Operational Business Management II

Study Legal, Contractual and Staff Management for Horticultural Enterprises

The ability to manage staff is pivotal in any enterprise (commercial or public); and in a society where law is becoming increasingly complex; the modern horticultural manager also needs to have a firm understanding of basic legal practice. This course focuses on building your capacity to manage staff anf legal aspects within the horticultural enterprise.

This is a module from the RHS M.Hort (based on curriculum developed by the Royal Horticultural Society); this can be taken either as part of the M.Hort Program, as a module in one of our other qualifications or as a stand alone course (Ideal for use as a Professional Development program for persons working in the horticulture industry anywhere in the world).

Lesson Structure

There are 7 lessons in this course:

1. The Law and Horticulture 10 hrs
2. Contract Law 10hrs
3. Employment Law 10hrs
4. PBL Financial Management 20hrs
5. Staff Performance Management 10hrs
6. Motivating Employees in Horticulture 10 hrs
7. PBL Management Case Study 30 hrs
   • Problem Based Learning

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

Aims

• Discuss, examine and evaluate legal systems and laws that are relevant to the management of horticultural enterprises.
• Examine, evaluate and debate the elements that comprise the making of valid contracts in the horticulture industry.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the principal areas of employment legislation
• Compare financial management requirements for a series of optional horticultural enterprises in two or more different countries.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the principal areas of performance management & staffing within a business environment.
• Determine and apply an understanding of motivation theory to better manage staff performance within a horticultural business environment

Extract From Course Notes

Recruitment is the development of a pool of applicants for a job. This can occur internally or externally. Internal recruitment will come from employees already working in the organisation. The advantage is the understanding they already have of the facility and the opportunity to move upward within the organisation may encourage staff to remain with the company, work hard and succeed.

A disadvantage of internal recruitment is lack of skills or talent within existing employees creating a limited applicant pool leading to poor selection decisions.

External recruitment brings in new blood to the organisation which can inspire innovation. The most frequently used source of outside applicants is newspaper advertisements, employee referrals and college campus recruiting. It is becoming more popular for organisations to utilise electronic media such as the Internet both to advertise job openings and to gather applicant information.

Selection of staff can occur through interviews being the most popular ways. Questions asked by the interviewee have to be appropriate and job related. During an unstructured interview different questions are asked of the interviewees and follow up questions can also be asked to find out more about the candidates.

Although selection and recruitment are the main functions on human resource management however employee resourcing should not be seen as a simply as a technique for filling a job.

Employee resourcing can also be seen as:

• Ways to make organisational change
• Ways to develop and sustain employee commitment
• Ways to achieve high levels of performance
  

This can be achieved by:

• Using various recruitment methods
• Analysing the available human resources within a company
• Deploying the right people to the right job ie. new employees, promoting existing employees, redeploying existing employees.
• New forms of work contracts

Today businesses use varied techniques and criteria to find the right (or best) person for a particular job this may include:

• Biographical data – ie. work history
• Interviews
• Psychometric tests – to match psychological attributes to the job
• Simulated work samples (eg. typing tests)

More emphasis is also being placed on the personality and attitude of applicants rather then just ability. The flow on from this approach is:

• New employees are more likely to fit into the corporate/business culture
• They are more likely to understand and aspire to company goals
• They are more likely to be happy to build a career within the organisation

Resourcing Professionals

Companies often use resourcing professionals to:

• Analyse job applications
• Interview and select appropriate applicants
• Pass on the ‘best’ to be interviewed by the company.

For small business however this is often financially prohibitive so they must develop their own selection criteria. In either case the resourcing policies, procedures and systems must correlate with the strategic goals of the business.