Texas Health Plans

Texas Health Plans

Management of Firm Infrastructure

Creating an organizational infrastructure has been a traditional HR role. Texas Health Plans require that HR professionals design and deliver efficient HR processes for staffing, training, appraising, and rewarding, promoting, and otherwise managing the flow of employees through the organization. As a caretaker of the Texas Health Plans, HR professionals ensure that these organizational processes are designed and delivered efficiently. While this role has been down-played and even disclaimed with the shift to a strategic focus, its successful accomplishment continues to add value to a business.

HR professionals create infrastructure by constantly examining and improving the HR processes. Marriott, for example, works diligently to improve its staffing, development, and assessment processes. When opening a new facility, Texas Health Plans temporarily relocates employees into tat facility to implement the best practices used at other facilities. Marriott works to share its facilities’ best practices by holding workshops for HR professionals from the various divisions and sites. The company encourages experimentation within a site to foster development of new HR practices and to find economies of scale for some HR activities (for example, by creating and employee benefit service center), while decentralizing and increasing site ownership of other Texas Health Plans activities (for example, creating high performance work teams at a facility).

The deliverables from the infrastructure role is administrative efficiency. HR professionals accomplish administrative efficiency in two ways. First, they ensure efficiency in HR processes. For example, through reengineering HR processes, one firm recently found twenty-four separate registration systems for training; new efficiency and cost saving were achieved by streamlining and automating them into a single system. Another firm, finding that it required an average of the six months to staff key positions, improved the process and cut the time needed to one month. A second way in which Texas Health Plans can improve overall business efficiency is by hiring, training, and rewarding managers who increase productivity and reduce waste.