MGT600 Management, People and Teams Assessment 2 – Case Study (group) Submitted to: submitted by: Doug Rosenberg Chehak (00276564T) Lecturer Olivia (00271678T) Jeremy (00271058T) 1 Executive summary Employee satisfaction and engagement are the two key values that are needed for a successful business. It is proven that employee engagement positively impacts employee performance, retention, and creativity. Also, it is the level of commitment that an employee has towards its organization. But the organization also have a duty towards gaining their employees' trust and making them better at their work. This case study focuses on how to build employee performance and capability, creating a high-performance culture team and ensuring to attract and retain the best talent. To gain all this an organization must go through a number of the process such as providing training to their employees, rewarding them for their performance, employee engagement, accepting all diversity of people and even improving the recruitment processes. Through such activities, employees can achieve recognition in their organization which further help them to build and gain trust resulting in their high level of performance in the company. 2 Table of Contents Contents Page Number Introduction …………………………………………………… 4 Background ……………………………………………………. 5 Main Discussion ……………………………………………………. 6 – 10 Recommendations ………………………………………………… 11 – 16 Conclusion ………………………………………………….. 17 References …………………………………………………. 18 3 Introduction As the organization evolves and its structure becomes more complex, ensuring that employees of all hierarchy are performing at their fullest potential towards achieving a ‘true north' requires organization-wide coordination. The human resource (HR) department, therefore, becomes an integral part of an organization's sustainable success by continuously shaping the corporate culture, incubating new talent and motivating high performance (Heathfield, 2019). The competition for talent is ever greater in today's globalized workforce, one that is also increasingly receptive towards gigs or remote working, giving rise to the need for a healthy corporate culture that could attract truly capable candidates. In this paper, a technology firm which is suffering from various human resource challenges ranging from poor performance, high turnover and low morale would be analyzed. There will be detailed discussions on the challenges that it faced and the corresponding targeted solutions. This paper takes inspiration from a host of reputable journals, case studies and global benchmarking in coming out with the suggestions that would transform the organization into a high performing one. 4 Background Organizations are increasingly being reminded of the crucial role that their Human Resource (HR) department play when it comes to achieving set objectives as well as continuously enhancing performance. As such, it has become important to identify effective strategies that can be utilized by these entities, to fully enhance their human resource, and as a result of this optimization, gain the benefits or advantages that are accrued from a highly effective workforce. This issue of improving an organizational task force becomes more important in the case of entities that are operating in the business environment, which in most cases is highly competitive thus, highly demanding for the numerous companies present. The identified factors make up the core setting of this reports' discussion, whereby a select organization, namely ComSyst Technologies (CST), is analyzed concerning the current challenges it's facing when it comes to its human resource. More specifically, these challenges seem to arise from the multi-national environment that the select organization has found itself operating in. For instance, poor employee performance, low employee engagement, a decline in staff retention, and resignations of some key specialists, have been identified as the key challenges being faced by the organization. Hence, given the need to address these challenges, to improve CST's performance, especially in its global operations, the reports discuss these challenges as well as identifies some of the required solutions that can help the organization in effectively solve these. 5 Main Discussion There are several ways in which the select organization can achieve the above objective. This is especially because, in its list of challenges, the loss of key specialists has been one of the obstacles that it is currently facing. The sections below show the key areas of considerations, which are mostly in the category of Human Resource Management practice. Source: https://www.flexipersonnel.com.au/blog/employers/building-employee-capability-througheffective-learning-development-programs 6 Performance review A huge part of a project cycle is the performance review, or post mortem, which is often overlooked as the team is bogged down by more immediate tasks. When the avenue for performance assessment and constructive feedback is missing, the employees will not have a chance to voice their opinions nor express new ideas to improve the process. A performance review can also be detrimental when assessments allow implicit biases to creep in. Traditional appraisal processes that rely on 'open box reviews' are often leaving reviewers to write open-ended feedback, which can result in ambiguous and subjective suggestions (Mackenzie, Wehner, Correll, 2019). They also often feature a narrow focus on financial rewards and punishments that only come at the end of the calendar year. Instead, a performance review should be a platform where team leader and members can openly discuss past performance (the ‘accountability’ aspect) and future personal development (the ‘development’ aspect) so that the organization as a whole remains competitive and future proof (Cappelli, Tavis, 2016). Project management Low business performance suffered by CST could stem from the lack of infrastructure that supports the staff in doing more value-adding work, as they are currently tied up with ad-hoc matters. Cross-departmental projects, in particular, are susceptible to culture clash, as different teams struggle to speak a common corporate language and assimilate. A complete project team would typically feature a project manager who oversees the entire project delivery, the leader and the members. Corresponding to that, there are four phases of project management, namely planning, build-up, implementation and closeout for a team to deliver the key outcomes. In high functioning organizations, employees should only attend to important and urgent matters as per the Eisenhower matrix, so that deadlines and key deliverables are achieved on time. Conversely, existing employees can be frustrated at the lack of capacity and control they have over the situation, and leave for greener pasture. As 7 such, making project management more efficient via proper frameworks and team collaboration tools is vital for the company. Reward Management Reward management is an important practice under HRM that targets at ensuring employee retention through the provision of benefits to the organizational task force. This can take place in numerous ways and extends beyond the basic pay or remuneration that the organization provides to its staff. Existing literature highlights critical factors concerning reward management such as financial and non-financial approaches, understanding what rewards work effectively concerning the different categories of employees among many factors. Financial approaches may include certain pay raises, bonuses, and incentives whereas non-financial approaches can be taking the employees to lunch, throwing them a small party, recognition of their best work and so on (Hamlin, 2019). What is critical to understand is that when reward management is carried out effectively, it does help promote high employee retention, satisfaction with the organization and ultimately, employee performance. Hence, for this reason, CST organization must examine its reward management practices. Besides, it should identify some of the approaches that it can utilize to improve this, especially concerning the highly specialized employee categories, which it has recently lost/ experienced an increasing employee turnover. Cultural Diversity Management Another important area that CST also needs to look into extensively to solve its current HR problems is that of cultural diversity management. This is largely brought about by the fact that the organization is currently operating at the multi-national level, with operations in numerous regions across the world. Based on this factor, the organization management 8 must realize that cultural diversity is a key outcome in the case of multi-nationals. Its presence in some of the major continents of the world exposes its management to a diverse organizational workforce. HR practitioners have acknowledged that handling a culturally diverse workforce does have numerous challenges/obstacles. For instance, different cultures in the organizational workforce will require, awareness and accommodation with their different practices beliefs and ideologies. This requires management to understand the numerous approaches that are used under cultural diversity management and implement these in the context of CST. Doing so will have a positive outcome when it comes to employee retention, as well as attracting a talented workforce to the company, given that improved cultural diversity management positively influences organizational reputation. Training and Development Low employee performance, which has been identified as another critical challenge that the company is facing, can also be as a result of inadequate training and development practices in the case of CST. This is also another possible reason why the organization may be failing at retaining its employees, given the poor performance they are exuding. Hence, solutions lie in the organization also improving its training and development practices. Doing so will have a direct and positive impact on employee performance. This is especially given that the organizational workforce comes from different regions, hence varying educational systems, training approaches, and standards in the case of employees. Employees can be trained on various topics such as computer skills, communication, customer service, ethics, diversity, safety and human relations (McNamara, 2019). Once, the organization has done so, it will be able to improve its employee performance, employee motivation, reduced employee turnover, increase job satisfaction and this further could lead to higher retention rates. 9 Improved Recruitment Approaches The challenge that CST s it's experiencing concerning its employees is that of enhancing its recruitment approaches. Improved recruitment strategies have the effect of not only attracting appropriate and performing staff but as well as ensuring high retention rates given that the organizational staff is well established as performing and talented before joining the organization. Therefore, this is another area where CST can place more efforts to address its current issues. These recruitment approaches must also take into consideration key variations in the different regions the organization is operating in. Doing so will ensure that highquality staff is attracted and retained in the organization. Employee engagement It is the part that contains all the above-mentioned practices for building employee capability, performance, engagement, job satisfaction, commitment, and organizational behavior. Employee engagement does not have a particular definition but can be said that it is considered as a workplace approach which will help in resulting the satisfactory conditions or environment for all the members of the organization. It is an approach that CST must apply to its organization so that it will enhance their chances of increased success in business, increasing individual as well as organizational performance and well-being (Kompaso & Sridevi, 2010). It is a two-way relationship including the employees and the employers. If the employees of the organization are not well engaged then it will only lead to splitting, not showing commitment towards the company and poor performance. 10 Recommendations To further achieve the strategies that have been provided/highlighted in the above section, the following specific recommendations concerning each of the strategy have been provided. 1. Performance review There are many ways in which performance reviews process can be optimized, in terms of what is to be reviewed and how the review is done. For starter, better prompts can be created to guide the managers on what to cover and what to write about. They should comment on how the employees have achieved against specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-sensitive outcomes, known as the SMART goals. Other than that, reviews should be conducted at intervals more resembling the actual projects rather than calendar seasons, so that feedback can be provided in a timely and useful manner. Peer to peer feedback or lateral review can also help the employees understand their standing relative to their peers. In some cases, having the responsibility to review others also enable the reviewer to self-reflect, leading to a virtuous cycle of personal improvement. A bottom-up approach should also be encouraged, by having a 360 review system in which the junior executives could review their superiors (Chappelow, McCauley, 2019). This will incentivize the team leaders to align the individual and team goals for the benefit of every member involved. 11 2. Project Management Rather than following the traditional waterfall approach, in which the feedback from key stakeholders and reiteration process only take place infrequently, CST can consider adopting the Scrum or Agile framework for a rapid and reiterative product development environment. In the competitive landscape of the technology industry, the ability to reduce time to market will boost its business performance substantially. Some techniques can also help meetings flow better, such as minimizing the attendees to only the decision-makers, having a clear agenda communicated to everyone pre-meeting, and having a meeting master/chairperson who controls the discussion flow. Amazon, in particular, made news last year for distributing 6-page memos before meetings so that all executives could have ample time reading the materials and attend the meetings fully informed. Tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack could go a long way in facilitating day to day communication among the employees. Services offered by this Software as a Service (SaaS) companies allow the employee to easily share files, make announcements and retain organizational knowledge for future references, reducing the friction in transferring knowledge. they also often have integrations with other applications, such as zoom conferencing, Google Drive, Dropbox storage and Twilio notifications to facilitate daily operations. Cloud collaboration platforms are particularly useful for CST, which is an international company with employees spanning multiple time zones. Many younger human talents also indicated that availability for supporting infrastructure as such could make or break their consideration in choosing a firm (Keller, Meaney, 2017). 12 3. Reward Management Under reward management, existing HR managers can carry out an assessment of similar companies or industry practices and standards in the different countries that the organization is operating in. This will help identify the best approaches when it comes to rewarding management, such as appropriate salaries and remunerations rates, preferred benefits for staff as well as key financial and non-financial reward systems that can be used by the company. Considering the one of the famous soft drink company cocacola which strongly focus on their employees or associates by keeping them motivated, providing trainings and by rewarding the employees for their efforts and hard work through pension, incentives, bonus, health care and even additional holidays (“Resources and Capabilities of Coca-Cola”, 2019). Also, considering one another example of a technology company “Full Contact”, they recently added a reward program for their employees known by “paid, paid vacation” where they give their employees $7,500 to spend on their vacation (Bharadwaj, 2019). This will make them happy, more productive, building trust and enthusiastic regarding their work. 13 Source: https://toughnickel.com/business/The-Use-of-Reward-and-Incentive-System-A-Case-Study-ofMcDonalds 4. Cultural Diversity Management A specific recommendation under this strategy is that of ensuring all organization managers of CST undergo proper cultural diversity training to carry this out when it comes to organizational staff effectively. Secondly, the establishment of proper standards and guidelines regarding diversity accommodation in the different global establishments the company has will also improve cultural diversity management in CST. 14 5. Training and Development Under this strategy, the company can carry out a key audit or assessment of employee training and development deficits or needs, and then establish programs that will cater to the outcomes identified. This is critical to the company, especially because it operates in the technology sector, where highly qualified and competent employees are a key essential to operate successfully. Computer skills training is vital in today's competitive and digital era for conducting almost every task. A training program can be started by creating a manual for employees including practical and several technical skills, also aligning the training with management goals, should be innovative and taking employees surveys are beneficial for the business growth (Ferrazzi, 2019). The training and development program can be supported by the example of Hyatt hotels, as they have a top-notch training program for their employees and has won the title for the best place to work. This is only possible because they value their employees, encourage them and help them in their development regarding their work (Son, 2019). 6. Improved Recruitment Approaches Concerning the proposed strategy to carry out improved recruitment approaches to address the current issues that CST is facing, the organization can explore options such as E-recruiting as well as the use of agencies, and establishment of recruitment standards and guidelines. Such specific approaches can aid in improving the recruitment methods and processes of CST. 15 7. Employee engagement Employee engagement can either make or break the business, as the organization depends on its employees for maintaining a good business in position. Money is not always the deal with the workers, they do need some other strategies to develop their attractions towards the company. Some strategies for employee engagement can be creating a culture of engagement, reducing stress on employees, promoting well-being, improving internal communication, appraisal of staff performance for motivation and their engagement in all discussions regarding the organization ("Employee Engagement Action Plan: It’s Time For Action", 2019). All these strategies should be applied by the CST for their growth in business. To support the recommended strategies an example of a famous global manufacturer of confectionery and food "MARS" inc. can be taken. The company seriously focuses on employee engagement in every field and boost employee pride. They appreciate their employees as well as include diversity, which results that 83% of the Mars employees say that it is a great place to work for (Work, 2019). 16 Conclusion At the beginning of the paper, CST is told to be struggling with the loss of key personnel, high attrition rate and subsequently poor business performances. CST is well-positioned for a business turnaround if it could implement the full suite of recommendations that were laid out above. The recommendations are broadly classified into three categories, one that concerns forming a structured framework to improve employee morale (e.g. reward management and employee management), one on improving performance delivery (e.g. performance review and project management) and lastly one that relates to the talent management (e.g. training and development, pro-diversity policy and improved recruitment). These solutions are unique to CST, which is a multinational company that is assumed to be fairly huge in employee headcount. It could be seen that there are many organizational improvements that a company could leverage to boost employee engagement, although it does still require management's will to recognize the problem and act on them. 17 References Bharadwaj, S. (2019). 5 Companies That Offer Seriously Cool Employee Rewards. 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