacle that has led to the loss of millions of euros for the company, not to mention untold customer heartache and upset, would have been easily avoided. The lack of genuine and effective employee voice is itself evidence of poor management. And, as with all ideologues there is a blind spot: failing to see the countervailing collective counter-mobilising force among pilots themselves, cabin crew and now disaffected customers serves to intensify antagonism. Corporate (in)accountability and weak government platitudes The government’s narrative – to make business more transparent with ideas for worker voice on the board, pay gap analysis and other incentives to regulate business greed – seem all the more shallow following Ryanair.

The airline has been criticised by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for seeking to deal with employee complaints and grievances through the Irish courts, regardless of where employees are based. This directly undermines worker protections further and makes grievance handling all the more complicated for staff. It may transpire yet that current investors will find the whole people management approach simply unpalatable.

Of more pressing policy debate is that the Ryanair issue exposes the limitations in the British government’s white paper to improve corporate conduct. The plans for better employee-customer voice will have had little or no change to Ryanair’s decisions and would have still left customers stranded and employee concerns unheard. The best that could be hoped for is Michael O’Leary makes some comment in the Directors Report and this is made available at some stage on their website. Small if any pressure for change or improvement in that regard then.

A further limitation is that the government’s policy approach and white paper is primarily based on voluntarist principles. With a desire to avoid legislative protections and a future post-Brexit corporate world removed from the remit of the ECJ, there is little prospect that corporate governance will advance the interests of workers or individual customers in the future.

Without more regulatory policy interventions curbing the unfettered power excesses of corporate leaders, Ryanair and many others like them will, in all probability, advance their vested interests over those of others.

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HRM in companies: Ryanair, IBM, Google, IKEA

The best-fit approach underlines the importance of assuring that HR strategies are performances. This takes into account, through the circumstances of the organization's culture, operational processes and external environment. Thanks to that, HR strategies consider two points, the organisation itself and its employees. However, this kind of HRM cannot be universally applied because it depends on the context. So you cannot apply it for all the HR systems. According to Schuler and Jackson (1987), the business performances will facilitate the application of HR practices. The cost leadership, quality enhancement and innovation supported their choices of competitive strategy. Under this model, organizations need to work out the required employee behaviours to implement a chosen competitive strategy and devise supporting HR practices to increase the motivation in the workforce. Then, following the principles discussed above we can establish links between corporate culture, corporate strategy and HRM. First, the company's culture can be the performance. Performance could be established by the HR supporting. Then, we can see that the HR supporting depends of three points: the cost leadership, quality enhancement and innovation. After that, we can link the HRM and corporate culture point with the corporate strategy. In fact, thanks to the performance, the cost leadership, the quality enhancement and the innovation, the company can have a competitive strategy.

• Introduction
• 3 models: best fit, best practice and life cycle
• Ryanair, a 'hard' HRM style
• Ibm, passed from the soft HRM to the hard HRM
• Google: a soft approach to drive employees and improve the performance
• Ikea: life cycle due in practice with the new store's implantation

[...] The reading of human resources management books gave us the understanding needed to transcribe the global ideas. Then, we found other models which we did not see in class. Thanks to these approaches, we have different points of view from different authors, to compare to our own. Support our researches; find others criticisms with some examples of companies which are using different models. ← Interpretation of this assignment We saw in this assignement the aim to establish the links between the HRM models, the strategy and the corporate culture. [...]

[...] Thanks to this strategy, Ryanair can offer lower price for customers. Economies are looking everywhere, because, ‘Ryanair invest nothing on marketing' like O'Leary said on Marketing Magazine (March 2012). The employees of Ryanair are driven by hard HR practices. ‘The airline staffs are measured on sales targets and are paid only when on air'. We can take the example of searches University of Strathclyde Glasgow's students: to get profit, Ryanair charges 40 pounds for overweight luggage and offers 50 pence for employees who find them. [...]

[...] USA: Traditional personnel work: • Recruitment, selection, training, health, safety, pay and benefits • Managers' requests for assistance by providing prescriptive solutions and a largely administrative service More integrated and sophisticated personnel: • Strategic planning • Personnel activities relationship with each other; it's often referred to as ‘internal fit' • Appraisal outcomes are linking to: ← Training ← The development needs ← Pay and benefits strategies Britain, Australia, New Zealand: People-oriented practices: • Job design • Organisational culture • Reward systems The main aims are to encompass traditional personnel, organisational behaviour and employment relations. All people-oriented practices: • It must be consistent with the organisation's competitive strategy • So it's not only internal, it's also external thanks to the link with the business strategy organisation. In 1914 “CTR” is created; it was the first name of Watson's company. In 1924 “CTR” became IBM. [...]

[...] IBM had a business developed; in fact, this company was vertically and horizontally integrated. Horizontally: many products (computer, CD's, ink, etc.) and good services (training for users, after sales-services, etc) Vertically: IBM made of the basic component up to the biggest machine. IBM had the strategy to sale the product of the final customer To conclude, with this type of organisation and this business, IBM was working in long term, like a concept of ‘soft' HRM. Lifetime Employment was created by Thomas J. [...]

[...] Available at: www.resilience-organisationnelle.com/pj/meo_cas_ibm.doc [Accessed on: 05th January] IBM, IBM Archives, Exhibits, IBM's chairmen (no date). Available at: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/chairmen/chairmen_9.html [Accessed on: 08th January] 3. GOOGLE: A soft approach to drive employees and improve the performance Strategy Explorers: Google: Who drives the strategy? ; Article by Phyl Johnson http://blogs.payscale.com/compensation/2011/06/google.html from World@Work conference 2011, San Diego [Accessed on January 11] Strategy Explorers: Google: Who drives the strategy? ; Article by Phyl Johnson http://resources.greatplacetowork.com/article/pdf/why_google_is_no._1.pdf [Accessed on January 11] http://fr.scribd.com/doc/13286610/Strategic-HR-Planning-at-Google-Inc [Accessed on December 20] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466852658514144.ht ml [Accessed on December 20] Strategy Explorers: Google: Who drives the strategy? [...]

• Number of pages 12 pages
• Language English
• Format .doc
• Publication date 06/03/2014
• Read 9 times
• Updated on 14/03/2014

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Ricardo flies Ryanair: Strategic human resource management and competitive advantage in a Single European Aviation Market

2020, Human Resource Management Journal

How and why are some firms, such as Ryanair, able to consistently record industry‐leading profitability that sustains a competitive advantage over their rivals? Human resource management (HRM) plays a critical role in four widely recognised profit‐generating mechanisms, albeit not always in ways predicted by mainstream strategic HRM. Studies of HRM → performance grounded in the resource‐based view of the firm invariably focus on the human resources already controlled by the firm—specifically, resources that are rare, inimitable, non‐substitutable and can be exploited through organisation—rather than strategic factor markets where firms acquire their human resources. In doing so, these studies overlook the industrial relations and wider institutional context that might variously promote, permit or preclude particular HR policies and practices. It is only when different profit‐generating mechanisms, either in isolation or combination, are activated under the auspicious conditions of a...

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