Case Application 5: TEAM FUN! Tony has been director of human resources at TEAM

Question

Case Application 5: TEAM FUN! Tony has been director of human resources at TEAM FUN!, a sporting goods manufacturer and retailer, for three months. He is constantly amazed that the company does so well, considering that everything is so loose. Nothing is documented about job roles and responsibilities. People apparently have been hired because Kenny and Norton, the owners and founders, liked them or their relatives. Tony is lunching with Mary, a friend from college who now manages the human resource function for a large financial investor. Tony tells Mary, "I don't know if 1 should quit or what. They both got mad at me last week when I suggested smart cards for security. The employee handbook looks like a scrapbook from their kids' high school football days...no, their high school football days. No one has job descriptions. I don't get it. Everyone likes working there. The job does get done. Am I the one with the problem?" Mary replies, "Couldn't be you! It does sound like a great place to work. Has it grown fast in the past few years?" Unbelievably," Tony says. "it had 25 employees 5 years ago, now we have nearly 150. could get by without a formal human resource structure up to about 100 employees?" projects," Tony sighs. be a start." "That's probably part of it," Mary answers. "Remember how Dr. Smith said in his class that you "Yeah. That was a great class! I met my wife in that class! We did lots of team exercises and Mary nods. "Anyway, maybe you could begin with writing your own job description. That would "Then I could talk about formal job evaluation processes." Tony cheers up. "That's a great idea. Mary shakes her head. "No, but a package is a good idea. What's your current HRIS like?" Tony Have you used QUICKHR, the new software tool?" laughs until he can't catch his breath. Mary continues, "Okay. That's another place you could start. Questions: 1. Help Tony write his job description 2. What techniques should he use to gather data? 3. How should he conduct the job analysis? 4. What should he say to Kenny and Norton to ensure their buy-in on this project? 5. How will job descriptions change the organization? 6. Give Tony some pointers on software packages and HRIS

Explanation / Answer

1) Help write Tony's job description

Tony is the director of human resources at Team Fun. He's job role requires him to

- Reduce Attrition and improve Retention within the organisation

- To set basic metrics like KSA for hiring employees.KSA's stand for Knowledge ,Skills and Abilities. They're performance metrics designed to measure performance of a candidate in a qualitative and a quantitative manner

- To ensure that in an organisation like Team Fun, where employees don't have rigid job roles, the job roles that are assigned to them or the ones that they volunteer to take up should be completed as delegated or picked and this in turn can be used as performance metric.

- To outline employee compensation policies, performance appraisals, benefits, leaves, addressing employee grievances

2) What techniques should he use to gather data ?

- He could use peer to peer feedback methods to gather data for performance evaluation

Self rating performance appraisal questions involve questions that try to understand the employee's perspective on his or her professional and ethical performance in the organisation. It tries to capture aspects of inputs or efforts which the employee felt that he or she contributed which may or may not have been over looked by the assessors. This tries to capture qualitative data that traditional performance metrics like the bell curve may have failed to capture. It asks the employee

- What he or she feels their core contribution to the organisation were

- What they feel are their core competencies and skills are and how they've applied them at their job role or how can we leverage those skills at the workplace

- What they think their opportunities for improvement are and why they fell short on certain metrics on their score card.

- Wether or not they think that they've been fairly rated on their performance score card

- What's their feedback and assessment of the organisation , its leadership and their immediate reporting manager.

- Areas where they've felt that they've performed well

Then, given the basic aspects of the 360 feedback, analyze what you could include in each of the sections for the supervisors, peers, and subordinates to help with the identification of individual training needs.

Questions for the supervisors

- How they've contributed to the employees performance as a leader or a manager

- What he or she feels their subordinate's core contribution to the organisation were

- What they feel are their subordinates's core competencies and skills are and how they've applied them at their job role or how can we leverage those skills at the workplace

- What they think their subordinates's opportunities for improvement are and why they fell short on certain metrics on their score card.

- Wether or not they think that their subordinates's have been fairly rated on their performance score card

- What's their feedback and assessment of the organisation , its leadership and their immediate reporting manager and subordinates.

- Areas where they've felt that they've performed well and where they felt that their subordinates performed well

Questions for Peers

- wether or not they think the employee in question has been a good team player

- If yes how have they contributed to the team and the organisation and if no what could help the employee get more involed with the organisation and the team

- What they think are the employees core competencies, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.

Questions for subordinates

- wether or not the leader delivered to their professional expectations

- Availability of the trainer to his or her manager / leader to his or her team members. The leader's readiness to help out his or her team members with their stated and unstated needs. The level of effectiveness in operational issue resolutions that have been escalated to the manager.

- How can the leader help them improve their skills that they need to succeed in the organisation

- What their career aspirations are and wether or not the leader has helped them reach closer to those goals.

3) How should he conduct the job analysis ?

Trait Focused Appraisals : Use the employee's work ethics, skills, attitude , personality traits, integrity and potential to measure an employees performance.

360 Degree Assessment : This uses a combination of the Bellcurve. Qualitative and Quantitative feedback, crowdsourced data from the employee's peers and bosses.

Critical Incident Technique : Involves an assessment of strengths and weakness using historical behavioural patterns and employee responses to various scenarios at work .

Behavioural Rating : Involves performance metric that give maximum weightage to an employee's behaviour over his or her quantitative on the job metrics

4) What should he say to Kenny and Norton to ensure their buy in on this project

I would sell this concept to them by showing how organisations with an informal organisational hierarchy did once they grew beyond a 100 employees. I'd use the following case study

Zappos

After implementing the first transition in the organisational culture at Zappos, Tony Hsieh wrote a memo about the new organisational structure Holacracy. In 2015 Hsieh offered employees three months of severance pay if they did not like working in the new structure. This resulted in about a 14 % overall attrition on an organisational level. In the second Phase of transition, Tony Hsieh implemented a new organisational structure called TEAL. Which is basically based on the principles of self governance and management. He repeated the same strategy during the transition of organisational culture in 2015, where he asked employees who did not like working under TEAL organisational structure to leave the firm with a severance pay. This resulted in about 29% of Zappos employees leaving the organisation as a result.

Performance Appraisals

Zappo's new organisational structure still retained an organisational hierarchy. If anything it build an even more authoritative and a vague performance appraisal process. This meant that instead of having a single manager oversee performance metrics, they had multiple people within a circle oversee performance appraisals without any checks and balances. This meant that employees had not received a clearly outlined performance metrics to adhere to in order to excel within the firm.

This was far worse than the bell curve. A change in the performance appraisal process would help zappos turn around their employee satisfaction levels and drive better performance within the organisation. Here's a case study of two companies who followed different performance appraisal processes.

Organisational Hierarchy

Zappos has an experimental approach to organisational hierarchy. While its good to test out new ideas and management concepts, the fact remains that experiments are risky and are often a product of trial and errors. These trial and errors could have serious consequences to the organisation and its stakeholders.

Stakeholders comprise of individuals or a group of individuals within or outside the company who have a vested interest in the company's business. They could be employees. customers. management, operations , workers, vendors etc. Any one person or a group of people who have a vested interest in an organisation are called stakeholders.

The Solution to Zappo's Organisational Hierarchy

To test out management concepts in smaller batches or smaller sample sizes with in order to reduce enterprise level damages in the event of the new organisational hierarchy not working out. And to implement a corporate culture that truly values employees and does not give them an ultimatum to adapt or leave. Its best to give employees the time to adapt to the new corporate culture.

Corporate culture is fundamentally defined by an organisation's values & principles with which it governs itself with. These values and principles are extremely strong in Legacy Companies such as GE, GM, Microsoft, IBM etc. These legacy organisations have a strong corporate culture that is define by their organisational values that were laid out both at the inception of the organisation and throughout its journey as a company.

5) How will job descriptions change the organisation

- They would make performance evaluation more effective and accurate at a larger scale when the organisation grows

- They would reduce attrition

- They would make promotions and task completion more effective

6) Give Tony some pointers on software packages on and HIRS

He could use an Enterprise Resource Management software life Zenefits, Sales Force One, SAP, Oracle , Maven Link, Asana or Trello to track progress on delegated tasks.

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