Question

Human resource management activities like recruiting, selecting, training, and rewarding employees is not just a job for a centralized HR group for an organization but is rather a concern for every manager and something they all should engage in. This is especially critical for small businesses where there is usually no specified HR staff to rely upon. The success of the entrepreneur is often dependent upon their effectiveness in recruiting, hiring, training, evaluating, and rewarding. Each week you will be given a case study based upon a single company. The company is Laurel Laundry and is co-owned and managed by Erica Laurel.  

Laurel Laundry Services

As a recent graduate and as a person who keeps up with the business press, Erica is familiar with the benefits of the program such as total quality management and high-performance work systems. Erica's father has actually installed a total quality program of sorts at Laurel, and it has been in place for about 5 years. This program takes the form of employee meetings. He holds employee meetings periodically, but particularly when there is a serious problem in a store - such as poor-quality work or machine breakdowns. When problems like these arise, he meets with all the employees in that store. Hourly employees get extra pay for these meetings. The meetings have been useful in helping him to identify and rectify several problems. For example, in one store, all the fine white blouses were coming out looking dingy. It turned out that the cleaner/spotter had been ignoring the company rule that required cleaning ("boiling down") the cleaning fluid before washing items like these. As a result, these fine white blouses were being washed in cleaning fluid that had residue from other, earlier washes.  

Erica now wonders whether these employee meetings should be expanded to give the employees a bigger role in managing the Laurel Laundry stores' quality. "We can't be everywhere watching everything all the time." she said. Her father replied that "Yes, but these people earn only about $8-$15 an hour, and will they really want to act like mini-managers?"

In light of these problems, Erica's father asked her to answer the following questions, and she would like to know what you would do:

Acting as a consultant for Erica, prepare a report on the following:

1. Would you recommend that the Laurels expand their quality program?
2. If so, what form should it take?
3. Erica has mentioned that she wants to institute a high-performance work system as a test program. Write an outline for her summarizing important HR practices you think they should focus on?

Answer 1

Answer:

Laurel should expand her quality program as with the expansion of the business, both Laurel and her father would be busy with some more productive works of the business and would be having least time or no time to control and monitor various tiny tasks and to micromanage all of the activities of the company. Hence it is very necessary that laurel should delegate the work of management of the individual activity to the respective employee and should make the senior most employee of a particular department as the head of the department. Laurel should provide a job card and a quality card to the employees so as to record the quality of their work over the cards. Laurel should also provide a diary to the managers of the department so as to summarise the daily working of the department. Laurel and her father should view over the diary on weekly basis so as to ensure the effectiveness of the work being delegated to the mini managers.

Erica should focus on following important HR practises:

1. Erica should design the performance appraisal mechanism by including the metrics associated with the productivity of the employee and quality of the work being carried out by them.

2. Benefits and salary hikes should be based on the yearly performance on the quality and productivity.

3. Erica should design the quality manual and should ask all of the employees to strictly adhere to the quality manual. Erica should ask mini managers to record the performance of the employees in his diary as per the quality standards and Erica should then check the diary of mini manager and should confirm the same in accordance to the productivity of the employee.

4. Erica should introduce the feedback mechanism so as to take feedback from the customers about the quality of the services being delivered to them so as to assess the quality of work of the employees.