1. Adaptability is a key feature of successful international managers. How does adaptability manifest itself, and how would you train prospective expatriates to be more adaptable? 2. Discuss the role of reverse culture shock in the repatriation process. What can companies do to avoid this problem? What kinds of skills do managers learn from a foreign assignment, and how can the company benefit from them? 3. What is the role of repatriation in the company's global competitive situation? Why do so many returning expatriates experience dissatisfaction upon repatriation? How can firms correct this problem? How can human resource managers assist repatriated employees? 4. Microsoft is weighing setting up a new R&D facility in India to develop new software applications. Should it staff it with Microsoft employees? Indian employees? Or should it subcontract with an Indian firm? Explain your answer and some of the potential challenges in implementing it. 5. What are two basic types of training for expatriates? Tell how each benefits the employee. Why is language training so useful in preparing people for overseas assignments? Case Study - Was There Enough Preparation? \"Hi, Sam. How are the preparations going for your assignment in Japan?\" \"Well, Elvis, I really feel prepared for the assignment, and the high level of apprehension I first experienced is gone.\" \"What exactly did the preparation program involve, Sam?\" \"The experience was really exhaustive. First, I spent a good deal of time in a comprehensive orientation and training program. The program covered training and familiarization in the language, culture, history, living conditions, and local customs of Japan. Then, to make the transition back home easier and better for my career, I have developed a plan with my boss that includes several trips back here to remain a key part of this operation. Also, my career development training will include the same training as the other managers in the home office. Finally, I was completely briefed on repatriation orientation and training that I would experience when I returned. Also, I was fully briefed on the compensation package, which appears to be fairly generous.\" \"That is great, Sam. Have you found a place to live yet?\" \"Not yet, Elvis, but my wife and children are leaving in three days to meet with the company's relocation person to consider the various possibilities.\" \"How did the family like the orientation training, Sam?\" \"Well, my wife ordered some Japanese language tapes, and I think she read all of the information that was covered in the class. She and the children will be fine because they have time to adapt; they don't have to hit the ground running like I do.\" QUESTIONS 1. Do you believe that Sam's family is adequately prepared for the move to Japan? Why or why not? 2. Should the company's orientation program have included training for Sam's family? 3. Is repatriation orientation and training necessary for Sam's family on their return to the United States of America? Tutorial Three 1. What are the basic components of the recruitment process? Why is employee referral so important in the recruitment process? 2. Define sources and methods of recruitment. What external sources of recruitment are available? 3. How do human resource planning and recruitment complement each other? Why is effective recruiting a challenge for many employers? What methods can employers use to effectively recruit a more diverse workforce? 4. Interviewing unqualified applicants can be a frustrating experience and a waste of time for managers, peers, or whoever is responsible for interviewing. How can the HR department minimize or eliminate this problem? 5. What basic steps normally are followed in the selection process? What is the general purpose of the preliminary interview? 6. What is the purpose of the application form? What is the purpose of an assessment center? 7. What is the significance of employee selection? Describe the different selection devices and which work best for different jobs. Case Study - Recruitment and selection of graduate trainees Garland Hotels is an expanding UK upmarket hotel chain of 95 hotels with an average bedroom capacity of 400. All of the hotels are located out of town in parkland settings, have fine restaurants and extensive indoor and outdoor leisure facilities. The Board of Directors is considering controlled expansion of the business through the selective acquisition of hotels in the UK and also in the European Union. The HR Director sits on the Board and has a strategic role in human resource planning and managing organisational change in a competitive hospitality market. Four regional HR Business Partners provide advice and consultancy to hotel managers who have devolved responsibility for operational HR matters. The total number of employees is 18 000. Historically, Garland Hotels has not recruited many graduate trainee managers and did not have a systematic process for doing so. Graduates were recruited at the discretion of individual hotel managers who devised individual training programmes. Success rates, judged by graduate trainees moving into general management positions, were poor and attrition was high. Three years ago the Board decided that high quality graduate recruits would be needed to support future business development and a more systematic, but small-scale, graduate recruitment has taken place. Graduate recruitment has been supported by a two-year training scheme of six fourmonth secondments to customer facing and to support service departments. The training scheme involves the trainee working in at least three different hotels and the General Manager of the hotel in which the trainee is working acts as a coach and mentor. The objectives of the graduate management trainee include delivering high customer service standards, working as part of the team for each area, contributing to staffing decisions, budgetary control and developing an allround understanding of the hotel business. The onus is on the graduate trainee to apply for management positions as they become available. Hours of work are 'unsociable' but are compensated for by free meals, access to leisure facilities and a reasonable (for the hotel industry) total working week averaging 45 hours. The total reward strategy for the graduate trainees encompasses pay rates in the top market quartile, six weeks holiday, profit share, a defined benefit pension scheme (currently under review) and subsidised private medical insurance. The Board of Directors, following the advice of the HR Director, have decided that the business requires 100 graduates to be recruited and trained in a three-year period. This is clearly a significant increase in the small-scale intake of the past three years and will involve significant investment. The graduate management trainees are to provide the future lifeblood of the organization at Hotel Manager level. The Board is convinced that graduates with a good honours degree in a business related discipline who are well rewarded and receive good training, will make a significant contribution to the future success of the organisation. You are one of the four regional HR Business Partners and you have been tasked by the HR Director to develop the graduate recruitment and selection process to ensure that the right numbers and quality of graduates are recruited to meet medium and long-term business needs. The other HR Business Partners are focusing on the development of the graduate training programme, performance management and future reward strategy for graduate trainees. Case study tasks Your task is to prepare a written report for your HR Director to deliver at the next Board of Directors' meeting and you are required to address the following issues: 1. The preparation of a job description and person specification for a graduate trainee. 2. The critical review of graduate recruitment sources and an outline recruitment strategy. 3. A method for reducing the number of graduate applications to a number that can effectively be put through an assessment centre. 4. A pilot design for a systematic assessment centre process for the selection of 30 - 35 graduates a year, which can be tested for predictive and face validity on existing managers. 5. Recommendations for an induction programme for graduate trainees to ensure their swift and effective transition to the organisation and also reduce early attrition through an induction crisis. Prepare a report based on points 1 to 5 above in which you justify your recommendations and also include costing and resource implications. Employee referrals Applicants who are referred to the organization by current employees Referring employees become stakeholders. Referral is a cost-effective recruitment program. Referral can speed up diversifying the workforce Tutorial Seven 1. What are the three most important purposes of performance management systems and why? Discuss the components necessary for an effective performance management process. 2. What would an effective performance management system look like? Show the difference between performance management and performance appraisal? 3. How does staffing influence an organization's performance management activities, and how is staffing influenced by an organization's performance management activities? 4. Why has performance appraisal taken on increased significance in recent years? How do firms use performance appraisals? Describe the three steps in the performance appraisal process. 5. As an HR manager how could you use performance appraisal information for HR tasks such as training and development, recruitment, and compensation? 6. Describe the four basic types of appraisal interviews. 7. What are the guidelines that supervisors should follow to hold effective appraisals and minimize problems like bias and halo effects? How can rating committees improve the fairness of the appraisal process? Case Study: CRB, Inc. A very small car restoration business (CRB, Inc.) is interviewing you for a position as its human resources manager on a part-time basis, working 20 hours per week, while you complete your degree. You would be the first HR manager they have ever been able to afford to hire, and the husband/wife owners (Al and Mary Brown) have been operating the business for 10 years. In addition to you, they recently hired a part-time janitor. This brought the paid staff to seven fulltime employees: a foreman who is responsible for scheduling and overseeing the work, two auto body repair workers, a person who disassembles and reassembles cars, a painter, and a detail person who assists the painter with getting the car ready to paint and sanding and waxing it afterward. Al Brown handles sales and estimating prices, runs errands and chases down parts, and envisions the future. Mary has been doing the bookkeeping and general paperwork. The owners and employees are very proud of CRB's reputation for doing high quality work in the restoration of old cars made as far back as the 1930s. CRB pays its employees based on \"flagged hours\" which are the number of paid hours that were estimated to complete the work. (For example, the estimate may say that it will take 3 hours to straighten a fender and prepare it for painting. When the auto body repair worker has completed straightening the fender, he would \"flag\" completion of 3 hours, whether it took him 2 hours or 6 hours to actually complete the work. It is to his benefit to be very fast and very good at what he does.) CRB pays the workers 40% of what it charges the customer for the flagged hours; the other funds are used to pay the employer's share of the taxes and overhead, with a small margin for profit. The foreman, who does some \"flagged hours\" auto body repair himself, is also paid a 5% commission on all the labor hours of the other employees, after the car is accepted as complete by the customer and the customer pays for the completed work. Employees are given feedback by Al, the foreman, and by customers on an infrequent basis. Right now, everything is going well and the employees are working as a team. In the past, the situation was less certain and some employees had to be fired for poor work. When an employee filed for government paid unemployment compensation saying that he was out of work through no fault of his own, CRB challenged the filing and usually was able to prove that Al had given a memo to the employee requesting improvements in quality or quantity of work. There has never been a formal planning or appraisal process at CRB. Mary Brown has read an article about performance management and is wondering whether CRB should implement such a system. Please answer her questions based on your understanding of this small business. 1. Critically assess whether a performance management system would work for such a small business. 2. Discuss benefits that such a system would provide for us as owners and for our employees. 3. Explain any dangers our company faces if we don't have a performance management system. What could be a problem if we go with a poorly implemented system? 4. What 10 characteristics, at a minimum, should we include in a performance management system? Explain your answer with 1-3 sentences for each characteristic you recommend. 5. Explain how we could tie our current reward system to a performance management system. Tutorial Eight 1. Arthur is the new HR manager and is investigating the various forms of compensation the company uses for its employees. Define compensation. What forms of compensation might be offered at Arthur's company? 2. After completing the job analysis, your boss has asked you to conduct a job evaluation of the various positions in the company. Detail the steps you would take in accomplishing this task. 3. Define compensation. Discuss the differences between job analysis and job evaluation. 4. It has been proposed that HR managers should be more involved with compensation committees charged with determining executive pay packages. How should HR be involved? 5. How can compensation be used to address the recruitment difficulties of scarce skills without demotivating existing employees? 6. Why is compensation so important to employees? What are your compensation options if you are an employer who needs to transfer an employee from a low cost-of-living area to a high cost-of-living area? Discuss the difference between pay-for-performance, and skill-based pay; and provide examples of when they might be used. What is a cafeteriastyle benefit plan? Is it a useful motivation technique? Case Study - Publish or Perish Tim Jackson had been a professor of accounting for nine years before deciding to move into administration. He submitted his name for a job opening at a large midwestern college of business. There were over 125 applications and Tim's was considered as one of the best. One reason was that his publication record was excellent. He also had five years' experience as the chairperson of the accounting department at his previous school. The president of the university has decided to make the business college one of the best in the country. "I want you to go out and hire the finest people you can get," he told Tim. "We have the money to turn this place into a showcase among business schools. Let's do it." This was a big order given the fact that the college of business had always been given low priority by the administration. Nevertheless, Tim was anxious to follow through on the president's directive. The first thing he did was to hire two nationally known scholars for the faculty of each of the six major departments in the college. He also let it be known that the college was going to follow a policy of "publish or perish." "It's the only way to get national recognition," he told the college faculty at their first annual get-together. "This means that from now on I am going to have all chair people evaluate their employees on the basis of three factors: publication, teaching, and university service. The procedure that Tim wants to follow is this: at the beginning of each academic year, the chairperson is to meet with each of the members of the department and jointly set objectives for the faculty member. Then, at the end of the year the two are to meet again and discuss how well the faculty member did. Raises will be given based on these evaluations. The president of the university and the chair people in the college both agree that the proposed procedure is a good one. The major question to be answered now is: what type of performance evaluation form should be used? Tim believes that a graphic rating scale would be ideal, but most of the chair people believe that a BARS approach or MBO would be better. There is to be a meeting later this week when a final decision will be made. Answers to Questions 1. Explain the benefits of each of the following: graphic rating scale and MBO. Which evaluation instrument would you recommend? Why? 2. Are there any problems associated with linking performance and rewards in the way Tim is suggesting? Explain. 3. Why is it so difficult to evaluate faculty? Case: Auditing the Tellers Holder Bank is a medium-sized financial institution that has witnessed dramatic growth over the last five years. One of the primary reasons for the bank's success has been its ability to hold down expenses. Thanks to computerization and the formulation of efficient procedures, Holder's cost of business is 2 percent below that of the competition. One of the areas that the bank has stressed is productive performance. Every individual in management is given a quarterly performance evaluation and those who do not measure up are soon let go. Holder is now in the process of taking its performance evaluation farther down the line and applying it to operating personnel. Specifically, the bank wants to develop an evaluation system for gauging the performance of bank tellers. Although there has been no formal decision regarding either the performance evaluation form to use or the specific criteria to evaluate, there are some general areas that the management feels should be evaluated: (a) the speed with which a customer is served; (b) the number of daily mistakes that a teller makes in entering transactions into the computer; (c) the accuracy with which the individual handles cash; and (d) the person's friendliness and general demeanor toward the customer. These are only four of the criteria that the bank has in mind. It intends to develop four to six more for use in an overall evaluation. Yet it is not the identification of the criteria that has the bank managers most concerned, but which method would be most accurate to evaluate their performance. Some of the bank managers believe that a graphic rating scale would be best; others feel that some form of paired comparison or behaviorally anchored rating scale would be preferable. The bank has formed a committee to look into this matter and hopes to have the situation resolved by early next month. Case Questions 1. Could a graphic rating scale be used in carrying out this evaluation? 2. Could a paired comparison be used? Would MBO be a useful approach? 3. Would the number of tellers to be evaluated have any influence on the form of evaluation that is used? Explain. 4. Which evaluation method would you recommend and why