Question

Please answer the following using the information given, Thanks!

Introduction:

The Nimble Storage is a hybrid growing data storage System Company situated in Silicon Valley. The CEO of the company is Suresh Vasudevan, and the Vice President of the HR department is Paul Whitney. The company's purpose of developing the hybrid system, which is used in flash memory (It is a storage memory that leads to rapid access to random data) and hard disk to increase the performance of the company at the competitive prices offered to the customers in order to give the efficient and the flash storage platform.

The case analyzes the past performance of the company and the talented hiring of the personnel by Whitney, where the founder and CEO of the company plan to transfer the storage world into the hybrid storage system and wanted to achieve the goal to make a billion dollar company within three years. For this purpose, Suresh Vasudevan aimed to focus on both short term and long term key people initiative to measure the results. The company decided to launch the new leadership program named "LEAD" for the sustainable future growth of the company and also effects on the people initiatives to go forward in future.

The objective of the case is to make quantitative and qualitative analysis by identifying the issues, providing solutions to the problems, and providing an alternative for the growth and evaluating and choosing the best alternative and provide an implementation plan.

Define the issues/Problem statement:

The company has finished its second full fiscal year of storage on January 31, 2013, which provided the great opportunity for reproducing its core values, reviewed the success over the last years and also the strong personnel who made it possible. The company always aims to deliver the world’s most efficient way of data storage by target the broad range of enterprise applications with the goal of optimizing in many factors such as performance efficiency, capacity efficiency, data protection and dramatic simplicity.

Problems/Issues and its solutions:

In order to stabilize the performance, the company faced many potential problems and issues in producing the product and also HR-related issues faced by Whitney.

The first problem was related to the health of the customers' network that led to the unusual high temperature in the data center. The company is now organizing the data center in order to convince the customers to the belief that will help to solve the range of problems in one single platform.

The second problem was the business team was not effective due to lack of motivation and employee turnover, it as one of the biggest challenge that company was facing in last nine months. So, the business wanted to improve its values by making the business by conducting two ways process with the two-sided as the same coin. It would result in the powerful feedback and result oriented of employees, which will result in employee retention and run the business with the order of framework and program perspective.

The company was facing the hiring issue as they wanted to maintain its culture and status quo, the company needed to change the paid time off/personal time off PTO policy in fifteen days, the company wanted to increase the length of services, and they tested the idea but not preferred by the company. Therefore, the employees wanted a favor, and the company made the PTO flexible and unlimited sick leaves and holidays for employee retention.

Suresh Vasudevan had talked about the cultural openness and transparency in sharing the information to the tons of people via any social website, such as Facebook and Google. The company estimates that the openness will be challenging to measure as the hidden information would be exposed publicly.

Analyses Nimble Storage’s mission statement

The HR practice of Nimble cannot be called as a best global practice because, It lacked in various scale on the HR operation and management. In global HR practice, employees concern and issues are solved on the earliest date. Most of the companies have pro-active HR policy due to which new people wants to be associated with the company. The policy consists of standard leave policy, motivating employees and changing the organization culture according to the need of the time. All these are lacks in the company.

From the case we cannot inferred the facilities provided to the global employees by the company. In geocentric perspective the gaps are in HR operation of the company which believes in status quo. In rapidly changing world order it won't work, and organization should be dynamic to deal with the challenges. The company also changed the leave policy and make favorable for employees because it had more attrition rate and wanted to retain the employees.

Global companies are using HRIS (Human Resources Information System) and this company should also use this. From the text of the case nowhere it is mentioned about the technological tools for HR so we can assume that it is not present in that scale in the company. HRIS promote transparency and openness in the system and employee will have access to the relevant data they should know.

Nimble is a leader in predictive flash storage solutions; they take advantage of flash, cloud and big data analytics to deliver data velocity to their customers. Their employees are committed to their vision and are passionate about the work they do (Bahrami, 2015). The annual goal is to become a billion dollar company in three years by selling hybrid storage platform to efficiently store and use data, hire and retain right manpower without disturbing the culture of the organization.

The three major problems are:

Health of customers network

Employee retention

Employee motivation

Employee Retention and motivation are taken care of by multiple measures by launching a LEAD leadership program to achieve a sustainable future growth of the company and encourages people to move forward in the future. They have also made PTO flexible and have allowed unlimited sick leaves and holidays for employee retention and motivation.

Customer network and storage issues are resolved by predictive flash hybrid platform. The hybrid storage system makes organizations more competitive by using flash memory which gives rapid access to random data and hard disk to increase the performance of the company by giving efficient and flash storage.

The company is trying present itself as a global organization by introducing openness and transparency but is still limited by its conservative culture in hiring and fear of their information being exposed.

“Geocentric focus is when the company focuses on global advantages, global communication, and global hiring off manpower based on their skill sets rather than country of origin. management looks at opportunities on a global scale. Instead of focusing on the way that business gets done in a given country, it looks at how to conduct business anywhere in the world, based on common ways of communicating (Lander, n.d)”. Nimble wants to transfer the world storage to the hybrid storage system and wanted to achieve the goal to become a billion-dollar company within 3 years. The hybrid storage system makes organizations more competitive by using flash memory which gives rapid access to random data and hard disk to increase the performance of the company by giving efficient and flash storage platforms. The target is to focus on a broad range of enterprise applications with the goal to optimize in many areas as follows:

Performance efficiency

Capacity efficiency

Data protection

Dramatic simplicity

The geocentric approach to business will give the following advantages:

Putting the best people with best skills suited for the profile irrespective if they are based out of Taiwan or California

Improve the global image of the organization

Give access to more qualified and suitable manpower

Flexibility to manage customers across different time zones as if we have clients in Asia we can have customer service employees based out of remote locations in Asia.

The geocentric approach means a global approach and a global advantage to the business. The company can have the following advantages:

Best skilled and suitable resources across the globe

The benefit of cross cultural thinking and exposure and can target customers across the globe

Address customer requirement in their time zone

Customers might feel more comfortable with customer service executives from the same region

The ideas generated will be global and can address many regional problems.

To summarize everything, a global or geocentric approach will be useful to get a flexible, multicultural and multi dimension vision to your business. We can see examples of giants like Google and Facebook who have used geocentric approach to make success of their business.

In order tackle the global business proposition, there are two important staffing approaches i.e. ethnocentric and geocentric approach. Since Nimble storage is aspiring to provide solutions to organizations all across the world, the company has to move from ethnocentric staffing to geocentric staffing. But there are challenges in the transition.

Ethnocentric staffing is a practice of appointing staff from the company’s home country with a belief that native employees would be more aligned to the interests of the company headquarters. “Ethnocentric staffing means you hire management that is the same nationality as the parent company (Johnston, n.d)”. The advantages of this practice are that there will be alignment in the interests and viewpoints of the head office. Communication with a same culture employee is easier than with an employee from different culture. There are disadvantages to the practice, that the company may not be able to understand the local market and culture. Second disadvantage is that employee from the parent company can be costlier than an employee from the host country. Finally, high ration of expatriates from the parent company can give wrong messages to the local employees and customers.

Geocentric staffing is more suitable to companies aiming to serve global customers. The Nimble storage must move to geocentric staffing. In geocentric staffing practice, the performance of the job candidate is considered rather than the cultural orientation. For multinational operation, geocentric staffing is preferred. There are many benefits to Nimble Storage by adopting geocentric staffing, i.e. the company can integrate global operations at lesser cost, can derive benefits from the diversity of employees, improved management of the local issues, better market penetration in each region of operations, etc.

There are risks in managing geocentric staff. For example, from a political angle when one nation dominates the other in economic and political dimension, the staffing pattern can have tremendous influence on the organization. Some staff may feel they are treated in discriminate manner and compensation is disproportionate to others in international locations. The perception of disparity of employee treatment can lead to distrust and negative consequences of employee hostility.

Questions:

a. Determine gaps in the organization’s current practices within the global market that are relevant to the human resources team of the organization.

b. Illustrate the potential gains for the organization regarding their business practices if they adopt a more geocentric focus. Be sure to support your response with examples. What will be the benefit for the business of the organization should they adopt a more global approach?

                                                                                            

Answer 1

Answer:a

The Nimble Storage is a hybrid growing data storage System Company situated in Silicon Valley.

Following gaps in the organization’s current practices within the global market that are relevant to the human resources team of the organization are as below

• Lack of motivation process and practices in the organization: The organization do not have proper motivation environment in the organization. The employees are not motivated and influenced for better contribution for the company. Thus the company needs to have better processes and practices for employee motivation.
• Lack of Employee Retention: The organization does not have proper good employee satisfaction and is not able to retain their employees. The organization is facing a employee retention problem, which is affecting their ability to achieve their target goals. The organization should have better employee benefits pland, employee welfare so that they can improve the employee retention in the company.
• Hiring issues and leave issues : The company was facing the hiring issue as they wanted to maintain its culture and status quo, the company needed to change the paid time off/personal time off PTO policy in fifteen days, the company wanted to increase the length of services, and they tested the idea but not preferred by the company. Therefore, the employees wanted a favor, and the company made the PTO flexible and unlimited sick leaves and holidays for employee retention.
• The company do not supports the openness in the company and use of social media tools like facebook, whatsap etc. The company estimates that the openness will be challenging to measure as the hidden information would be exposed publicly
• The organization lack in changing the culture according to the need of the time. Thus this is resulting in low employee satisfaction and high employee iterations.

• The company does not have any database system which can support the company in managing the human resources information systematically.

Answer b:

The potential gains for the organization, regarding their business practices if they adopt a more geocentric focus is that the organization will be able to achieve the business targets more easily and will be able to reduce their current gaps and issues in the organization. They will have better employee motivation, employee retention and suitable leave system for the employees. Examples – Many MNC and global companies are resolving their such gaps and issues with the help of geocentric focuses in the organization.

Benefit for the business of the organization if they adopt a more global approach will be as below

• Higher employee satisfaction, motivation and retention due to global influences in the organization on the employees.
• Better employee contribution towards the organization and will achieve higher outputs.
• Improves the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization by global processes.