CASE 7 & 8

Nokia closes plant in Germany and relocates in Romania

The article tells about the scandal that arose when Nokia announced its plans to relocate one of its plants from Germany to more affordable Romania. That will result in a job loss of 4000 german employees. Nokia management made a decision without informing or consulting with the worker’s unions or their representatives.

According to the coursebook, the company must inform the employees 60 days before the layoff, to enable them to look for a new job. If not informing 60 days in advance the employer must pay the 60-day salary for the employee as a compensation. It seemed to me that the layoff

It seemed to me that the layoff was announced in a timely manner by Nokia, but the issue was that according to the EU laws Nokia was not allowed to make this decision before consulting with the workers union.

Nokia cuts 3500 jobs “to ensure profitability”

Looks like the move from Germany to Romania did not stop Nokia downfall, the next article tells about Nokia reducing its headcount internationally just a few years later. Nokia plans to lay off altogether 3500 employees from different countries, including Finland and USA.

While Nokia the last downsizing created some conflicts between workers unions and the company, this time Nokia is handling the situation with more care, by inviting workers to the meetings to discuss the situation.

Hundreds of Nokia’s outsourced Symbian developers leaving Accenture

The effects of Nokia’s downfall were felt deeply in the consultancy firm Accenture who had accepted the 1200 Nokia workers to work under Accenture company serving Nokia. But now when Nokia is in trouble Accenture don’t have enough work to justify its huge workforce. Instead of laying off people, Accenture has given them the opportunity for voluntarily leave with the benefits package worth of 15-day salary.

CASE 6: Employee Wellbeing and Health and Safety at Work + Employee Engagement

‘Exhausted’ Merrill Lynch intern died from epileptic fit in shower after he ‘pulled three all-nighters at bank where employees compete to work the longest hours’

The article tells a sad story about young and ambitious investment bank intern who pushed himself really hard to be best he can be. He was one of the top interns in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s London offices. He was very appreciated by the colleagues and the management. He was hinted that the company is interested in hiring him as an employee, but all that came with the high price.

One day, young Mr. Erhardt did not make it to the office and was not answering the phone. Colleagues knowing the young intern knew that this is not like him and something must be wrong. They started to look for their colleague and found him from bathroom floor of his rental apartment. Mr. Erhardt was declared dead by paramedics at 8.34pm on August 15.

Mr. Erhardt had been suffering from epilepsy since childhood and his parents think that the long working hours in the Merill Lynch might have been the cause the triggered the fatal event. Juergen Schroeder, Mr.Erhardt’s development officer at Merrill Lynch claimed that according to the bank’s knowledge there was nothing wrong with the young intern health since he did not mark into medical questionnaire any illnesses or medications.

Bob Elfring, co-head of corporate and investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that they are aware of the long working hours of the ambitious employees and the company has done their best to enable their workers to put in the extra hours, but they have never considered measuring who is working till what time. Now they are thinking about setting in the clocking system to see if some people are repeatedly clocking in the long days.

 

 

 

CASE 5

The puzzle of motivation

A really good TED talk where Dan Pink made a case about how financial reward with limited time constraints kill creativity. He manages to prove that “Carrots and Sticks” strategy works well with well-defined tasks while autonomy and freedom are the best for the more creative tasks.

CASE 4

A Performance Appraisal Horror Story (With A Happy Ending)

The article told a story about one HR manager who was not receiving any feedback on his performance and also didn’t had any specific goals from the company. So he didn’t have any ways to measure his own performance and since no one was complaining, he assumed he is doing well. At least til he had his first appraisal meeting with his manager.

Having found out that he was not performing so well, the employee got frustrated and even considered changing the workplace. For his luck, the situation cached an eye of one other manager, who became his mentor and helped him to set the goals and gave constant constructive feedback.

Having the exact goals and a mentor helped the employee to achieve what was expected from him and lead to his promotion. The moral of the story is that good employee might underperform when mismanaged and kept in darkness what is expected from them.

CASE 3

CASE 3A

This was an article about New York police officer who tried force himself on a female police officer working under him. He was sent to the paid leave until the situation is cleared out. For me, it seemed more of a sexual assault than just a workplace harassment. I hope that if it comes out that being the case, he will face legal consequences.

CASE 3B

It was an article about how restaurant waitresses use race and other physical characteristics to remember the tables and orders. Although it might seem like an easy way to keep track of customers, it is still offensive and unethical. There are better ways to do it. According to Alex Benes, executive chef and a partner at Wood Ranch Barbecue Grill, there is no excuse for this kind behavior, as there is a system in place to use a number in order to identify tables and chairs.

The article also emphasized on the effect that this kinda behavior might have on the business in the age of social media. That is definitely something to keep in mind by manager and HR when either hiring or managing their employees.

CASE 3C

The third article told a story about American Navy officer, who got bullied at his workplace because his wife had started to investigate high levels of lead in their drinking water. It is understandable that active military officers cannot participate in political activities, but it was his wife, not him and also the actions taken by military command were not formal. He was simply bullied, to force his wife to quit doing what she did. This kinda bullying is wrong and I hope that public eye will force some higher ranking officers to look into it. Article did not say the motivation behind the bullying and it left open for me, if the military had anything to do with the lead being in the water.

CASE 2 B

Nando’s tastes success through training.

To the article

It was a great article about Nando’s restaurant and their path to achieving high employee job satisfaction through training, that led them winning multiple National Training awards and also reflected highly in their customer reviews.

They achieved it through various training programs that they had developed over the years of working with the people with different backgrounds. New employees in Nandos start off with the 10-day training program where they learn about Nando’s values, food hygiene, and workplace safety. Companies managers are taken to England countryside, where they go through a team-building boot camp.

Nando has a restaurant buddy system whereby every restaurant has 2 “buddies” responsible for organizing workshops for each others staff.

CASE 2 A

Super-sized gamification for training – McDonald’s is lovin’ it.

To the article

The article talked about how McDonald’s is using Virtual Reality to train their personnel and the success they are having in results, staff motivation and in training costs. That is no surprise because VR possibility to repeatedly create situations that other vise would be too costly or unthinkable.

Benefits of using VR in training are long known and have been used a lot on fields where other training methods might prove dangerous, such as military and aviation. VR in training has been limited to the fields where is no other way around because of its high cost and its own limitations.

On the moment VR is better at training staff in manual labour that doesn’t tend to be valuable enough to justify creating virtual games for it. But it already starts to appear as a training method in some of the more expensive technical skills, such as surgery. One emerging start-up from that field is introduced in Medtech Boston article “Changing the paradigm: training surgeons with virtual reality”.

While we can start seeing VR in training high-end technical skills, the advancements in artificial intelligence are starting to enable applying virtual reality in training more cognitive skills as we can see from the Qooco Opinion article, where VR is used to train hotels staff and managers.

CASE 1

What It Was REALLY Like Working As an Abercrombie ‘Model’

To the article

The article talked about young women experience working in the Abercombie retail shop as a model.

She complained about the recruitment process that did not involve an interview and all the recruiting was based on the physical appearance. After being hired they had strict rules on what to wear and what not to wear.

Since that article was just the one person’s view on the company and definitely was not objective, I Googled up the company.

What I found was that Abercombie truly was very discriminative in their hiring practices and that it was not just one person experience, but it was rooted in the companies culture from the top down.

Mary Beth Quirk quotes Abercombie CEO Micheal Jeffries in the Consumerist article  saying “We only want attractive kids wearing our clothes”. According to our course book “Managing Human Resources. Global Edition 8” page 135 it is illegal to discriminate employees or recruitees based on their physical characteristics.

However, article in Fentonkeller  claims that it is allowed to discriminate based on personal attractiveness as it is subjective to each person.

I don’t think that Abercombie goal was to promote discriminative views. I think that they tried so hard to relate to their target market that they ended up on gray area of moral and ethics. It might be that they themselves was very aware of that.  Naming their sales associates models might have made their job offering more attractive to their future employees and also might have helped them to explain their shallow recruiting practices when questioned about it.