Employee Context at K wik-fit - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Case study reveals that work force is distinctly tiered into hierarchies of grass root workers, supervisors and managers. The main employee and HRM context at K wik-fit is that of employee turnover. This context can best be classified as a problematic context as the employee turnover has been very rapid at K wik-fit.Figues reported in the case study indicate that in the K wik-fit's Lanarkshire call center the employee turnover used to be as high as 52 percent. In the year 2001 such high employee turnovers used to translate into vacancy rate as high as 21 percent. This used to present three fold HRM problems. There was a colossal waste of organizational resources invested in training and upgrading employees who only decided to quit soon after receiving such training. Two, an equivalent effort and resource deployment was required to fill the resulting vacancies and three resources had to necessarily deployed yet again to train and upgrade the new recruits. This results in adverse impact on employee productivity and continuation of the organizational work and, in the final analysis, impacts overall company results and profits.
The main features of K wik-fit's human resource strategy center on two core concepts found in any human resource management strategic move. These are: one, analyzing in the work environment the possible factors responsible for employees' rapid turnover and removing such factors as far as possible, and, two promoting intra organizational conditions and tie ups which would help motivate the workers to high productivity and enthusiasm. The results of this two fold human resources management programme ,adopted in K wik-fit in stages, has been astounding enough to give it an industry award for human resources management. Factually the stage one of the human resources management initiate has brought down the employee turnover rates from the high of 52 percent to 34 percent with another 2 percent fall being achieved in a matter of couple of months. The initiative has been so successful that t even helped halt employee turnover in the month of January where turnover used of be highest. Even in this month the employee turnover instead of rising over the annual average continued to plummet indicating deep impact of the human resources management initiative.

A closer look at these initiative clearly reveals that two sets of human resources tactical moves can be identified separately i.e. one that improves work environment for employee and helps boost their motivation and two that offer to help employees solve work related issues and problems and move to higher productivity and better work standards. In the fact the latter move appears to be an initiation of a system of Total Quality Control (TQM) in the services organization. Behind both tactical moves there is a realization that selling insurance is a complex assignment which is not only monotonous and repetitive but which also requires up to date product knowledge and employee empowerment to meet the challenges posed by growing competition. To top it all such tactical moves have been carefully based upon employee feed back carefully collected earlier on. In the former category one finds that employee motivation is sought to ...Download file to see next pagesRead More