In today's world of fast paced business, nothing less than 100 percent success is accepted. Companies and organizations thrive on consistency and profitability. A classic tool that has proven successful for most companies has been benchmarking. Basically, benchmarking is the modeling of similar successes in similar or different industries and applying them to a company's specific situation. Generic benchmarking is finding best practices or solutions to a company's own problems through outside industries or seemingly non-related companies. This paper highlights five of those issues and focuses on how other companies have implemented plans to handle those issues. The issues facing InterClean highlighted in this analysis are, Retaining Employees, Career and Training Development, Human Resource Philosophy, Management of Restructuring Process and Motivation. InterClean benchmarking was conducted to evaluate how other companies had handled similar situations. Ten companies were evaluated from the home health care industry, technology industry, oil industry, retail industry, and telecom industry. The ten companies evaluated were AT&T, BP Amoco, Starbucks, Home Depot, Genetech, Whirlpool, Luxoltica, Logica CMG, Dow Corning, and Minimed Inc. Evaluation of these companies showed several concepts used in handling the issues. As part of this analysis, this paper will discuss how the companies used these concepts.
Retaining Employees
Every company experiences employee turnover but their main objective is to ensure that their top performers want to stay with the organization and that employees whose performance is minimal are encouraged or forced to leave. After the acquisition of EnviroTech and the implementation of a new sales model, Interclean must recognize the importance of retaining employees through this transition phase. Interclean can create a successful training and learning program to help retain employees and minimize voluntary turnover due to changes. The loss of employees can be costly. Replacing workers are expensive, and new employees need time to learn their jobs. Interclean can develop an effective human resource management team to support the organization through possible high turnover (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhert, & Wright, 2003).
Home Depot provides experience to high employee turnover ratios. Recently Home Depot was faced with similar issues. Employees were constantly leaving the company and Home Depot was struggling to retain them. It was costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to retrain new employees and give them time to learn their jobs. Chief Executive Officer Robert Nardelli changed the focus of the company by hiring Executive Director of Human Resources, Dennis Donovan. Donovan changed the face of the company through redeveloping their training programs to better serve their employees.
Employee motivation and rewards are effective means to retain employees. When an employee is motivated, his or her needs are being met. When an employee is unmotivated, his or her needs are not being met which results in a high employee attrition rate. Riordan Manufacturing is experiencing a high attrition rate. Riordan Manufacturing has 3 plants and employs 550 people. Recently, Riordan hired Human Capital Consulting to perform an analysis on the underlying issues that are causing the decreasing employee satisfaction and to recommend courses of action that will address the underlying issues. Research has been done to identify the issues and opportunities, the stakeholders and ethical dilemmas, and the end state vision. A gap analysis has also been performed to determine the gap between the current situation and the end state goals. Riordan Manufacturing will use this information to determine the best way to proceed towards improving its working environment for the employees.
The Department of Human Resources is involved with many important aspects of a business, like staffing, compensation, benefits, and much more. As the new Director of Human Resources for a 150-room, full service hotel in downtown Sheboygan, I am in charge of turning around the hotel. Some urgent tasks include hiring and training new candidates for two open positions, revising the training and incentive programs, and finally, improving the overall morale of the employees.
With the high rate of turnover, we would need to find a way to lower that and make sure the employees are feeling like they are valuable members of the business. I predict that I would find out that the employees don’t feel that they are treated well enough and getting rewarded for their liking. I think that they feel undervalued and disrespected and that causes the high turnover. I would recommend to the executives that they sit down and meet with their employees and figure out ways to better the relationship between management and the
Human Resources practices retention for the massive cost and time taken it has to replace and hire new employees. Hiring has such a high cost for the facts of ensuring all new employees meet the expectations and requirements for a business. Not only do new employees have to meet the company’s expectations but also pass employment tests, physical exams, and background checks (Nickels (290-346). They also consider consumers habits and help form solutions to meet the businesses and consumer’s needs to keep up the company up to date. (Alper (112-113). Human resource personnel also help companies evolve with new innovations. Human resources help establish future labor by helping the companies find employees that meet the new requirements. Human resources personnel also forecast future requirements for organizations that way they can ensure trained people will be on hand for the organizations (Nickels (290-346). “In the future, human resource management may become the firm’s most critical function, responsible for dealing with all aspects of a business’s most critical resource: people” (Nickels (290-346). Human resources not only has a future of importance, but its past shows its importance now. From being responsible for only one department to being in many and still predicted to grow to being in charge of many more
Downsizing, restructuring, rightsizing, even a term as obscure as census readjustment has been used to describe the plague that has been affecting corporate America for years and has left many of its hardest working employees without work. In the 1980’s, twenty-five percent of middle management was eliminated in the United States (Greenberg/Baron 582). In the 1990’s, one million managers of American corporations with salaries over $40,000 also lost their jobs (Greenberg/Baron 582). In total, Fortune 500 companies have eliminated 4.4 million positions since 1979 (Greenberg/Baron 627). Although this downsizing of companies can have many reasons behind it and cannot be avoided at times, there are simple measures a company can take to make the process easier on the laid-off employees and those who survive with the company.
Nardelli was brought in when the company needed to focus on the cost side of the equations when sales were growing. However his reputation suffered when Home Depot's smaller archrival, “Lowe's Companies, soared more than 200% since 2000, while Home Depot's shares declined 6%”.In addition, The organization never really embraced his leadership style. The company needed a more innovative and constructive leadership. Nardelli came in with new ideas for change, the employees did not have the desire for transformation since they did not feel the need for change and their morale was good. He believed that managing by metrics was the best way to guarantee fairness in judging a person’s performance. When Nardelli acquired control, the store managers felt that they lost their autonomy and independence. This led to the failure of unification of commitment and enthusiasm of his
Although Nardelli brought his previous knowledge to the company, when it came down to the employees there weren’t too many that remained happy. The numbers were most important to Nardelli, “Nardelli’s data-driven in your face management style grated on many seasoned executives, resulting in massive turnover in Home Depot’s upper ranks” (Grow, et al., 2007). Nardelli wasn’t willing to change the process of how Home Depot was operating once he became the
The founders hired a CEO to continue guiding the company on the path towards success but realized too late that they overlooked an important component. The CEO lacked the character and traits needed to positively develop and lead the company and its people. After facing a major decline in customer service and an uptick in employee turnover, The Home Depot realized that it needed to resort back to the basic guiding principles. They must choose a leader that buys into the same vision and philosophy that the company was built upon. The leader must behold the same values that were cherished by the founders and must be willing to invest in nurturing the culture, the associates and customers.
Palmer, W. W., & Dean, C. C. (1973). Increasing Employee Productivity and Reducing Turnover. Training & Development Journal, 27(3), 52.
Keeping a high turnover rate, companies will continue to lose money until they decide to deal with the issue. Through some adjustments and implementations of the programs to lower turnover rates, the company can see a significant change in their costs and what they might actually save.
Employee satisfaction, employee turnover, and workplace environment are inseparably linked. Workplace environments heavily influence employee satisfaction, which directly affects employee turnover rates. When employees feel they are not being supported within their first months of hire, they will inevitably leave the company. Employees want to have the security that if they need assistance, someone will be there to guide them. Therefore, it is imperative for organizations to develop a thorough onboarding program and a long-term retention plan.
Lengnick-Hall M.L.; Lengnick-Hall, C.A.; Andrade, L.S.; Drake, B. 2009. “Strategic human resource management: The evolution of the field.” Human Resource Management Review, 19, pp. 64-85.
C & C grocery store currently operates under a goal approach. They were committed to customer service and satisfaction. This approach provided the grocery chain with the profitability and growth they strived to obtain. The stores operative goals were attained and the chain had over 200 stores in operation. For years overall performance for C & C was excellent and came with ease. Unfortunately employee development and innovation and change weren't a top priority and it began to show. To remain successful C & C had to outsource and get advice from a team of consultants. The team dissected the company from top to bottom and advised the chain to implement an internal approach to go along with the goal approach. Implementing the internal approach will give the store managers full control of their stores which they do not currently possess. The store managers should be knowledgeable in all areas of the store to be able to fully communicate with staff. It was difficult for the district managers to give each store location the time and attention they needed when they were responsible for several other stores. Giving store managers more responsibility was a terrific idea of the consultants because the store managers have more day to day customer and employee interaction and could better assist needs. C & C was in desperate need of providing employee training and development. Cross training is beneficial for company as well as employees. Employees get the opportunity to learn other job positions and have the ability for advancement opportunities within the company. The company benefits from cross training because it provides flexibility if a store is short staffed, and it provides empowerment. A store full of happy employees from mana...
In the future, employing organizations will face a wide range of issues and challenges in meeting their workforce requirements. These periods of difficulties generally will center around the effects of external environmental influences on the organization and the manner in which it manages ongoing issues. Many of these external factors filter down and influences an organizations roles and responsibilities for talent scarcity, changing products or services, shifting demographic composition and their consumer preferences, etc.
Employee turnover in organization is one of the main issues that extensively affect the overall performance of a workplace (Tariq, Ramzan and Riaz, 2013). Various studies show that employee turnover negatively affect the overall efficiency at the organization (Tariq, Ramzan and Riaz, 2013). Xiancheng, (2013) mentioned the employee turnover is a method of personal issues who decided to stop associate with the company for better advantage. There are two types of turnover which are voluntary and involuntary turnover. Voluntary turnover can be defined as the termination of the official and the psychological contract between the employee and employer (Krausz, 2002; Macdonald, 1999; Mclean Parks et al, 1999; Rousseau, 1995) while involuntary turnover inescapably lead to direct negative results such as current job is insecurity, work difficulty, and status fluctuation (Gowan and Gatewood, 1997). However, other researchers such as Haven-Tang and Jones, (2012) concluded poor management, lack of salary, bad working environment and paucity of job opportunities could be the highest causes of turnover among organization. This statement was support by Kusluvan et al., (2010) where is they had stated that poor management, low payment of salary, work environment and lack of employees’ job opportunities on the organization will make employee want to quit from their job. Turnover intention situation will appear when labour had feeling that they want to quit from current job, so voluntary and involuntary turnover will become final stage for them as their decision (AlBattat and Mat Som, 2013) but it is different for researchers such as Mosadeghrad, Ferlie and Rosbenberg (2013) when they conclude that employee turno...