Starkey HR Ltd - Essay Example

Starkey Hr A. types of employment relationships are: Permanent employment. Temporary employment. B. a permanent employee is employed to work on a long term basis while a temporary employee is used to address the temporary and present demands of company. Permanent workers have more control and responsibility. Temporary employees are usually considered for assignments that range over a limited period of time. C. in view of the economic downturn, companies would not be looking to hire permanent workers by virtue of being unsure of the demand. However, the effort to stay in business would prompt them to look for workers to fill out part time requirements, which could be the present demand for Starkey HR. 2. A. the business cycle has four stages. The first stage involves the star up of the business and is a nascent phase during which the company is aiming to establish a strategy to help generate business and clients. Less or no revenue may be expected at this stage and requires investment and resources apart from promotion. Innovation and risk mitigation are essential. Having conquered this successfully, a better places firm will look to consolidate its position and expand by catering to core customers and looking to secure newer ones. A brand identity is established in the market, which determines additional demand from customers. Trust, goodwill and good service are major expectations from the firm. With a good set of customers, the firm begins to witness better profit margins and reaches a stage of maturity where the customers and investors provide business at a regular pace. the company requires to undertake extensive marketing to enhance its position and looks to branch out to other sectors and tries to innovate. Profits are stable. However, a stage comes when a company has to witness recession and witnesses a decline in demand and sales. Reduced economic activity may take away profits or may even result in loss. The company struggles to remain in business and attempts to return to recovery at the earliest. B. redundancies should be a matter of last resort. Starkey must initially make efforts to identify the employees with special skills and experience and retain them. Reducing working time, pay cut, temporary leaves, less dependence on casual staff are some of the desirable measures. If redundancies are inevitable, a voluntary redundancy scheme should be employed. The offers of the scheme should be clearly outlined and sent to all applicable employees. In case of forced redundancies, the method of selection should be fair and non discriminatory that takes the expertise and experience into consideration. 3. Redundancy is enhanced in companies where statutory entitlements are low. The redundancy packages in most EU countries are quite high in comparison to the UK with a few exceptions such as the Netherlands and France. The average redundancy pay in the EU is more than twice the amount paid by employers in the UK. Under EU regulation, workers are supposed to be informed and consulted in any case of redundancies. Additionally, companies need to determine a threshold level for the redundancy and is determined by the size of the workforce and number of required redundancies. 4. Forecasting allows a business to create and modify the financial and promotional strategy of a company in addition to allowing it to keep track of the performance of all requisite parameters, which play a crucial role in decision making and implementing the required changes into existing strategy. Errors are neutralized and peaks and declines in demand caused by market conditions can be addressed to immediately. Forecasting allows the business to conduct various kinds of analysis for different purposes on the basis of historical and current conditions and allows the prediction of the most probable outcome, thereby helping in making the required modifications across all departments. Starkey HR can make use of several forecasting techniques that take into account several parameters. Direct managerial input from clients provides an assessment of future requirements from the client. Ratios such as the cash and return on capital employed help determine this expected demand. Additionally, Starkey HR could conduct surveys for various managers in the client company with the aim of identifying the demand they expect from within their work group. Current headcount requirements and anticipated productivity are a few parameters. A historical correlation of the size of the workforce with business factors such as the productivity volumes, sales are suitable candidates for consideration. Owing to the presence of employees such as Dan who specialize in the domain in which they provide HR services, Starkey HR can resort to forecasting demand on the basis of process analysis that involves a detailed study of the work process that operate within the area and which are believed to play an impact on the decision making process for worker requirement. 5. Starkey’s new culture could be defined by making use of the Blake and Mouton model, which provides the requisite culture on the basis of concern for production against concern for people. As such, the Blake and Mouton model aims to provide a requisite culture model that reflects directly on the quality of leadership and depends on the two extremes of the spectrum namely production and people. Under the concern for people, the leader is not very concerned about production and is instead concerned about his approval among people. Against this, a concern for production does not care much about the welfare of people and operates in the fear that something may go wrong against the wishes of the firm. As such, the focus is more on achieving better productivity and results. On the basis of this model, there are four possible structures namely the impoverished, authoritarian, Country club and Team leader. Starkey is currently witnessing problems due to the recession and is in a desperate need for better productivity and more business. The current situation seems unfavorable for the company if it were to continue operating in its existing framework and is in danger of going out of business. As such, the focus is more on productivity. At the same time, the company cares for the welfare of its employees, but is serious about drawing a clear line between managerial control and employee benefits. In this scenario, Starkey is recommended to adopt the ‘Team Leader approach towards implementing the new company culture as this would enable it to achieve higher performance by leading employees to work towards their goals in a dedicated fashion, which is definitely the call of the current situation. A higher degree of participation and coordination is also required that requires everyone to stay committed and be assessed on the basis of their performance. Also, newer ways to wriggle out of current financial problems are also required, which requires innovation, flexibility and open mindedness as key components of the new company culture. 6. Refer spreadsheet Q. 6. Of the centralities calculated, the mode offers the best possible estimate as it allows the estimation that the mean number of holiday taken by the average employee at Starkey HR is 6.5 days. 7. Refer Spreadsheet Q 6. 8. Refer Spreadsheet Q 8. 12. a. Contribution is the amount of business or revenue generated by an individual employee or group. it can be studied across an individual, group, company and industrial level. In the case of Starkey HR, the amount of contribution is determined by the number of Hours, number of employees placed and the amount of revenue generated. b. Semi-variable costs are an expense in a firm which includes the fixed costs as well as the variable costs. fixed costs are the expenses that need to be paid irrespective of the amount of reveue generated by the firm or level of activity at the workplace. Variable costs are dependent on the amount of activity. 13. a. gross profit and net profit Gross profit is the difference between sales and the costs involved in making the product before any overhead costs, taxation and inventory costs. Net profits the gross profit subtracted from overhead costs and interest payables. b. revenue and profit Revenue is the total income derived by a business by way of selling a product or providing services. Profit is the amount of revenue retained by the firm after deducting the various costs incurred in making that product or providing the service. c. cash and profit. cash is the liquid asset of a business and is the amount of inflow into the firm's account. profits are simply measured by deducing costs from the revenue. its different from cash as it is represented on paper and is dependent on credit terms as well. 14. The graphs have been charted under Q. 14 and the trend lines have been constructed. For the Recruitment wing of Starkey HR, the breakeven is at £28,000 for an output level of 62 placements. In the case of temps, the breakeven is at £26,000 at an output level of 33,000 hours. 16. 17. a. Communicating Redundancies: the initial step would be to perform an analysis of the estimated projections of the revenue and turnover and determine the amount of profit or loss margin that would be expected to be incurred by the company. with this forecast, it would also be wise enough to consider a deviation from the expected returns by a certain percentage in order to accommodate unforeseen expenses as well as market conditions. With the exact figures in place, the next step would be to confer with the top people in the company and consult them in determining if redundancies would be necessary and the number of people who should be made redundant in order to enable the company to at least break even with the revenue generated. With this determined the other employees in the company should be informed of the decision and that the redundancies would not be affected immediately and take place as the situation demands. This way, employees would have good time to make alternative arrangements and look for jobs elsewhere. Additionally, employees should be categorized into groups that would determine the sequence in which employees would be relieved as this will help prevent every employee from looking for alternatives thus helping in retaining employees in employees in the order of their importance to the firm. b. Employees should be categorized into order of importance as mentioned above. Additionally, the employees should be rated on the basis of their performance on a weekly or monthly basis and provide a procedure that allows for comparison of revenue against the forecasted revenue. A suitable combination of experience versus performance should be compiled and evaluated periodically that would enable evaluating employees on all aspects. Comparing this against the cash flow of the company should be used in deciding the required redundancy on a regular basis. Read More