The Human Resource Function of Harrison Brothers Corporation:
A Case Study
Faced with a new set of challenges in the retail industry, Harrison Brothers Corporation has set strategic goals to have high-value, high-quality specialization to cater to the needs of the sophisticated customers. One of these strategic goals is improving its human resource management (HRM) by increasing productivity of associates, buyers and department heads.
However, HBC is presented with an HRM-related problem. The possible revamp in the human resource department appears to be major business decision by CEO James Harrison himself to improve employee quality and performance that would translate to better customer service. The series of interviews of HR and non-HR managers identified that the two major problems in the company are: 1) the questionable competency of the sales employees, and 2) the procedures of the human resource department.
The employees, whether working full-time, part-time or contractual, do not project expertise in the job. Aside from the short training period given to new hires, they are not knowledgeable in the vitals of sales and operations. Tenure should be a major concern for HBC because career mobility of the employees is somewhat unstable. There is a heavy turnover of employees in one quarter, which reveals how temporary the job is for the employees. This would greatly affect HBC not only in terms of the consistency and quality of customer service they offer, but also in the financial costs of constantly training new employees.
The second major problem covers the procedures of the human resource management. Such procedures include applicant selection and compensation. Selection criteria do not put much value on the credentials of the applicants. Although work attitude, character and personal motivation are important factors in selecting potential employees, their credentials should be given value as well. The credentials would speak about how competent and capable an employee is to determine if he or she has the potential to perform well and perhaps, improve and get a promotion in the future.
The competency of the employees would not be put into question if the selection procedure would be changed and improved.
There should also be a refocusing of objectives of the human resource department to adapt to the new strategic goals of the company. According to the store and operations managers, the HR department is understaffed and they seem to pay more attention to internal, day-to-day activities. This appears to be a disadvantage especially when the human resource manager, Brenda McCain, spends time in internal management and monitoring work habits. She herself recognizes that the store is growing in terms of operations, because there is a wide range of brands now available for the customers. However, staffing procedure does not seem to have kept up with this major change in sales and operations.
Also, their weakness is the slow turnover of employees, especially when the positions become vacant after 3 months or so. The in-sync cooperation of sales and operations and human resource department is vital for HBC to realize its strategic goals.
The employees would be willing to stay if good performance is compensated correspondingly. Their current system of performance evaluation is not good enough to persuade employees that HBC has a fair and stable environment for their careers. Earning a commission is also troublesome for the employees. Therefore, it takes the employees a long time to earn extra from a good performance evaluation even before they could get a commission. Instead, the commission should be based not on the evaluation but on the sales turnout of each employee. As for a good performance evaluation, a bonus could be a good compensation.
