Case Study 1: In order to survive in the highly competitive world, organizations generally tend to change and restructure their culture, people structure, legalities, technologies, marketing processes, pricing and many other parts. The definition of change may be different to different people. A CEO may define change as change in organizational strategy and structure, a manager in technology may define in tools and systems, an HR manager may define change in terms of recruitment, training and development of new staffs. In few cases change is difficult which creates problems and leaves people in bewilderment. Usually wrong decisions and strategies are applied which affect the organizational environment and psychology of the employees. In the case of king of Calls (Hyderabad) similar happenings can be perceived. An extremely ambitious Indian executive in charge Kabith out of desperation hires, scolds and fires the new agents just because they were unable to meet the sales targets of the call center company due to their rudimentary English and new American names. They lacked proficiency of language and professional skills to convince the American customers to buy listings, $459.95 each which were free previously.
Instead of hiring, scolding and firing, the management could adopt other strategies to develop the business without much difficulty and desperation. According to McKinsey 7-S model, organizations must look at the seven Ss to perform successful change (Conway et al. 2016). These are Strategy, structure, system (HARD ELEMENTS), shared values, skills, style and staff (SOFT ELEMENTS). An organization needs both the soft and hard elements. The model helps to find out and work on certain problems and improve them for better organizational results (Hurrell 2016). According to the theory of this model if Kabith had trained the employees properly before assigning them to the tasks or had he measured their skills and knowledge while recruiting them, he would not have faced such problems.
Case Study 2: Nowadays employees getting fired for their facebook posts is not a surprising news. Social media boosts people’s career, connects them with the perfect recruiters and also build a good reputation but it can also be harmful to the good will and affect the individual in many ways (Guest 2017). Posting humiliating comments on company business is definitely a despicable action and a person who does that should be punished for that at early hours. The treatment should be equal for all. Such was the case with Downcity motors, where James Kenton, the most successful salesperson of the company has recently posted some embarrassing comments and pictures of Downcity cars on social media. Dell, the business head of Downcity motors gets infuriated by his conducts and decides to fire him because this is not the first time that James has done such mistakes. Susannah, a member of the company discusses the matter with another sakes person Tyson ad finally decides not to fire him, rather ignore his posts for the time (Harvard Business Review 2018).
The Downcity motors company had no right to fire an employee because they lacked in generating any such policies for their company, thus having no solid ground to accuse the person. Ultimately, nobody has the right to accuse anyone on the basis of a social media post. There have been some faults on the part of the company because earlier when the person had posted similar sarcastic photos of the company, the management overlooked it as he was earning huge sales for the company (Conway et al. 2016). Even though they did not generated policies acting against violation of company reputation, they should have at least warned him once not to commit such mistakes in future.
Case Study 3: Performance management is a managerial technique where the performance and behavior of each and every employee is tracked. This strategy helps to accomplish the mission statement of the company and examining the performance capability of the employees. Lack of performance management system in an organization might keep the manager blind to which employee is working how (Buckingham and Goodall 2015). In this regard, the case of Lucas, a general clerk I in the general accounting department in ABC company for past 28 years can be examined. His task was to prepare different financial reports and statements being payed $ 21.85 per hour. After a new department head came to the general accounting department, it got discovered that Lucas is inefficient n performing his job. He has been getting his tasks done by other employees. After a series of meetings regarding his issue, he got medically and psychologically evaluated which revealed that he has the capacity of a fifth grader at the age of forty-five. Therefore, he could not perform the general clerk I job properly (Lucas 2011).
First of all, poorly implemented performance management affects the company. It incurs huge costs for the company, creates misconception about the employee and the work quality. Without accurate data to support the appraisal, the truth cannot be determined. The resources of the company including Time and Money are wasted on the employee who does not have the mental capability to accomplish the task. Although in this case Lucas had the perfect attendance and tardiness record, no performance reviews were conducted by the company to evaluate regular employee performance (Eskridge Jr 2017). Since, the fault was mostly on the part of the company, they cannot demote Lucas and deduct his salary, instead they can employ him in a position where he can perform suitable tasks of his level. The performance management model needs to be followed by every company to avoid such tough situations.
Case Study 4: Flexible work timing can undeniably increase the organizational effectiveness, support better decision making, improved morale, competitive advantage and improve people management providing higher levels of revenues. It hurts morale when a fixed group of employees avail the advantage of working comfortably at home and others do not. Work-at –home policy definitely earns improved productivity and the employees also feel comfortable and satisfied by this policy (Cooper and Baird 2015). In the case of KGDV which offers a huge range of services such as market and legal research, converting, abstracting and indexing journal articles and selling them to libraries and institutions. As the company was expanding larger than the office space, the management decided to divide the teams into two groups. One group worked the office and the other group worked at home. After six months the company discovered that the people working at home could provide lesser productivity than the employees working at home. The office working employees started feeling deprived of the facilities which could initiate employee burnout and turnover tendencies. In this confusing situation they discuss over the matter and try to find some way out which would retain the dissatisfied employees and manage the other sides too (Harvard Business Review 2018).
As the business world is running through advancement, the four walls of the office room theory is gradually evaporating, instead employees and organizations are displaying their preference for the work-at –home phenomenon. Companies can adjust and grant the work-at-home facility if it brings more benefits than before (Lins, Servaes and Tamayo 2017). It will free the employers of the stress of managing employees at the office and in return outcomes more than the expectations are received. Therefore, the KGDV company should generate timing and place flexibility for all the employees. It will benefit the female workers too up to greater extent.
Case Study 5: Salaries, wages and other costs are the most expensive investments of a company. Therefore, a company must be careful in handling the change with care, honesty and compassion. Those companies which reduce the costs and increase productivity by firing significant employees undoubtedly suffer from weak morale, poor customer relations, decline in sales and cause employee turnover due to pressurizing them for extra labour at lower wages (Hess and Jepsen 2009). Midwest Education, Inc, is a great supplier of educational stuff for the United States. The major concern of the company is in the field of technology, business classrooms and science. It also provides books, videos, presentation and manuals for educational help. The company has grown with 416 employees divided into three major divisions. The aim of the company is to increase the quality and productivity of their sales products. In the year 2008 the company had been struggling through “great recession” due to the economic downfall. The company needs to reduce the costs even after cutting the budget from many systems. Although the company has tried its best to save the employees from getting affected by this deductions, they no longer could refrain from cutting the salary expenses (Fischer and Henderson 2015).
In this condition the company still can avoid employee aggression and turnovers. During the recession, it is necessary for the management not to simply cut the wages, rather they should adopt strategies that would preserve the employer-employee relation. First of all, a departmental meeting should be scheduled to present, discuss and seek for support from the employees at this deplorable hour. A list should be prepared about the employee question and suggestions. The highest paid executives should be convinced to cooperate (Kossek and Thompson 2016). Finally, the management should assure all and reunite them to fight the situation together. It will strengthen their bond and trust on each other and the situation will pass with the compromise, sacrifice and support of everyone.
Case Study 6: Trust is essential in a work culture or rather say the foundation of the work culture. Not only in organizations or work places, in almost every sphere of life once lost, it is difficult to restore trust. Organizational trust is the base for employee motivation, satisfaction and happiness. The communication in the work place should be transparent. In every aspects of organizational operations such as goal achievement, employee engagement, employee empowerment, trust is paramount (Pate, Morgan-Thomas and Beaumont 2012). There are plenty of small ways which can affect the organizational trust. In a UK based public sector company employing almost 200 people has a centralized management frame. There are so many skilled ad semi-skilled employees. In the year 1999 and 2003, an employee survey program had been conducted by the company. After the survey, it has been found that there has been some issue regarding the trust of senior management. The downturn in trust subsequently gave rise to harassment and bullying. The management failed to address the past concern s of the employees and thereby suffering such conditions (Pate, Morgan-Thomas and Beaumont 2012).
The company dealt with the problem and tried to restore the trust by applying the Gillespie and Dietz’s (2009) trust repair framework that is the process of apologizing by letter/e-mail. A new policy got generated titled ‘Dignity at Work’ tackling bullying and harassment. There are other positive actions which can be adopted for restoring trust. Lying is an offence, but stating the truth partially is also equal to lying. The half said truth if said fully can restore the lost trust up to greater extent (Alcover et al. 2017). The assurance given by the offender to the coworkers or the management about how he/she will change the future behavior or actions will also add value to the person. The offender should compensate the loss by working more sincerely, systematically and promisingly (Stevens, MacDuffie and Helper 2015).
Conclusion:
Therefore, from the above case studies, it can be concluded that strategic evaluation is important to assess and measure how well the business pf a particular organization is performing, and achieving its goals. Through each of the six case studies it is pretty apparent that in the highly competitive business world, organizations go through certain shortcomings, be it regarding strategic employment, workplace policies, reduction of labor- costs, work-at –home policies or trust restoration. It is up to the management how will they deal with the problems strategically without disrupting the business flow and disrespecting the employee relationships which is the pillar of an organization.
Strategic evaluation is an extremely essential method which helps to minutely observe and assess the efficiency and usefulness of different plans applied to achieve business goals. The managers are helped by this process as they can measure the appropriateness of the current strategy and make changes if needed. The current assignment examines six case studies to evaluate and through more light on different organizational situations and proposed strategies which could be helpful in getting better results. The six different companies have faced six variety of problems and how they deal with them and how they should deal have been further detailed in the assignment. The paper concludes with the assertion that human resource management and employee relations are highly correlated and one is incomplete without the other.
Reference:
Alcover, C.M., Rico, R., Turnley, W.H. and Bolino, M.C., 2017. Understanding the changing nature of psychological contracts in 21st century organizations: A multiple-foci exchange relationships approach and proposed framework. Organizational Psychology Review, 7(1), pp.4-35.
Buckingham, M. and Goodall, A., 2015. Reinventing performance management. Harvard Business Review, 93(4), pp.40-50.
Conway, E., Fu, N., Monks, K., Alfes, K. and Bailey, C., 2016. Demands or resources? The relationship between HR practices, employee engagement, and emotional exhaustion within a hybrid model of employment relations. Human Resource Management, 55(5), pp.901-917.
Cooper, R. and Baird, M., 2015. Bringing the “right to request” flexible working arrangements to life: From policies to practices. Employee Relations, 37(5), pp.568-581.
Eskridge Jr, W.N., 2017. VII’s Statutory History and the Sex Discrimination Argument for LGBT Workplace Protections. Yale Law Journal, 127(322), pp.322-404.
Fischer, A. and Henderson, M. (2015). Workforce Reduction: Strategic, Legal And Employee Concerns. Journal of Business Case Studies (JBCS), 11(2), p.49.
Guest, D.E., 2017. Human resource management and employee well?being: Towards a new analytic framework. Human Resource Management Journal, 27(1), pp.22-38.
Harvard Business Review 2018. Case Study: Can a Work-at-Home Policy Hurt Morale?. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2015/01/case-study-can-a-work-at-home-policy-hurt-morale [Accessed 26 Aug. 2018].
Harvard Business Review. 2018. Case Study: Should He Be Fired for That Facebook Post?. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2015/12/case-study-should-he-be-fired-for-that-facebook-post, August 26, 2018.
Hess, N. and Jepsen, D. (2009). Career stage and generational differences in psychological contracts. Career Development International, 14(3), pp.261-283.
Hurrell, S.A., 2016. Rethinking the soft skills deficit blame game: Employers, skills withdrawal and the reporting of soft skills gaps. Human Relations, 69(3), pp.605-628.
Kossek, E.E. and Thompson, R.J., 2016. Workplace flexibility: Integrating employer and employee perspectives to close the research-practice implementation gap. The Oxford handbook of work and family, 255.
Lins, K.V., Servaes, H. and Tamayo, A., 2017. Social capital, trust, and firm performance: The value of corporate social responsibility during the financial crisis. The Journal of Finance, 72(4), pp.1785-1824.
Lucas, J. 2011. Case Study: Possible Demotion Of A Long-Time And Faithful Employee. Journal of Business Case Studies (JBCS), 6(2).
Pate, J., Morgan-Thomas, A. and Beaumont, P. (2012). Trust restoration: an examination of senior managers’ attempt to rebuild employee trust. Human Resource Management Journal, 22(2), pp.148-164.
Stevens, M., MacDuffie, J.P. and Helper, S., 2015. Reorienting and recalibrating inter-organizational relationships: Strategies for achieving optimal trust. Organization Studies, 36(9), pp.1237-1264.
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