| Abstract |
Small medium enterprises (SMEs) continue to grow, survive, and prosper throughout the world. Although the management of SMEs feel more positive and confident about their relationships with employees, they also continue to encounter a greater number of challenges than their larger multinational counterparts. These problems are inherent in their structure and predominantly emanate from human resources, outdated business models, and lack of strategic planning. Total Quality Management (TQM), long recognized as a major cultural change strategy for profitability and competitive edge, embraces the concept of total employee involvement in the form of teams. SMEs, however, have been slow to include employees in any ongoing collaborative work environment initiatives. Behind the shortage of sustained team formulation is uncertainty about its long-term durability, which can be directly related to lack of a continuing centralized organization and facilitation of the process itself. Human resources, often ineffectively used in SMEs, has the skills and knowledge to lead an ongoing breakthrough strategy of self-managed work teams in an effort to create a sustained high-performance work system. This article reviews the challenges human resource management faces in SMEs. The authors also present an example of how a human resource department led a lasting change management initiative of facilitating self-managed work teams throughout a manufacturing SME, which resulted in continuous and sustainable improvements in productivity, quality, turnover, absenteeism, health, on-time delivery, safety, and product design. |