Question

Human resource management Case

Gerald Mahoney was working in the women’s shoe department and doing the best that he could to sell a fairly expensive pair of boots to a young lady who obviously could afford to shop at a much classier store. For some unfathomable reason, however, she decided to shop at Marcy’s. After a few minutes of trying on several pairs of boots, Gerald was able to gently persuade Ms. Monahan to buy one of the store’s most expensive boots. He rang up the sale and was complimenting himself on his persistence when out of the blue the customer said:

“Why is an obviously highly talented man like you, who has just sold me a pair of shoes I probably don’t need or even want, working at a place like Macy’s? My name is Ms. Monahan, and I am the director of recruiting and training at Home Builders, and I can tell from the way that you have handled this sale that you would make a superb home salesperson. Here’s my card. Why not call me tomorrow morning, and we can arrange a time for you to come in?”

Gerald thanked Ms. Monahan for her kind words and told her he certainly would call her. He called the next day and she seemed quite receptive to his call. She asked him to fax over a resume and said that she would get back to him (or her assistant would), in order to set up an appointment for him to interview with her and some of the key salespeople in the firm. Gerald ended up faxing his resume three days after talking to Ms. Monahan. Her office emailed him with a link to an online blank job application, which he quickly filled out. A nerve-wrecking week went by, and Gerald finally received an appointment for an interview for the following week.

The interview started at 9. a.m.. First, before he met with anyone, Gerald took a battery of tests and filled out a set of questionnaires. The exams included everything from basic math to what

seemed to be an IQ test, to questions about self-image, his honesty, and his preference about the type of work he liked to do. Rather than having a long break for lunch they had a working lunch where HR went through the entire compensation package: a base salary plus commission, medical benefits, and a really good retirement plan where the firm contributed 5% of his salary.

His first interview that afternoon seemed to set the tone for the rest of the day. Gerald had a wonderful interview with the Sales Director, Sam Arden, and found it easygoing, laid-back. Sam, after telling Gerald about the firm and the job, asked Gerald some brief standard questions about his background and sales history and what made Gerald special enough to become a sales associate with Home Builders. Gerald expected these questions and was quite prepared. The next series of questions, however, were very different from anything he had experienced before. Sam would tell him a little story and then ask Gerald what he would do or say if he were the sales associate in the fictional story. No one had ever asked Gerald’s opinion about anything at his prior job and he felt he had finally found a firm that cared about what he thought. Gerald thought he sailed through these scenarios with flying colors.

After the interview with Sam, Gerald was directed to a small conference room where three people who identified themselves as area managers and one person from HR asked him a series of questions about his selling approach, his work habits, and his ability to work with a sales partner. This session was repeated in another room with another three area managers and another person from HRM. Both of these sessions included a series of follow-up questions that Gerald was happy to answer. In both of these interviews after the one with Sam, he was always asked to explain the most difficult sales situation he has ever faced and how he has handled it. However, apparently he was not the only candidate the company was looking at since in the second interview with the area managers and the HRM representative he sat together with a different candidate in the room and both were asked the same questions to which they often had similar but sometimes also very different answers. Gerald felt that his answers were overall much better than the responses of the other candidate. He even felt that the interviewers had to make suggestions to the other person in terms how to answer, basically giving the other candidate only the option to agree or disagree with the suggested answers. They never did this when they asked him questions. At 5 p.m. the last session ended and Sam walked in and told Gerald he would contact him in a week to let him know the decision of Home Builders.

In the days after Gerald left, some HRM personnel of Home Builders screened Gerald’s online profile accessing his Facebook and Twitter as well as Instagram account. From the list of his contact on those three social media HRM randomly picked a few individuals and contacted them in order to get some references. Gerald learned about it only by chance as one of his friends contacted him via email asking if he could respond to Home Builder’s request – Gerald answered affirmative. Later he would find out that ten other of his acquaintances, friends and even a coworker at Marcy’s had been contacted by Home Builders.

A week went by, and Gerald had not heard anything from Home Builders. He finally called and was told that a letter was in the mail to him and he should await arrival. Three days later, and with continued impatience at work and at home, Gerald received the letter. The first word he read, “congratulations”, sent him into an ecstatic frenzy. He then read further and realized that

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this is not what he was told. Their job offer was commission-based only, and, assuming that medical and dental packages ran about the same cost and that coverage was the same as his current job, Gerald would lose paid vacation time but perhaps gain in terms of contributions to a retirement plan. Gerald though: “This is not the same great deal that I was told about during the interview process! Who sold who in the job?”.

At the same time as Gerald was asking this question to himself, Angie was standing at her (former) desk at Home Builders picking up her personal items and wondering how she had gotten into this mess. At one shoulder was the head of HR and at the other was one of the security officers. They were there to escort her out of the building as soon as she retrieved her personal items. Thinking back, the last hour or so had been a whirlwind. She had come to work like she had for the past several months, maybe a little late and a little hungover, but she was there. Shortly after she had sat down at her desk to start making phone calls, her supervisor had called her into her office. She asked her to accompany her to the HR Manager’s office. Once there, she saw a printout of her Facebook page, but at least they weren’t the postings she first had considered putting up. She was really glad that when she graduated from college she had purged her account of all previous personal pictures.

Angie knew, like all of the other employees, that management had recently been going through some of the social networking sites to review potential recruits before they decided to hire them, but she didn’t know anything about management reviewing current employees’ webpages. Well, she thought, my pages are pretty clean since I was warned about this by career services in college. However, what she saw next really bothered her. There was the highlighted section of her blog from last Thursday. She had forgotten about that! In the post, she had noted that she had a whopping hangover because of the night out on Wednesday and saw her post: “I think I’ll call in sick because I just can’t face working for that idiot with this headache. I’ll take a pill and relax today taking a sunbath”. Well, now they knew that she wasn’t sick. How could she have been that stupid?

As she sat there, she suddenly realized that this was no normal conversation – it looked more like an inquisition. And when the HR manager informed her that the company was going to terminate her employment by today – i.e. right away - and she would be required to pick up her personal belongings right now, she couldn’t believe it. What had happened to freedom of speech? What had happened to a person’s right to have a life outside of work? Could they monitor her personal communications that had nothing to do with work and then use them against her? She wasn’t sure, but she thought that was wrong. Nonetheless, here she was cleaning out her desk with a security guard next to her. She should have been more careful: the internet is full of references to people fired for things that they posted on their personal webpages. And it doesn’t necessarily matter if you set your pages to private. Your friends may still capture comments that you’ve made on their pages without you even knowing about it. In addition, recruiters may use your “friend” list to find people to call for references, and if your friend is unaware of the purpose of the call, they might say something that you’d rather wish they didn’t. Employers can look at who has recommended you on sites such as LinkedIn and may approach those references as well.

As Angie finished packing her personal belonging she noticed that the security guard had filmed her cleaning out her desk. While she was walking to the exit, she already saw the recording being streamed on the video monitors placed all around the corporate headquarters and other employees were watching it and staring at her while she was walked through the crowd followed by the security guard like a criminal. The subtitle of the video said: “This is how we deal with problematic employees!”... This seems to have been a modern version of the medieval pillory punishment which publicly exposed and shamed culprits. Some of her colleagues were also her friends and after her dismissal they did not want to meet her anymore. In the evening after her dismissal she started to have depressions and a first panic attack - both even got more intensive with time passing! A large part of her social network and friendship was cut off as a result and this further pushed her into a severe depression in the months after the incident. Angie soon needed psychoanalytic treatment and antidepressant medication to get by.

Not long ago her career in the company seemed to have been quite bright: she was asked to attend various workshops that were designed to train future junior managers. Apparently, she was in the roster of those employees who may be promoted into leadership positions she thought. Angie was familiarized in one of those workshops with strategic management and business strategies and analyzed her own company’s strategy using Porter’s concept of business strategies. A leadership workshop, as it was called, was also quite interesting: next to some presentations about some leadership theories and HRM issues she would be asked to engage into some role plays – one was about “democratic leadership” and the other about how to discipline subordinates. Now she was the one to be disciplined while she was never in the position to use what she has learned by herself. But, perhaps, at least she learned something in the workshop which will help her to address the way she was dealt with by the company: how they handled her case was not correct, she thought!

While Angie encountered this problem, Nora, one of several supervisors at Home Builders that has 50 sales teams, each with 10 members, was busy with performance evaluation. For this, Nora was supposed to use a graphical rating scale that has four performance indicators (1. Quality of work; 2. Quantity of work; 3. Politeness; 4. Integrity) with a 6 point scale ranging from 6 = (outstanding/best) to 0 = (problematic/poor). Employees will receive a corresponding performance bonus on top of their base pay depending on the rating. If they receive a rating of 1 on all four indicators (= 4) they will receive a 4% bonus and so on (a rating of 0 on the rating scale for all items will, of course, result in a 0% bonus) with a maximum of a 24% bonus pay. Nora can, of course, not observe all employees permanently and, therefore, usually simply looks at the subordinate’s work behavior and work outcome one week before the performance evaluations are due. Nora considers this as a “random sample” for evaluating work behavior and outcome. However, Nora’s subordinates are all aware of the fact that their performance is only monitored that particular week. Nora usually gives all employees scores between 4-5 (4= very good and 5 = excellent) in order to not upset anyone. Nora feels confident that this is fair since all subordinates demonstrated actually very good/excellent work in that particular week. Yet, there are significant differences in performances throughout the year. There are two subordinates in the team, who are actually outperforming any others in the company on all of the indicators!

But Anton has also to deal with another problem: one his subordinates, Carl, has been caught being involved in a scheme of fraudulent sales with a kick-back scheme. Anton is fuming since this particular team member had received a great reference from his previous supervisor - even highlighting the very high moral standard. Fact is that Carl was involved in some illegal schemes even at his previous employer as Anton found out later. The supervisor who provided the excellent reference only did not learn about those activities only since he omitted the regular auditing duties since he was too busy. Anton reports this fact to Ms. Monahan who decides that it is now payback time. Ms. Monahan is aware of the fact that the fraudulent subordinate’s wife is expecting soon to give birth to a child. Ms. Monahan instructs the HRM department specifically to wait to inform Carl about his immediate dismissal on the day when the birth of the new child has been confirmed to make him feel miserable. Of course, as is the practice at Home Builders, a short video clip will be created and screened on the video monitors of the company while Carl will be pictured being escorted outside of the premises by security personnel.

Question: Identify all the HRM issues and carefully analyze them while using relevant concepts and theories you have been familiarized with and suggest how Home Builders could have avoided the various problems.

Answer 1

Following are the HRM issues which we see in the above article:

1. The termination policy is incorrect. Even though the employee may have committed a mistake, the organization has no right to humiliate the employee.
2. Interference with the employee right to privacy - The organization investigates candidates and present employees social media accounts and interferes in their personal life. Thus, employees are not free to express their opinions or views. Also, these can be used against them as a proof to terminate an employee as in case of Angie.
3. The compensation package that was verbally discussed with Gerald was not mentioned in his selection letter. This meant that the interviewer Sam lied to him and tried to lure him with false commitments.
4. Performance ratings must be given on basis of data and not assessor's perception. As in case of Nora. This is resulting is awarding the candidates without realizing their true performance. Also, injustice to the over-performers as they too receive same ratings as other co-workers though they have performed better than the rest.
5. The HR must ensure no employee is over-worked. Nora has too many teams and sub-ordinates to manage. Employee work-load management is necessary.
6. Anton wants to deliberately wait for the dismissal of Carl until his wife delivers their baby so that he can be humiliated more and terminated. The HR too knows about this and supports the dirty politics being played in the organization. The HR instead must dismiss or discourage such acts and ask for evidences which require Carl to be dismissed from his duties.