You are the HR manager for Medibank, which began as a health...

You are the HR manager for Medibank, which began as a health insurer and has grown into a broader healthcare company, committed to delivering affordable healthcare that gives customers more choice. Medibank is delivering care in new ways by collaborating with hospitals, doctors and governments and driving reform to help reshape Australia's health system. Medibank also offers travel, pet and life insurances to meet a wider range of the customers' needs. Considered to be one of the best insurance companies in the Australian market, Medibank had a profit of $458 million in the year 2019-20. However, the profit became almost half in 2020-21. A few reasons for this huge drop in profits were attributed to increasing competition in the market, poor management, the COVID crisis and a high turnover rate. The drop in profit has subsequently led to investors retracting their investments which has led to many of the employees thinking that the organisation may collapse. Due to this fear, many employees have started looking for jobs elsewhere, some have already Because of this organisational performance has dropped down. Due to the shortage in staff, customer complaints have increased and the brand value has massively suffered. Following are some statistics:

Total number of employees as of 30th June 2020	2,234	Total number of employees as of 30th June 2021	1,625
Profit as of 30th June 2020	$458 million	Profit as of 30th June 2021	$231 million
Customer complaints received as of 30th June 2020	56	Customer complaints received as of 30th June 2021	269
Customer complaints received as of 30th June 2020	53	Customer complaints resolved as of 30th June 2021	105
Turnover rate as of 30th June 2020	5%	Turnover rate as of 30th June 2021	25%

Employee Turnover

From 1st July 2020 to 30th June 2021 609 employees have left the organisation. Medibank has a system of exit interviews, i.e. employees that leave the organisation have to go through an interview process to explain to the company why they are leaving. The process helps the organisation to improve employee retention. Here are some statistics from those exit interviews.

Reason to leave	% of employees
Entry-level employee got a better position elsewhere	19%
Was given minimum wage, joined the competitor for a higher wage	24%
Was a temporary visa holder, had to leave Australia due to a family crisis back home	14%
Manager/Management was not supportive	16%
Planning to start their own business	8%
Not enough appreciation/motivation	8%
No room to grow	9%
Retiring	2%

These issues are not new as these are the same for companies across the board.

Customer Complaints

The analytics team at medibank did some research on the customer complaints and found the following top 8 complaints.

Customer Complaints	% of total complaints
Long Wait on Hold	46%
Lack of knowledge	17%
Having to give too many details	15%
Self-help apps and services don't work	8%
Information is hard to find	7%
Support agent is unfriendly or rude	6%
Claim was not provided even though covered under the policy	1%

The situation presented above is quite complex; you and the other managers consulted with the CEO on what needs to be done. Based on the consultation, the CEO has assigned different tasks to each manager. You have been asked to focus on 2 areas of the organisation, customer service and HR. As the customer service manager Elisha McCarthy has put forward her resignation, there is a gap which has to be filled. However, in the interim period, the CEO has asked you to act as the acting customer service manager along with your HR manager role.

Question 1 a. Based on the case provided above, explain what complex issues you are dealing with. b. With respect to the issues faced conduct a quick research to: i. identify 2 common customer complaints, ii. identify 2 reasons why employees leave.

Question 2 a. Write down the task objectives involved in pursuing identified issues. b. Write down at least 2 risks in dealing with the problems existing in both the departments.

Question 3 Write down the legislations and organisational policy or procedures applicable to identified issues.

Question 4 What resources will be required to solve the problems identified? Email these to all the relevant stakeholders.

From: To: Subject:

Question 5 You have made certain changes to the organisational structure. As you are now managing two departments, you have created 2 new positions: Customer Service Team Lead and Human Resources Team Lead. These vacancies were filled internally. You have discussed the complex issues that the 2 departments are facing with the respective personnel and are planning to conduct an ideation session with each one of them.

Ideation session with Customer service team lead - Mark Thompson

You: Our customer complaints have quadrupled in just a year's time, how can we reduce these?

Mark: We do have more data on it; we can see that 46% of the customers had to wait for long times, 17% felt our staff lacked knowledge, 15% felt that they were asked for too many details.

You: Hmmm, what do you suggest should be done?

Mark: In my opinion, we should focus more on training the staff regularly.

You: Given the circumstances where we don't have enough staff to cope with the current customers, additional training during work hours would rather increase customer complaints as there would be less or no staff to answer calls.

Mark: Yes.

To facilitate the ideation session you feel that it is better to address each of the top 8 complaints individually rather than just having 'training' as a solution to all 8 of them. a. Name at least 3 creative and critical thinking techniques that you would suggest Mark to use so that he could come up with more effective solutions. b. Mark suggested that he could look at providing solutions to 4 of them and the other 3 can be done by you. The following are the suggestions provided by Mark.

Customer Complaints	Suggestion
Long Wait on Hold
Lack of knowledge	Having regular product knowledge interactive quizzes so as to ensure that employees are up-to-date with information.
Having to give too many details
Self help apps and services don't work	Understanding what errors exist and correcting them.
Information is hard to find	Analysing online customer searches and updating the information.
Support agent is unfriendly or rude
Claim was no provided even though covered under the policy	We will have to look at each case and see if what the customer is saying is true. A possible solution would be to have another team review the claim for a second opinion in such cases.

Fill in the above table with your suggestions as well, feel free to add to Mark's suggestions.

Question 6 a. You couldn't talk a ideation session with Jack Jameson (HR team lead) because of some personal reasons. He had to take the week off. You are required to provide 3 suggestions or ideas to reduce the high turnover. b. Evaluate each of those solutions and write down at least one advantage and limitation for each of the solutions provided in Q6a. You can use the table below.

Solution	Advantage	Limitation

Question 7 Based on the solutions provided in Q6a, use any decision-making tool of your choice to select the 2 most viable solutions of those three. Explain which decision making tool you used and how you made the decision.