Psychology and Employee Engagement
Course name: Psychology and Employee Engagement
The case
The Ealing Building Society has a head office in Oxford that contains the operations, marketing, product development, corporate planning, finance, IT, HR and legal functions. The HR department at head office is responsible for providing HR services across the whole organisation. These services include recruitment, training (including centralised courses, mainly for branch staff), pay and benefits administration for the whole Society, and dealing generally with employment issues. There is no recognised trade union at the company. However, a staff association exists but it does not have negotiating rights and does not exert much influence. Little responsibility for people management is devolved to line managers, who are expected to use the services of the HR function on any matter affecting the employment of people; even first-level disciplinary problems.
The Society has been doing reasonably well in terms of sales and profits over the last few years but there are signs of the beginning of a downward trend. The marketing and product development functions at head office are not effective but sales at branch level have been disappointing. Serious doubts have been expressed in the board about the quality of staff, their skills and performance in the branches.
The reality of the situation, however, was that the newly appointed manager Mr John Smith felt considerably less than satisfied with the way his unit was working — there seemed little sense of being a team, people (especially the marketing and sales research-orientated types) kept questioning why they were being asked to do certain tasks and seemed disgruntled at the ‘interference’ in their work by their new manager, whilst the more broadly-experienced members began to display open exasperation at new manger’s lack of understanding of the needs of sales and marketing.
It is felt that inadequate and under-skilled people have been recruited and that they are badly trained and underpaid. Employees are complaining about wages because they lower than industry comparators and a significant pay gap exists between the genders. Retention rates are getting worse, as staff are lured to other companies who offer higher, fairer wages and better facilities. Long-time employee with no past performance issues are missing the work frequently, randomly with very short notice over the past few months.
An analysis of labour turnover during the previous 24 months established the following rates, (table1) including a comparison with the latest figures from the annual survey of recruitment, retention and turnover conducted by CIPD.
NOTE: Please read the case study carefully and find three problems in the case study related to employee engagement.
Assignment question
You are the newly appointed HR consultant for Ealing building society. The Board of directors has requested that in your first 100 days in office to address the concerns within the building society. Your task is to prepare an individual report which will be presented to the board on ways HR will strategically contribute to the business needs and objectives
To present the report you are required to identify three issues within the given scenario that impact on group dynamics and the overall organisation.
It is expected, whilst preparing the report you should demonstrate the psychological theoretical frameworks underpinning the case, recommending the significance of employee engagement as a contributor to organisational competitive advantage.
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Word counter 1800 report
