Application Case - MSDM PDF

Preview

Summary

Application Case ( Chapter 1 )A Healthy Workplace? Ten years ago, as a hungry Sam Dickinson walked through a shopping mall looking for a quick lunch, he despaired at the choices. High-fat and -calorie fast-food was everywhere. Like many others, Sam was becoming acutely aware of the importance of a h...

Description

Application Case ( Chapter 1 ) A Healthy Workplace? Ten years ago, as a hungry Sam Dickinson walked through a shopping mall looking for a quick lunch, he despaired at the choices. High-fat and -calorie fast-food was everywhere. Like many others, Sam was becoming acutely aware of the importance of a healthy diet and of keeping his weight in check. As he searched in vain, an idea came to him that was to become the foundation for a small empire: not just a sandwich and salad shop, but an extensive menu with healthy takes on traditional fast food favorites such as hamburgers, fries, pizza, and fried chicken, with no menu item containing more than 400 calories—nutritious, tasty, quality fast food. Sam set up his first healthy fast food outlet at a shopping mall in the United Kingdom with a team of 16. It soon became renowned for high-quality food, cleanliness, and great customer service and was an immediate success. Today, there are more than 80 of Sam’s healthy food restaurants in 10 countries throughout Europe, employing nearly 1,800 staff. But what at first was a relatively easy business to run became far more challenging as the firm grew. Recently, Sam sat at his desk in the company’s brand-new head office reading a recently conducted customer and staff feedback report compiled from all the company’s restaurants. He didn’t like what he was reading. While customers at some outlets praised the standard of the food and service, at others it was described as “tasteless,” taking too long to make; employees were called “rude” and the restaurants “dirty.” The employees were not satisfied either. Among the gripes were allegations of unfair treatment, below-average wages, long hours, demotivation, and food hygiene regulations not being followed. The bottom line for Sam was decreasing profits, stores closing, and high staff turnover. Sam’s empire seemed to be crumbling before his eyes. Questions 1-16. What do you think was causing the poor customer and employee feedback? 1-17. How could better knowledge of HRM among the store man-agers improve the situation at the restaurants? 1-18. What HR challenges emerged due to the firm’s growth in particular? How could they best be addressed?

Application Case (Chapter 3) A Failure of Strategy at Borders UK In 1971, Tom and Louis Borders, students at the University of Michigan, opened the first Borders bookstore in Ann Arbor, in the United States. At a time when bookstores were small, specialist, and usually dark and dusty, Borders had a different approach: it was an enormous store that carried books on all sorts of topics and had excellent customer service provided by highly knowledgeable and empowered employees. This mix of knowledge and authority among employees helped in creating a customer-

focused strategy where employees partnered with the stores’ customers to better meet the latter’s needs and interests. In 1997, the company established its first international store inSingapore and later opened in other countries, including the United Kingdom. Borders UK was established in 1998 and quickly became one of the leading booksellers. At its peak, it had about 70 stores and 10 percent of the retail bookselling market. But the fall was fast. In 2009, Borders UK had serious financial problems and was taken under the management of a court-appointed administrator. Eventually, the end of 2009 marked its demise. At the same time, all of Borders’ directly owned overseas locations were sold or closed until the company was finally shut down in 2011. What went wrong so quickly? Poor strategic decisions played a major role. Executives of the giant bookstore missed the impact that tech-nology would have on the industry. In 1998, Borders created a website but three years later outsourced the online business to Amazon, essen-tially handing over the part of the business to a competitor. By the time they addressed this in 2008 by launching its own e-commerce website, it had fallen well behind its competitors. Borders was also too late to e-books and it branched out into CDs and DVDs just when the entertainment industry was getting into iPods and similar devices. When all this hit physical book sales, it could not afford the stores, expensive retail space. Essentially, Borders forgot that it was a book store. High levels of turnover and new executives being recruited from other industries, such as supermarkets and department stores, eroded the original Borders culture. The once-famed variety of books was steadily replaced with non-book items such as dolls, toys, games, and novelty items. The book-loving staff had largely been replaced by unprofessional staff. Crucially, customer service and loyalty were lost. Questions 3-13. Identify the levels and types of strategy that Borders followed after it was first founded and then after it was bought by Kmart. 3-14. Was the human resource management strategy at Borders pre-1992 consistent with the overall strategy? What about after this? 3-15. Draw a strategy map to translate how the post-1992 Borders could have better translated the company’s goals and given the firm a better chance of survival. 3-16. The Borders Group intends to resurrect the business of Borders Books. Draw up a strategic plan that you believe will make the firm successful given today’s business environment and identify which HR strategies are needed to achieve the goals.

Application Case (chapter 4) The Chilly Burger Joint When Steve Parella opened the Chilly Burger Joint in the United King-dom in early 2012, many people flocked to its doors to taste their signature burgers, which they had been advertising very heavily on TV. Their slogan was, “Live the Chilly Experience.” People lined up for hours to buy a burger from the restaurant. However, after an extraor-dinary success in the first year, the store reported a drop of 30% in revenues by the end of the second year. This was mainly due to the poor customer service at the store. Customers were often handled by unprofessional employees with a careless attitude. Disgruntled employees barely greeted their customers and were visibly annoyed when customers demanded a change in their order. In addition, tables were often left uncleaned for the next customer, and during peak times some untrained employees over-cooked the fries. Steve decided to have a meeting with his store manager. The store manager complained that there were no job descriptions for the employees to understand their requirements accurately, and this issue had further complicated employee recruitment and training efforts. Steve saw this as an attempt by the manager to cover for his management mistakes. Not knowing what to do exactly, Steve scrambled to fix the situation by turning to an HR consultant. The consultant said that the job descrip-tions are critically needed and that Steve needs to hire a job analyst for this task. Steve rejected the advice and believed that it was unnecessary to incur the extra time and costs necessary to do the job descriptions, and hence decided to replace the store manager instead. The store rev-enues kept deteriorating sharply, however. After four years of opening, Steve Parella finally decided that it was to time to shut down. Questions 4-16. Should Steve have taken the consultant’s advice and pre-pared job descriptions? Do you think the store’s losses are the fault of the store manager or due to the absence of job descriptions? 4-17. If you were a job analyst, which method would you employ to conduct the job analysis at CBJ? Why?

Application Case (chapter 5) Techtonic Group Written and copyrighted by Gary Dessler, PhD. It’s been estimated that there are more than 600,000 unfilled techni-cal jobs (systems engineers, programmers, and so on) in the United states. Therefore, IT companies like Techtonic Group are continually battling for good applicants. For many years, Techtonic outsourced app software development to Armenia; CEO Heather Terenzio flew twice a year to work with the people there. However, programmers’ salaries in Eastern Europe were rising, and the distances involved and the language differences com-plicated managing the projects. Therefore, the CEO decided there had to be a better way. Since the programmers abroad required more and more detailed instructions, she decided she could hire junior people closer to home. Then with about the same effort and instructions Tech-tonic could do its programming locally.

The problem was, how do you recruit talent when the unemployment rate for tech workers is close to zero? Ms. Terenzio had a novel solution. Rather than looking for college graduates with technical degrees, Tech-tonic set up a training/apprenticeship program. The aim was to attract people who didn’t necessarily have college degrees but who expressed a strong desire for doing programming. People apply for the five-week program at “Techtonic Academy,” where they learn basic computer cod-ing skills. Some of the graduates than qualify for an eight-month paid apprenticeship at Techtonic, where they learn software development. The program is successful. They usually get about 400 applicants for each of the 15 spots in each five-week Academy program. The city of Boulder helps subsidize the program, and the applicants don’t pay for classes. The company is now expanding its academy/apprenticeship programs to other U.S. cities. Questions 5-15. Specifically what recruiting sources would you use to attract participants to the Techtonic Academy, and apprenticeship programs? 5-16. What other recruitment sources (other than the academy and apprenticeship programs) would you recommend Tech-tonic use, and why? 5-17. What suggestions would you make to Techtonic for improv-ing its recruiting processes?

Application Case (chapter 6) The Insider Written and copyrighted by Gary Dessler, PhD. A federal jury convicted a stock trader who worked for a well-known investment firm, along with two alleged accomplices, of insider trading. According to the indictment, the trader got inside information about pending mergers from lawyers. The lawyers allegedly browsed around their law firm picking up information about corporate deals others in the firm were working on. The lawyers would then allegedly pass their information on to a friend, who in turn passed it on to the trader. Such “inside” information reportedly helped the trader (and his investment firm) earn millions of dollars. The trader would then allegedly thank the lawyers, for instance, with envelopes filled with cash. Things like that are not supposed to happen. Federal and state laws prohibit them. And investment firms have their own compliance procedures to identify and head off shady trades. The problem is that controlling such behavior once the firm has someone working for it who may be prone to engage in inside trading isn’t easy. “Better to avoid hiring such people in the first place,” said one pundit.

Over lunch at Bouley restaurant in Manhattan’s TriBeCa area, the heads of several investment firms were discussing the conviction, and what they could do to make sure something like that didn’t occur in their firms. “It’s not just compliance,” said one. “We’ve got to keep out the bad apples.” They ask you for your advice.

Questions 6-10. We want you to design an employee selection program for hiring stock traders. We already know what to look for as far as technical skills are concerned—accounting courses, eco-nomics, and so on. What we want is a program for screening out potential bad apples. To that end, please let us know the following: What screening test(s) would you suggest, and why? What questions should we add to our applica-tion form? Specifically how should we check candidates’ backgrounds, and what questions should we ask previous employers and references? 6-11. What else (if anything) would you suggest?...