The problems facing itc

The problems lining itcReport utilizationThis report has been compiled by the Director of Human Resources at the request of the come along of Directors. Following on from the new-made schooling of the administ proportionalityn by remote consultants, a rivet of problem aras need been identify in likeness to HR practices, policies and executing. It is the purpose of this report to analyse the findings of the study compiled by the consultants and pep up the courses of action necessary to address the problems identifiedThe Problems Facing ITCThe geological formation is shortly comprised of four severalise run aways administration, production, retail, and client service. These functions atomic number 18 spread everyplace a number of sites with administration and production sharing a single site, retail function operating from several locations, and client service spread crossways three ph superstar centres. The problems which be facing the organisation vary depending on the function and location.The administration function of head office and the production function of the pulverization ar both based on the alike geographic site. Although the functions be take a shiting in c retreat proximity to each opposite they are very different in terms of working conditions, practices, and get away establishments. These differences are creating tensions crosswise the departments and driveing to a them and us culture. Some of the differences identified include bonus intrigue in the factory provided non the head office, poorer working conditions in the factory compared to head office, lack of pay keisterteen for factory faculty which is available to administrative ply. Some problems are common to both functions such as lack of promotion opportunities for midland jackpotdidates and poor general perception of stave abilities by managers. As headspring up as these, the factory in any case suffers from a blame culture evidently fostered b y poor product quality.The retail outlets gravel a separate set of problems. thither is potentially a discrimination problem in the recruitment and selection processes employed for managerial supply. There are currently no female managers of retail outlets and in that location has been at least(prenominal) iodin complaint of discrimination referred to a trade union by an undone female spatedidate for promotion. This complaint has received the backing of a number of the one-on-ones colleagues.The call centres are very highly pressured, conviction-oriented environments in which to work. There are significant pressures to deal with guest enquiries quickly and to sell as some refreshed packages as possible. Pressure is exerted by supervisors whose salaries are dependent on the abilities of the centre staff to mystify income through sales.Across the organisation there is a general intuitive feeling that staff are underpaid in sexual relation to competitors and not valued a s an asset of the organisation. There is an change magnitude turn towards trade union membership which is probably a sign of evolution estrangement indoors the men as a whole. There are also a growing number of customer complaints, mainly enjoin at retail and customer service staff as they are the customer-facing part of the organisation. These complaints are generally centred on lack of knowledge of products on the part of retail staff and poor customer service from the call centre staff. As detailed there are a quite a brusk of different problems facing ITC with the lack of consistency of treatment of staff crosswise the organisation and poor communication of organisational values existence major add factors. The morale of the workforce is low and there is a lack of the true to the organisation debated by high levels of staff turnover. It is not purely a matter of low salaries as it has been issued that staff leave the company to work for other(a) organisations for little in the way of additive reward. The managerial and supervisory staff also show up to be ineffective and/or un forgeting to tackle the problems which leaves the staff with no alternative but to seek advice and assistance from the trade unions. The consultants reported that there is no indispensable problem with the quality of the core workforce but that the managerial staff are not sufficiently competent to be able to recognise and build on the attributes of the workforce. This combination of factors and problems could potentially all be explained inwardly the concept of employee struggle. The main thrust of this report will, therefore, concentrate on the execution of instrument of an employee booking programme as an initial means of addressing the issues currently facing ITC. Other means of tackling the identified problems over the longer term will also be discussed and recommendations made.Employee Engagement The CIPD (2009) define amour as creating opportunities fo r employees to relate with their colleagues, managers and wider organisation. It is also about creating an environment where employees are motivated to want to splice with their work and really care about doing a good suppose.why is employee engagement relevant to ITC? Al intimately all examples quoted in the consultant findings demonstrate an out-and-out lack of employee engagement moreover, the opposite appears to be the case. At this point, it is consequential to note that a global survey by BlessingWhite Intelligence (2008) on the state of employee engagement be that that Indian workers are among the most center and satisfied in the world. In the Asia-Pacific groupings, full engagement for Indian employees reaches 34% in parity to the lowest of only 10% for China. Moreover, over 65% of respondents said yes when asked if, assuming they had the choice, they would hope to remain within their organisation in 2008. From this, the apparent lack of employee engagement and retent ion issues apparent within ITC would appear to point to something we are doing wrong as a company. The for the first time question should be Why is employee engagement important? Links surrounded by employee attitudes, employee management and business writ of execution pee been repeatedly demonstrated in CIPD (Nov 2009) research, and the Aberdeen Group (2009) reported only this year that 82% of Best-in-Class organisations attributed employee engagement initiatives flat to transformations in revenue and / or profitability. Employee engagement spills into the concept of the psychological contract. The psychological contract is a popular framework within which aspects of the employee relationship can be studied (Bratton Gold, 2007 14). Guest and Conway (2002) define it as the perceptions of the two parties, employee and employer, of what their common obligations are towards each other. These obligations tend to differ from individual-to- individual and are often imprecise / unsp oken and inferred from actions or from what has happened in the past, as soundly as from statements made by the employer(CIPD Nov 2009). This contract forms the basis for employer grade (CIPD Jan 2009) unequivocal brand can of course help promote recruitment and remedy staff retention levels. For the latter reasons, ITC should pay close heed to this contract. later all, fetching account of the emotional needs of the employee ought to be a term when we consider they are the only resource within our organization that can simply walk out, taking their skills and possible opinions of negative employer brand with them.Customer service issuesWith regards to the consultant reports of customer service issues, several studies prolong found that employee engagement is an important variable on this front. The CIPD (2009 2) reported that indorse Europe figures show that employee engagement levels ran parallel with an development in customer satisfaction. Likewise, it seems intuitive t hat an increase in customer satisfaction would henceforth lead to an increase in financial writ of execution. In a recent study within the customer service industry by Chi and Gursoy (2009), verifiable support for this link was indeed presented. On the engagement level, while they found employee satisfaction did not appear to impact on financial comeance directly, they did find an indirect relationship in the midst of the latter, with customer satisfaction acting as the mediator. Storey, on the other hand refers to engagement as EIP (employee fight and participation) and stated that it is thought to contribute to improved levels of worker satisfaction and lading and, subsequently, organisational performance. From this it would appear that engaged and satisfied employees are a requirement for customer satisfaction, with customer satisfaction being the strongest indicator in financial performance. It would also appear, however, that all three variables are take to be woven int o the same fabric for overall business success. For ITC, without employee engagement / satisfaction, there will little customer satisfaction, and without customer satisfaction there will be no success. The obvious lack of ITC employee engagement at this moment in time is a worrying factor with regards this tripartite equation. Therefore, the obvious question should be how do we tackle employee disengagement, how do we go about driving employee engagement? Employee engagement driversAccording to the CIPD (Nov 2009), there is no absolute list expressed of engagement drivers. Their research has shown, however, the key employee engagement drivers are Opportunities to feed employee views upward Feeling well-informed about what is happening in the organisation The employee believe that their manager is committed to the organisationMost writers agree that one of the most important factors at stage with regards employee engagement is reciprocal communication between management and the re quirement to keep all employees well informed, etc. As you might imagine, these factors are also very more involved in the psychological contract it is also suggested that, in a crisis, mutually prize expectations are surmount shaped by honest communication and unfluctuating information (Dietz 2009). At this moment in ITC history, we might be exposit as being on the verge of crisis point.Intranet 2.0A technology that appears fishily lacking in ITC since its inception is Corporate Intranet. All of the key engagement drivers suggested above can to some extent be addressed with the devouration of an Intranet solution. This of course would not solve all of our problems, but it would at least supplement any other measures we ultimately put into place. This Intranet should not be of the antiquated variety (known as sack 1.0), that is, typified by static pages, lively with the sole purpose of providing information. We should be embracing all that Web 2.0 tools have to offer (i.e. highly dynamic / interactive internal social networking tools, arcminute messaging, wikis, blogs, discussion forums, and RSS feed technologies, etc.). Intranet 2.0 is still very much in its infancy, so the ability to introduce a rich networking environment is very much in line with core business strategies of innovation and creativity. We also have a largely young workforce, and Web 2.0 technology tools are something the junior generation have grown accustomed to, and this acquaintance can be employed to our advantage in the recruitment field.When it comes to the employees call to connect with managers, the confide to believe in their commitment, and having the opportunity to have views fed upwards, the sharing medium of Intranet 2.0 is ideally suited to help facilitate these key engagement drivers. Web 2.0 tools flatten company hierarchy by providing a transparent pathway of communication between employees at all levels, from the Company Director quite a little to the shop fl oor worker. It can provide staff across geographic location, irrespective of position or intellect, the opportunity to float ideas on new product ranges, best practices, working procedures, etc. via live suggestion boxes. These ideas can appear in real time and will open to progress comments / suggestions by all staff. Intranet 2.0 can also provide a telephone line for feedback on organisational news announcements, strategies, etc. This type of feedback can help managers to gain insight into the needs and motivations of employees (BlessingWhite Inc. 2008). Indeed, employee attitude surveys can be a uninterrupted feature of the system, the issuances of which can used to measure employee engagement and gauge feeling amongst the workforce, all of which can help ITC identify areas to focus improvement towards.The parcel such an Intranet can put to work as a training and phylogeny tool cannot be underplayed. It can provide the workforce with the most current product information , tutorials, and marketing material, etc. This information does not have to appear in the way it did pre-Web 2.0, where static pages were displayed across the organisation, meaning each employee would be required to wade through pages in order to arrive at the relevant nugget of information. Intranet 2.0 provides levels of person-to-personisation to the point of providing each employee with news updates focused on their job role (Nielsen, J. 2009). This would be of particular return when it comes to areas such as the customer complaints we have been receiving from the call centre regarding staff not being current on products. For example, this type of system has the capability to consistently display individual staff with the most up-to-date products details and Q A scripts, etc. As this Intranet 2.0 proposition is based on helping the flow of communication across the entire organisation, thus logically, we would require all staff to have distract gateway to such a system. He ad Office, call centre and retail staff are likely to have ready access to PC, laptop, diligent phone technologies in order to do this. In the factory, however, such access is very likely limited. To get around this, deployment of PCs / touch-screens at specific locations passim the factory is recommended perhaps inviting factory floor staff to use the system during lunch breaks, etc. Following the suggestion that we allow all employees across the site access the canteen, situating access in this area would also make sense.Web 2.0 technologies and business performanceBeyond the obvious communication-flow benefits of Web 2.0 technologies, recent findings by the Aberdeen Group also provide positive figures for their business performance benefits. Saba (2009) reported that they found that 52 % of organisations who employed social networking tools, blogs, and wikis achieved Best-in-Class compared to only 5% for those who did employ them. They also provided figures for Web 2.0 tools in relation to employee engagement. They found an 18% average year-on-year increase in employee engagement for organisations employing Web 2.0 technologies in comparison to a mere 1% for those who did not Options for ChangeShort-termAn employee engagement programme and corporate communications strategy should both be essential as a matter of urgency to stem the tide of disaffection and high levels of turnover within our workforce. This will undoubtedly require a reliable level of upfront investment but will, I believe, nonplus to pay dividends at a very early stage. Part of this investment may have to include outlay for extra personnel and equipment to implement these solutions as we currently do not have the specialist staff available in-house to fully utilise the technology required for this communications systems implementation, nor the staff to adequately implement an employee engagement programme.Long-termAn organisation-wide job evaluation scheme is required as a means of ra tionalising the pay scales of the separate functions into one transparent system. The use of bonus payments to boost the wages of certain sections of the workforce should be reviewed and possibly abolished. Exact costs of this proposal are ambitious to predict until the completion of the job evaluation exercise, but it may well be a cost-neutral option with increases to basic salary costs being offset by reduction in bonuses. Any subsequent increase in the overall salary costs which may arise would hopefully be countered by increased productivity.A scheme which would encourage secondments between departments should be developed. This would allow staff to gain a better agreement of the operations of the other functions within the organisation. This scheme could also be of benefit in assisting to identify personnel with potential for promotion or who could perform better in a different role.The hierarchy in the factory requires a radical overhaul with a view to rationalising the man agement structure. The ratio of managers to supervisors is far higher than the ratio of supervisors to production workers. The potential savings gained from this advancement could be used to increase the salary of the supervisors in return for taking on greater responsibility for operations in their sector. This would create a more prestigious role for the first line supervisor and a more strategic one for the remaining managers.A process is required which will recognise the potential leaders and managers of the future from within the alive workforce. Learning and development for staff should be a core convention of the organisation. Staff with the potential to move on to other roles within the organisation should be identified, encouraged and developed in order to achieve this. There is also a need to introduce learning and development opportunities for staff who do not necessarily like to move on to other roles. Members of staff may be satisfied with the role they are playing but it is still necessary to ensure that there are opportunities for personal growth and satisfaction within that role. The emphasis on speed in dealing with customer enquiries within the call centres should be replaced by an ethos of power in dealing with those enquiries. This would be a more cost-effective advance as an enquiry dealt with efficiently initially is less likely to generate future similar enquiries from the same customer and reduce complaints of poor service. proofBeing an Employer of Choice is not simply about offering the best salary. The whole package must be seen as appealing in order to attract and retain the correct calibre of staff who address the vision of the organisation and who want to actively contribute to its success. It has been stated (CIPD, 2009) that industrious employees are more likely to act as organisational advocates than disengaged employees and can play a powerful role in promoting their organisation as an employer of choice. For this to w ork, staff must feel that their views are welcomed and they are valued as individuals. This should result in higher levels of motivation and increased morale which, in turn, should reduce staff turnover. Our aim is to spread the word about how good ITC is to work for and hence attract the maximum number of high calibre candidates for posts who then want to stay with the organisation to reach their full potential. We also have to relieve that by attracting the highest calibre of candidate we will inevitably lose a number of high-performing staff over time as they wish to progress beyond what the organisation can offer. We must be disposed(p) not only to embrace this, but actively encourage it, and accept that for the organisation to grow there will be a certain degree of turnover of ambitious staff. The upside of this is that there will be regular opportunities for existing staff to progress through the organisation increasing levels of loyalty and improving morale.