Performance Management and the Employee Appraisal Process

Assignment 3- Case study

Customer Relationship Management

Course topic internal customers- Employees

You have just been hired as the Employee Relationship Manager by John Maris of Maris Foods Ltd.

Maris Foods is a small food and beverage conglomerate comprised of three companies: Maris Beverages Inc., Cara Sweeteners and
Taste of Heaven.

Your meeting with Maris was originally intended to be an overview of the three companies but serious problems have arisen with the
most recent acquisition – Taste of Heaven – and Maris has advised you that your first project will be to do some research and fact
finding to determine the extent of the HR problems/issues at Taste of Heaven and provide some recommendations as to what needs
to be done to address the problems. He has advised that he will be assigning one of his operations managers, John Morgan, on a
temporary basis to work at Taste of Heaven. However, as John is currently on vacation with his family in Vienna, he will not be able to
report to Taste of Heaven for another 5 days. Maris has advised you that you must be prepared to debrief Morgan regarding the HR
problems along with your recommendations on his first day on site at Taste of Heaven.

Maris begins to fill you in on what has happened over the last few weeks. He bought Taste of Heaven without visiting the physical
premises because the price was excellent, the profit margin was attractive and the company was a good fit with his focus on food
and beverages – Taste of Heaven packs and sells herbal teas and regular teas to big box stores as well as health food stores and
has been in business for over 20 years. His overall arrangement with the previous owner, James Toomi, was that he (Toomi) would
stay on for a period of 90 days after the sale was finalized, and would participate in an orderly transition to new management. Maris
said that he had made several phone call over the last two weeks to Taste of Heaven to arrange an appointment with Toomi to work
on the transition plan. Each time he phoned, he was advised by the person who answered the call that James Toomi, was not
available. Finally, after several calls and no word from Toomi, Maris made an unscheduled visit to Taste of Heaven and introduced
himself to the receptionist as the new owner of the company. Her faced turned red with embarrassment. She quickly admitted that
Toomi told her that she was to tell whoever called that he was not available and not to provide any additional information. When
Maris asked her where Toomi was, she said that she thought he might have left the country. She said that someone else in the

1
company told her that he had overheard Toomi telling his son-in-law (who was the operations manager but has also been absent for
the same period of time as Toomi) – that they were going to relocate the whole family to the Cayman Islands and set up a charter
boat service there. This piece of information spread quickly throughout the company along with an assumption that the company was
going to go bankrupt. Based on this piece of misinformation about potential bankruptcy, three key people - the office manager, the
warehouse manager and the part time bookkeeper – have all left – presumably for other jobs. Maris indicated that he was very
unhappy that the former owner’s unwillingness to carry out his responsibility during the transition period along with the misinformation
caused the departure of some key staff at Taste of Heaven and has left management in that company in a very weakened state.
Maris advised that he is proceeding on the assumption that both the former owner and the operations manager will not be returning
and that a new general manager will need as soon as possible for Taste of Heaven.

While Maris was onsite for a brief period, he also found out a few other things. The person who took care of HR work at Taste of
Heaven left on maternity leave about 6 weeks ago and is not expected back, as her husband has just been transferred to Denver,
Colorado. The office manager at Taste of Heaven took over HR duties on a temporary basis but as that individual has also left, no
one has the responsibility to deal with HR issues.

Maris asked the lead hand in the packaging group at Taste of Heaven to assume the warehouse manager’s position on a temporary
basis and to advise all warehouse staff that the company has been sold and that operations would definitely continue. He also asked
one of the Taste of Heaven sales reps to take over the office manager’s position on a temporary basis and to advise all office staff
about the sale of the company and that there is absolutely no truth to the rumour that the company has gone or is going bankrupt.

Maris has made it clear that he would like Taste of Heaven to remain as union-free as possible (the packagers at one of his other
companies are unionized) and is not averse to paying union wages to non-union staff in order to retain good people and avoid
unionization. He feels that unions tend to reduce management's control over a company.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Maris asked you to travel to Taste of Heaven immediately to begin your research.

The following is a summary of your findings.

Taste of Heaven

1. Taste of Heaven is made up of approximately 150 employees: 65 in packaging, 5 in shipping/receiving, 10 in various other
warehouse and maintenance jobs, 15 drivers reporting to a warehouse manager. The balance of employees work in
purchasing, sales, expediting and office administration and report to the office manager. There are currently no unionized
jobs in the company.

2. As Maris had indicated, the office manager, part time bookkeeper and warehouse manager positions are all vacant as these
staff members quickly left when they thought that the company was going to go bankrupt. Maris asked the most senior lead
2
 hand in the packaging group to take over the warehouse manager's position on a temporary basis and asked the most
productive sales rep to take over the office manager position on a temporary basis.

3. The lead hand has told you that he is really enjoying the temporary job as Warehouse Manager but has had no training that
would prepare him to deal with various problems. He would like to know when he could meet with you to discuss some fairly
serious HR-related issues. Although you did not have time to get extensive details from him about the problems he is facing,
he shared the following with you:

a) Taste of Heaven is temporarily short of three packagers - the lead hand in packaging is replacing the Warehouse
Manager, and two other experienced packagers have been off three weeks due to a warehouse accident. One of the
packagers was opening a new bottle of chemicals to clean the machines and was overcome by fumes. The second
packager who came to her aid, did not take time to put a mask on as required, and suffered the same result. The
latest information received is that some lung damage has occurred, and the return to work date of both packagers is
now unknown. This shortage of packagers has resulted in a three week backlog of orders (normal backlog is 48
hours). Staff are working overtime three nights a week and this is still not enough to eliminate the backlog. The acting
warehouse manager is concerned that the overtime might be starting to cause some burnout among staff who work
most of the overtime.

b) WSIB has called a number of times for the Health and Safety report related to the accident but the office manager who
normally took care of accident reports and other HR related matters, has left the company. The current acting office
manager from sales does not know how to complete the report or even conduct an accident investigation. You asked
if there is an active health and safety committee and the acting warehouse manager told you that there was one a
long time ago. Some of the people on the committee have left the company and they were not replaced and the
committee remaining has not met in close to two years. When you asked about the frequency of accidents, the acting
warehouse manager tells you that they have about two per quarter that require medical treatment of some sort. Both
you and the warehouse manager agree that this accident rate is far too high.

c) The acting warehouse manager tells you that he caught the head shipper in the men's washroom sniffing cocaine a
couple of weeks ago. He told the shipper he was going to report him to the owner but the shipper begged him not to
as he would probably lose his job. He told the acting warehouse manager that he was just going through a bad time
right now - marital problems and a terminally ill mother. You ask the acting warehouse manager if the company has an
option in the benefits package to support a referral for the shipper to professional counseling and he tells you that he
is not aware of anything like that.

d) You learn there is a very high turnover among the drivers and that the company has problems recruiting and retaining
drivers. The acting warehouse manager thinks that this might be due to the wages (drivers have told him that the
company is paying below the going rate) and also due to safety issues with the trucks (there are frequent breakdowns
3
 on major highways). Of the 15 required drivers, four have been with the company less than three months and there
are currently three vacancies that need to be filled. Because of the staff shortage in this area, some of the drivers have
been working overtime over several weeks and this has cost the company considerably more than it would have paid
if drivers had been hired and paid regular wages. There is a rumour floating around that some of the drivers have
been approached by CUTE (Canadian Union of Transport Employees) about becoming unionized but the acting
warehouse manager does not know if it is true. The acting warehouse manager has also received complaints from
drivers about the differences in wages from one driver to the next and there are situations where drivers with less
experience are being paid more than drivers with more experience. The warehouse manager said that the owner did
the hiring and that he is at a loss to explain why this kind of discrepancy exists.

e) The acting warehouse manager advised that the packagers at Taste of Heaven found out a couple of days ago that
the unionized packagers at one of Maris’ other companies are being paid $3.00 more per hour and the union rep from
this company has had at least one informal after-hours conversation at the local bar with some of the packagers about
the possibility of becoming unionized. You did a quick check and also discovered that current packagers at Taste of
Heaven are definitely being paid below the going rate for non-unionized packagers in the area and that there is also
considerable differences in the rates at which the packagers at Taste of Heaven are paid. You find out that the
previous owner tended to offer packagers 50 cents more per hour than they were paid on their previous job but he
only gave raises if people specifically asked for them and the raises were very small. This has led to a lack of
consistency in compensation for packagers.

f) The acting warehouse manager also happened to find out that the warehouse manager at one of Maris’ other
companies is being paid $10,000 more per year than the previous warehouse manager at Taste of Heaven and that
this person is responsible for fewer staff than the warehouse manager position at Taste of Heaven. As he hopes to get
the warehouse job at Taste of Heaven on a permanent basis, he would like to know if he will be paid a salary
equivalent to that of the warehouse manager at the other Maris company.

4. The sales rep who took over the job as office manager appears to be a nervous wreck. Her hands were shaking and she
started to cry during the interview with you. She tells you that she absolutely loves sales but doesn’t feel cut out or equipped
to do a manager’s job. She said that she doesn't know what to do about a lot of the issues and that the job seems to be
comprised of one problem after another. She is dealing with a serious health problem with one of her children and while she
wants to be a good corporate citizen, she tells you that things have gotten to the point where she can’t sleep without taking
pills. She says that she needs to be able to return to her regular sales job as soon as possible.

5. The receptionist advised that the part time bookkeeper worked at home all of the time. She (the bookkeeper) was a single
parent Mom and the owner had told her that the bookkeeper had some kind of disability and that he was allowing her to work
at home 100% of the time and that he arranged to have work dropped off at her home every few days. Because the
4
 bookkeeper was never onsite, the receptionist had been asked to take care of petty cash. Only 4 people had access to petty
cash – the owner, the office manager, the head shipper and her. She said that for quite some time, she has not been able to
balance the petty cash fund on a consistent basis. Often the fund was short anywhere from $50 to $200. She had reported
this to the office manager but he never did anything about it. The shortages have continued even though the owner and the
office manager are no longer with the company. She believes that the head shipper has been stealing money for quite some
time and that you should call the police and report the theft right away.

6. In talking with various employees, you learn that hiring is done exclusively by word of mouth and that an inordinate number of
people in the company are related in some way – cousins, mothers and sons, brothers, etc.

7. Lack of annual increases appears to apply across the board and the only staff who have obtained increases are those who
have gone directly to the previous owner to ask for an increase. The increases appear to have been given without any
reference to performance. In fact, there appears to be no systematic approach to performance evaluation and management
and you have not been able to locate one single example of an employee evaluation.

8. One of the things you are surprised by is the mess in the office. There are boxes in the aisles and equipment stacked up all
over the place – in fact you tripped over some cables on your way into the office. In addition, you become aware of a bad
smell coming from a part of the building. Apparently a toilet backed up and flooded a storage area in the warehouse with
sewage about a week ago and all of the equipment in the storage room (some of which appears older than the planet) was
just transferred to the office and left there. The workers in the area tell you the smell has been there since the flood, even
though the sewage in the washroom and in the storage room was immediately cleaned up by one of the workers in the
warehouse. Apparently sewage seeped into the wall between the storage room and the office, but nothing has been done to
address this problem. When you ask the sales/office staff if they have spoken to the acting office manager about the smell,
they just grow silent and there are some nervous laughs. The accounts payable clerk was in a very serious accident about a
week ago, is off sick indefinitely and the receptionist said that she heard that this employee may be confined to a wheel chair.
You note that the premises are not wheelchair accessible.

9. The current accounts receivable clerk is pregnant and due to go on maternity leave in two months. The receptionist indicated
that she has been taking accounting courses at night for a couple of years and that the previous owner had repeatedly
promised that she could temporarily take over the accounts receivable duties while the job holder is on maternity leave.
However, no training has taken place to allow this to happen.

10. Payroll has been contracted out to ADP, a company that specializes in payroll services. The former bookkeeper was
responsible for communicating information about payroll to ADP via her internet connection at home and there have been an
abundance of overpayments and underpayments to staff which have not yet been corrected.

5
 11. Overall, morale seems to be quite low at TH because key employees have already left the company. Some or all of the
remaining staff may have been operating under the assumption that the company was about to go bankrupt. They have not
been advised about their potential future with the company and have been told that the new owner would be meeting with
them shortly. Various staff members tell you that they are starting to look for work at other companies because they are still
feeling uncertain about the future of the company.

12. To gain a better understanding of the organizational structure you ask to see an organizational chart, job descriptions or job
specifications and you are told that none of these things exist. You note with little humour that once an org chart is developed
it might end up looking more like a family tree than a standard org chart because of the number of staff who are related to
other.

13. You ask what orientation or onboarding new staff receive and staff don't seem to have a clue what you are talking about - you
take this to mean that there such programs do not exist at TH.

YOUR TASK …

1. This is a group assignment (group members should be same as your final project group)
2. Please complete the charts found on the next 2 pages.
3. Your project submission must be uploaded on LMS by March 21st, 2021
4. Please upload you file in MS word format
5. The file name for your submission must be your first name, followed by your last name
6. If you do your project with someone else, submit it ONCE. It does not matter who submits it but it must have everyone’s
name on it. In this case, the name of the file should include everyone’s first name

7. When you submit your project, only submit your responses and not the project outline itself. Also, do not include graphics in
your submission. Please keep the issues and recommendations separate as they are shown in the charts.

8. When doing your project, the issues section has close to 35 issues. The weighting of marks varies with the sections.

 In Recruitment, you need six (6) correct issues for full marks (10) for this HR area
 In Compensation you need six (6) correct issues for a full marks (10) for this HR area
 In Health and Safety you need six (6) correct issues for a full marks (10) for this HR area
 In Training and Development, you need three (3) correct issues for a full marks (10) for this HR area

6
  In Labour/Staff Relations and Employee Discipline, you need four (4) correct issues for a full marks (10) for this HR area
 The “Other” area is treated as a bonus marks area where you receive 1 mark (up to 3 marks) for each appropriate issue
that does not belong/is not a primary issue in one of the other 5 areas noted above. This will top up your mark if you are
under 40 marks in total for the above 5 sections. If you already have full marks for the above 5 areas, no marks will be
given in this section.

 YOU SHOULD IDENTIFY AS MANY ISSUES AS POSSIBLE IN EACH OF THE SECTIONS NOTED ABOVE.

9. Do not roll up issues into overall conclusions . While a number of issues might lead to a certain result, marks are provided for
the individual issues and not the rollup. For example, rather than saying that compensation needs some work, list the actual
problems that lead you to this conclusion.

10. Every issue that you identify should have a solution to it and some solutions may overlap. Again, it is important not to use
overall recommendations. Be specific.

9. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to post it on whatsapp group

7
PART 1: Worth 40% (each of the 5 areas is worth 8 marks) NAME:

HR ISSUE IDENTIFY THE SPECIFIC DETAILS IN THE CASE WHICH

ARE PERTINENT TO EACH HR AREA
(expand the chart to accommodate your information)

RECRUITMENT AND
SELECTION (need 6 valid
issues)

COMPENSATION AND
BENEFITS (need 6 valid
issues)

HEALTH AND SAFETY

(need 6 valid issues)

TRAINING AND
DEVELOPMENT (need 3
valid issues)

LABOUR AND
EMPLOYEE RELATIONS
AND EMPLOYEE
DISCIPLINE (need 4 valid
issues)

BONUS MARKS (up to 3

bonus marks)

8
PART 2: Worth 50% (each section is worth 10 marks)

HR ISSUE DISCUSS THE RECOMMENDATIONS THAT YOU WILL MAKE TO JOHN MARIS TO RESOLVE EACH
HR ISSUE – (expand the chart to accommodate your information)

RECRUITMENT AND
SELECTION

COMPENSATION AND
BENEFITS

HEALTH AND SAFETY

TRAINING AND
DEVELOPMENT

LABOUR AND STAFF

RELATIONS

BONUS MARKS (up to 3

bonus marks)

9
PART 3: Worth 10%

What is the number one priority to be dealt with and why? What is the first thing that has to be done? This is not a long
term goal, but rather something in the short term that is critical and needs to be done and can be done almost on the spot.

THE NUMBER ONE PRIORITY IS:

REASONS WHY:

10