Discuss about the Developing an HR Plan.
Fresh Fruits Forever—widely popular as Triple F — initially started off as a partnership between four people, has now grown into a public limited company with a worth of over $150 million. As the name suggests, Triple F is largely based on the buying and selling of fruits and also offers a variety of fruit-related products to the consumers, for example, fruit juice, pickles, etc.
Basically, Triple F is a fruit selling chain. It has gained so much popularity in recent years that it has opened numerous branches throughout the country. Thanks to the outstanding quality of the products it sells and reasonable pricing scheme, the company has been able to soar higher in ever target they set, with each passing year.
Recently, thanks to the immense success of the company, people have been vying ‘fruit market’ as a viable and profitable industry. As a result, various other similar companies have been established. To be precise, Healthy Fruits is Triple F’s major competition at present. While Triple F is the market leader, Healthy Fruits has been giving major competition to the company. Authorities have been in continuous discussions as to how to overcome the competition and establish Triple F as a ‘monopoly’ in the fruit market industry.
By further conducting SWOT (Humphrey, 1964) and PEST analysis (Aguilar, 1967), it can be seen that Triple F has an edge over fruit production, fruit juice making and other things over its competitors as the company has had a really long experience in the sector. Likewise, it has a specialist marketing expertise, a wide scope for market growth and favorable economic and technological factors. However, recent advancement in technology in fruit juice making processes and Triple F’s competitor cashing on it might be a problem. Apparently, the machine requires a huge capital investment. Triple recently invested in opening a new branch; hence, it currently doesn’t have the funds to buy the advanced machine. This might be a problem as Healthy Fruits has been selling fruit juices and pickles at a cheaper price because of this.
A corporate strategy is a long-term strategy designed to achieve the ultimate goal of the company. They are goals understood as the ‘ultimate aim’ and should be achieved in order to determine the success of any business or the competitive position and distinctive competence (Yeung, 1991). To achieve strategic objectives, strategic management, strategic analysis and strategic choices are made.
The following are Triple F’s strategic objectives:
As a company that is very much interested in providing quality services to its customers, satisfaction in customers has always been Tripe F’s main corporate objective. In order to achieve this, the company has been constantly striving to provide good quality product to its customers.
Like any company, Triple F is also a profit motive one. Hence, it aims to be the market leader ultimately. Its rapid growth and increasing popularity in recent years have been a testament as to how successful the company has been to achieve this objective. However, it still has a long way to go.
Triple F aims to set a benchmark and create a name for itself in the long run, in the fruit market industry. Hence, it aims to innovate. For a fruit selling company as Triple F, innovation means innovation in terms of production (of juices and pickles), innovation in terms of fruit sowing and production techniques, etc.
Corporate Social Responsibility (Watts, 2000) is an act of conducting business activities morally by being accountable to the society for one’s actions. As an aware and responsible company, Triple F also aims to preserve society and not exploit the resources it has. Under CSR, the company aims to not exploit any o its stakeholder groups, cause minimum harm to the environment and conduct eco-friendly activities wherever possible.
In order to achieve the aforementioned strategies, Triple F has conducted a thorough research and various discussions among its different departments and it is HR department, specifically, has been directly involved in the process. Human Resource, often undermined as a department only important for recruitment, is an important department in achieving the strategic objectives of any company. Human Resource Development—as elaborated in the book Passion Plan At Work — includes recruitment and training, career development and employee assistance and benefits; as HR’s main responsibilities (Chang, 2001).
The key implications include:
The authorities set the goals. However, it is the workers who work day and night to achieve the set objectives. Hence, it is the responsibility of the HR department to recruit passionate and enthusiastic individuals who are keen on doing their jobs eagerly. As of today, the HR department has been pretty okay in selecting such individuals. But recently, there have been instances of customer complaints. Some people have expressed their dissatisfaction regarding the qualities of fruits they’ve purchased. One individual has even gone far to claim that the chains are selling expired fruit juices and pickles.
Another responsibility HR has, as a department is that it must be effective in communicating the changes Triple F has to grow through as an organization. The various changes that occur within and outside the organization have to be thoroughly communicated and the department has to make maximum efforts to prevent resistance in order to keep workers motivated so that productivity is at maximum and cost at minimum level.
Triple F, like any other large and dispersed organization, has had issues communicating changes to its large groups of workers. Recently, when some of its branches had to be mechanized (only to an extent), there were short-term problems of redundancy and resistance to change.
While Triple F’s HR has been successful in achieving the company’s strategic objectives to a great extent, it has been lagging at certain aspects. The most common one: being unable to effectively implement proposed changes. The reason for the resistance to change (Hede, 2001) could be the leadership style being used to implement the change. The HR department could conduct trainings and workshops to workers on all levels focusing on different leadership styles and that ‘change’ is a natural thing – this could help remove the hesitancy that the company has been facing as a whole.
In order to decide whether the company should further focus on growth or that it should now focus on innovation and mechanization to avoid competition, the HR department could refer to Ansoff’s matrix (Ansoff, 1957) and conduct Force Field Analysis (Lewin, 1943) to analyze the risks of each activity and then, come to a conclusion.
Regarding the quality of services and the occasional customer complaints the company has been receiving, Triple F should find out the root cause behind these complaints. If this is a result of low quality products then, better quality checks and quality assurance standards should be established. If this, on the other hand, is a result of poor motivation level among workers, HR should take up measures to improve the motivation level among workers. This could include referring to various motivation theories such as Maslow’s Hierarchy (Maslow, 1943) and the two-factor theory of motivation (Herzberg, 1968).
Furthermore, the company should start investing on what it deemed as ‘innovation’—its corporate objective and strategy. For this, the HR should start hiring or look for expertise groups that are adept at food processing and production processes related to the fruit market industry, with meaningful discussions from the board of course. An evaluation should be conducted that should provide information that is credible and useful, enabling the incorporation of lessons learned into the decision-making process (Commission, n.d.).
Conclusion
In conclusion, Triple F has achieved heights and gone lengths in a mere span of ten years. Not only that, it has been growing in a really large and fast pace. In order to make sure that everything is happening under control and that they don’t fall behind their competitors, Triple F should now take a step back and focus on innovation – their corporate strategy—instead of only focusing on growth. By that, they will be able to keep up with the things happening in the fruit market industry.
What is necessary is a ‘situational analysis’ (Clarke, n.d.) that will help determine the current status of the company and what further steps the company needs to take in order to keep up with its initial corporate strategic objectives.
To tackle competition, Triple F should focus on its initial objective of ‘innovation’ so that Healthy Fruits no longer bears such a big threat to the company. This can be done by maybe increasing share capital so that the company can immediately mechanize all the branches to reduce costs and maximize productivity.
In order to measure how the proposed changes have affected the company’s performance and whether they’ve stepped closer in achieving their goals, Triple F can resort to a few options. In order to compare their market share, they can refer to their sales. To know about customer satisfaction and content, the company could conduct surveys and ask customers about the changes they’d like to see in the services of the company.
References
Aguilar, F. (1967). Scanning the Business Environment. New York: Macmilian.
Ansoff, H. I. (1957). Strategies For Diversification. Harvard Business Review.
Chang, R. (2001). The Passion Plan at Work, California: Jossey-Bass.
Clarke, A. E. (n.d). Situational Analyses: Grounded Theory Mapping AFter the Postmodern Turn, San Francisco: UNiversity of California.
Commission, E. (n.d). Project Cycle Management Guidelines, l.: s.n.
Hede, W. H. B. a. A. (2001). Resistance to organizational change. Bovey Management, 11.
Herzberg, F. (1968). One More Time: How do You Motivate Employees. Harvard Business Review.
Humphrey, A. (1964). Zurich: s.n.
Lewin, K. (1943). Defining the Field at a Given Time. Psychological Revoiew, 292-310.
Maslow, A. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation, l.: Psychological Review.
Watts, L. H. a. R. (2000). Making Good Business Sense, Geneva: World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Yeung, A. C. a. S. (1991). Ashridge Mission Model. Creating a Sense of Mission, 10-20.
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