Business Assessment of the Gladwell Grocery Stores

GLADWELL GROCERY STORES SCENARIO

STUDENT NAME:

LECTURER NAME:

COURSE NAME:

SUBISSION DATE:

Introduction

Gladwell Grocery Stores (GGS) has ten stores with Tom Bell working as both the human resource manager and operations manager. He spends more time and gasoline in traveling weekly to the ten stores to perform specified relations functions and recruitment duties like hiring, recruiting and dealing with employees concerns. The grocery payroll system is still based on check printing software and Microsoft excels spreadsheets. GGS profitability is affected by cost on time and traveling of the human resource. Mr. Ben needs help to determine best means to reduce human resource costs and increase efficiency in its functions. If the company had established HRIS all functions would be automated and relieve him from stress.

Business assessment

In globalization, HRM has been evaluated as a comprehensive and strategic function that is crucial to the growth and success of companies in many industries like food and grocery retailing, and service oriented retail. In HR people are involved in management at workplaces. GGS is operating from its head office in New York and supplies consumers with merchandise for sale. This entails final step in the value chain that involves products delivery to end-users. 45% of employees at GGS are on permanent terms while the rest are on part time contracts. This shows that every outlet has at least 22 employees on part time terms. In the ten stores, the company has about 400-440 employees, 180 of them being on permanent employment terms.

The human resource ensures a motivated and productive workforce through strategic planning and management of workers. In a retail industry like GGS, there are HR challenges that are as a result of employees dealing directly with customers and must be addressed both in long and short term through HR objectives and policies. (Moschetto, 2014) High employee turnover; employees come and go often causing difficulties in training and developing, waste of time on constant recruitment and hiring of new employees. This makes it hard to attain customer loyalty since they encounter new faces on every occasion. A diverse workforce and misconception may course cohesiveness. Seasonal demand affects the retailer and a program to assimilate temporal workers during high demand seasons must be developed.

Identifiable issues

Thisinvolves human resource functions that are beneficial to the company and includes;

Business proposal

• Positioning employees for success through ongoing assessment of needs(Delorme & Arcand, 2010). This is done by identifying ability gaps in employees between current and future for competitive reasons. This involves the company’s weaknesses and strength. The critical issue in medium businesses is how to develop potential employees that can multi-task roles in various stages of growth.
• Secondly identifying training and development plans. After highlighting ability and skills gap, training issues are identified. This is important because it helps identify environmental and technological factors that influence business competitiveness ability. Leadership training can promote succession planning. As the company automates software training is required. This increases employee satisfaction and retention leading to successful business and contributes to competitive advantage.
• Finally, effective communication of policies and employees practices. This stimulates teamwork through a proper interaction of employees and minimizes personnel obstacles that may result in problems. Well-defined roles and positions and company’s culture must be clarified to employees. Training policies or forms of guidance must be put in place to avoid liability. Moreover, workforce planning and implementation policies that will effectively suit the company must be established. Moreover, work conditions and environment must be conducive to the staff.

In reference to HR functions, training and development plan for GGS should be well established. The weaknesses of the company highlight the training issues to be tackled. Leadership training will determinesuccessful succession plan of the business and there will be no need of hiring from outside and culture continuity will be maintained. Training employees are beneficial since highly trained employees are retained and motivated boosting customer retention. In this case, both the technological and environmental elements that influence the business ability to compete are established and future strategic plans are outlined. With the adaptation of HRIS which is software that is designed for the medium sized business that helps to simplify human resource functions in automated way, reduce cost and minimize waste of time. Employees are required to undergo software training to be acquitted with the new system.

Conclusion

Through HRIS the human resource functions will be centralized. Mr. Ben will not undergo the stress of traveling from one store to another to accomplish his duties. Costs of traveling from one store to another will be decline rapidly and time will not be wasted. This is because Mr. Ben will operate his functions from one centralized point and will be able to multitask easily. Moreover, the company will be automated in various departments like payroll, training, recruitment and compliance thus reducing the workforce. Employees will be able to handle recurring activities easily through electronic means like filling forms for time off.

References:

Delorme, M. & Arcand, M. (2010). HRIS implementation and deployment: a conceptual framework of the new roles, responsibilities and competences for HR professionals. International Journal Of Business Information Systems, 5(2), 148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/ijbis.2010.030626

Moschetto, M. (2014). Key Trends in Workforce Management and New Challenges for HR. Employment Relations Today, 40(4), 7-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ert.21428