Executive Summary
This report is based on the case study of Construction Products, and the aim of this report is to analyze the existing problems of the company to find out effective measures for the future development of the company.
Problem Identification and Analysis
Communication Problems
The chain of command under the Operations and Purchasing Manager results in several troubles aside from communication disparity between the employees and the managers. Aaron Fernandez, who is a member of staff at the company, has put forward many problems within the firm that also stated the problem of communications – there are the irregular verbal communications of the supervisors with the forklift drivers, floor workers with the managers, or even supervisors with the managers.
Communication is the solution to a strong business relationship; this can be the relationship between business-customer, and internal-relationships amongst different workers within the business; communication can recover in every headquarters, no matter the industry or size; it is the only way for information to be spread throughout the firm so that everyone could be informed to the extent that they require to attaining objectives. Therefore, poor communications mean that the business will be in big trouble.
Organisation culture
The organisational culture of the Construction Products Company is extremely centralised, which creates a range of problems and dissatisfaction amongst workers. The firm possesses fragile organizational culture, and this is pure because of a centralized administration; such system of management consists individual teams that are not as autonomous – therefore the workers in this centralized company have an insignificant role in the direction of actions at different departments, and everything depends on units and between each unit and the central management office. Therefore, in this company, the talents of the workers are greatly deprived.
Leadership
The consultant had discussed with production worker Aaron Fernandez, sales dispatcher Sandra Mayson and sales manager, Vikram Bangara in order top, find out existing problems of the company those hampered success of the business, and he identified that Construction Products followed autocratic leadership style, which is the key problem of the company. Sandra is not quite happy with her job position as she has to deal with high work pressure, but she cannot manage her when she gets lower payment as a female employee of Construction Products. At the same time, she cannot tolerate false complaints against her and misconducts of the senior managers, discriminations between male and female, excessive workload, duration of the job, and attitude of leaders.
On the other hand, Vikram Bangara reported that he could not implement effective strategies to develop the company because this company is controlled the directors of the parent company who shows highly autocratic leadership style and enjoyed unlimited power to take action and to adopt recommended action plan.
Attitude and Commitment
The senior staff should change their attitude as Sandra stated that Vikram likes to talk rather than listen, and Vikram pointed out that top-management are reluctant with his performance and would not like to consider his suggestion though he is committed to controlling daily production, and disseminate information returned by representatives, communicate with the potential customers of the company. However, Griffin (2006) and Weihrich & Koontz (2005) noticed that productivity of the employees could reduce for lack of commitment.
Lack of motivation
Lack of motivation is immense difficulty in the Construction Products Company – Taylor’s approach in leadership means that the motivation of the workforce is unfavourably affected; conversely, not including Taylor’s approach, there are some other vital concerns, which cause this dearth of inspiration. According to Aaron Fernandez, low pay, poor working condition, highly repetitive and extremely monotonous tasks, and many other factors create a decline in motivation amongst workers.
As suggested by Sandra Mayson, Lack of motivation also results from an organisational practice that does not ensure equal opportunities – for example, women are not paid equally as men; this, in turn, means slower production process, poor quality production, more absenteeism, and high staff turnover, which results in rising operating costs.
Statement of Key Problems
Communication problems, fragile organizational culture purely because of a centralized administration, lack of motivation, low pay, poor working condition, monotonous job, poor quality production, more absenteeism, high staff turnover, poor operations management, a long chain of command, Taylor’s approach, lower engagement, inefficiencies, mistakes, and delays, loss of institutional memory are the key problems of the business. Moreover, not ensuring equal opportunities, loss of managerial, programmatic, and operational skill, and loss of aptitude, a poor delegation of authority and insufficient capacity utilisation also causes the Construction Products Company to undergo such great barriers in operating successfully.
Generation and Evaluation of a Range of Alternative Solutions
Alternative 1 – Participative and Transformational Leadership Style
Autocratic leadership approach of Metrivac Company is one of the main barriers for the success of the subsidiary Construction Products as employees of all departments pointed out this issue to the consultant David Schneider. As a result, this report suggests the president of Construction Products a suitable leadership style to reduce the existing management crisis, which will dramatically reduce the problem of productivity, increase annual profit margin, and help to expand the business in the global market.
However, it recommends the management to follow both participative and transformational leadership style considering the outcomes of the conversation of Vikram Bangara and Sandra Mayson, as they addressed the negative side of high autocratic leadership in the job satisfaction. However, Robbins & Judge (2008) and Vliert (2006) argued that participative leadership style is more relevant to the democratic leadership approach and the employees can participate in the decision-making process by sharing their valuable opinion, knowledge, skills, experience etc.
That indicates the top-management of Construction Products will take most of the decision based on the feedback of the employees. Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson (2001) stated that transformational leadership inspire the subordinates to perform the required task and it is very motivating for the team members where they identify that the leader tries to build a vision in the mind of the subordinates to achieve the objectives of the business.
Alternative 2 – Considering Employee Retention Strategies and Applying Time Based Management
Several research report has appraised that employee turnover has been 1.5 times costly than the retention of the efficient employees; in case of reducing staff turnover, firstly it is better to pay attention on employee wage and remuneration management package as well as on compensation attributes. Alternatively, if the working atmosphere or the organizational culture were enjoyable and satisfying employee’s needs and demand would be more effective to retain an efficient employee.
In short, job satisfaction has the immense power to retain effective and efficient employees in an organization. In the following discussion, key strategies to avoid staff turnover has briefly discussed (Fox, 2010). In context, as the Construction Products Company undergoes inefficiency in production and operation management, together with poor quality products, these problems are very likely to be prevailed by adopting Time Based Management, just in time management, kaizen approach, and total quality management.
Here, employees should categorize into multi-skilled teams, and each team would be accountable for a specific part of production procedure comprising quality control and health and safety; moreover, each cell should be made up of numerous teams who send finished products on the next cell in production procedure; cell production will lead to efficiency development because of amplified motivation.
Additionally, by adopting Kaizen or “continuous-improvement” the general advancement of business would augment, and there will be improvements in productivity that comes from small-improvements by employees being made incessantly; conversely, by adopting just-in-time, the business could diminish the quantity of stock that has to be accumulated (reducing storage-costs); it would have many benefits as it is an obvious way to organized-production. Nevertheless, the application of these methods can be very costly – so the Construction Products Company will have to make massive investments.
It is arguable that when an employee gets a sound, easy-going, and friendly atmosphere to work in, where the employer is very watchful about ensuring workplace health and safety issues, providing equal opportunities for all disregard of their ethnic origin, it gets easier for the staff to cope up with the working environment of the organisation lowering chances of turnover. It is therefore essential for the Construction Products Company to build up a staff retention strategy keeping all these things in mind.
The organisation must be strictly managing some vulnerable concerns such as healthcare benefits, rising work pressure for nerve-racking responsibilities, increasing working hours, monotonous features of the occupation, deficiency of guidance, performance assessment for giving promotions, and accountable union privileges. Most essentially, it is imperative for the organisation to undertake a number of schemes and policies, for example, providing competitive and reasonable remuneration, reorganization of the worker maintenance plan, altering personnel traditions, delivering workstream composure, and observance of online recruitment opportunities constantly.
The firm should take into account some significant aspects in order to originate a recruitment policy to diminish turnover, which would focus on not only the motive behind turnover, organisational, political principles, or organisational culture but also on the overall positional strategy of the organisation (Careersatifds, 2010). It is important for the HR department of the firm to adopt a more smart approach in terms of employee retaining process. It should bring transformations in the total performing periods in order to make sure that the workers are getting enough freedom to spend a few hours with his/her family.
Together with the recruitment policy, the HR panel must be more cautious about assuring an accessible payment structure and appreciating the working expertise, innovative, and creative ideas of the workers as well. Moreover, it is important for the organisation to consider the consequence of the employee turnover as the main reason for its rising costs of recruitment, adversely affecting the organisational goodwill and depriving the annual targets.
Alternative 3 – Focusing on Better Motivational Theories and Practices to Reduce Turnover
It is clearly visible from the case that the employees in the company suffer from very poor motivation; therefore, the firm needs to emphasize sufficiently on these issues and consider some of the motivational practices as outlined in this alternative. The firm should consider developing motivation by Maslow’s hierarchy theory, which plays a significant role to motivate employees; it assumes that every employee has five levels of needs that require fulfilling chronologically and fulfilment of one raises the other; at the very bottom of the hierarchy is the basic needs that include food, shelter, and medical; at top-level is self-actualization. According to this hypothesis, every organisation needs to fulfil the demand of workers according to the level of needs to achieve the objectives by motivation:
The Construction Products Company should also consider David McClelland’s proposed Achievement-Power-Affiliation theory where he described that according to nature, people has three types of need-fulfilment of which motivate them to achieve objectives – the first need is an achievement, which indicates the need for performing better; second is the power need that indicates need to influence others; finally, affiliation need indicates the need for establishing-relationship.
The intensity of this need varies from person to person and organisation should try to assess the needs of the employees and then fulfil the need to motivate them to achieve the objectives. Moreover, the firm should accept theories provided by Herzberg, Maslow, and Mayo; managers must have to change the compensation formation by eliminating piece rates or piece related wages and concentrate on payments like fixed wages and revenue sharing, yearly dividends, periphery benefits, etc.
In addition, there should be more emphasize on superior workplace circumstance, extremely branched out, motivating, and swivelled jobs, a guarantee of equal opportunities, giving out of power, decentralisation job-design that comprise job rotation, job enrichment, empowerment, or team working, and most importantly, by treating them as McGregor’s Theory Y managers, and appreciating good ideas from them as well as good performances.
Recommendations
According to the case, management fault is the fundamental problem of the company, which is difficult to remove by formulating a new recruitment policy; therefore, it is essential to provide equal opportunity for all employees in order to remove their disappointment. The president of Construction Products should modify its regular working hours and ensure liberal working hour, which would not create any pressure on employee’s personal life, for instance, sales dispatcher Sandra Mayson was in serious workload, and she requested to recruit more employees to manage her department.
However, the strategy of teamwork should develop in the company because co-operative management technique is effective while each project will place in-group, and the management of Construction Products should handle some sensitive issues more carefully such as healthcare opportunities, Increasing workload, over stressful duties, increasing over time, repetitive nature of the job, lack of training and communication, a performance measure for promotion.
Implementation
The implement is one of the most important tasks for the Construction Products as Vikram Bangara had tried to take many development projects, but the top-management protected him from implementing his suggested strategies through seniors eventually followed his few recommendations. On the other hand, Sandra Mayson complained that she needed more workers, but senior executives have no headache in this issue, whereas there are many employees in this company who have no task. Considering these facts, this report recommends the following organizational structure for the improvement of Construction Products –
However, suggested organizational chart is not emphasis on the new employees rather it suggests to restructuring the existing organizational chart, for instance, Supervisors of fitters, loading and mechanics would be responsible for helping Sandra Mayson. However, new charts also remove the communication problems between managers and employees; therefore, all employees would be able to give highest efforts as a complaint against employees would reduce, and no one has to face severe workload.
Reference List
Careersatifds. (2010). Recruitment Policy. Web.
Fox, E. (2010). Meeting Employee Work Expectations: 4 Keys for Minimizing Turnover. Web.
Griffin, R. W. (2006) Management. (8th ed.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Hitt, M. A., Ireland, R. D., & Hoskisson, R. E. (2001). Strategic Management. (4th ed.). South-Western Thomson Learning.
Robbins, P. S. & Judge, A. T. (2008). Essentials of Organizational Behavior. (8th ed.). London: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Vliert, E. V. D. (2006) Autocratic Leadership Around The Globe Do Climate And Wealth Drive Leadership Culture? Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 37(1): 42-59. Web.
Weihrich, H. & Koontz H. (2005). Management a Global Perspective. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill.