CASE STUDY NR 1 The HR Function of Harrison Brothers Corporation

FIERARU IRINA – IONELA

COBIRJEA CRISTINA – FLORENTINA
CHEN ZHANGWENHUI- ANDREI
CALINESCU ALMA – MARIA
Group: 147

QUESTIONS:

1. Mccain finds her role as the human resource manager very important as she finds it
essential to keep the performance of workers at their best. Furthermore, she
acknowledges the challenge of high turnover in the sales area, particularly with part-
time employees. At the same time, she conducts interviews and places weight on
motivation, personality, and drive during the hiring process

2. Within the first paragraph, the company targeted middle class customers which were
also “fashion-conscious”. However, due to the many changes in the industry, they had
to reposition themselves. Thus, here are the following strategic goals proposed by
James Harrison: 1. Convert non-selling space into revenue-generating selling space. 2.
Build up underdeveloped merchandise categories. 3.Invest aggressively in private
brands like Polo, Nautica, and Tommy Hilfinger. 4. Reduce costs by using advanced
computer systems to project sales and manage inventory. 5. Improve productivity of
sales associates, buyers, and department heads.

3. The human resource department at Harrison Brothers, led by Brenda McCain, consists
of five people.
- Responsibilities include staffing, training, performance evaluation, and
disciplinary actions.
- McCain took over the role of centralizing HR operations and set up procedures
and policies.
 - The department is involved in managing the workforce of a store with 950
employees, including sales, support staff, maintenance, security, and management.
- The department faces challenges due to high turnover, heavy workload, and time
constraints.
- Training of new salespeople occurs regularly, and annual evaluations are
conducted for performance assessment.

4. Within exhibit 1.4, we are shown a questionnaire completed by the human resource
managers and the store managers which shows from a scale of 1 to 5 how important a
specific category is for the company. With the given results, we can see that staffing,
training and development, compensation and performance management are all held in
high regard by both groups due to how employee related this business is. On the other
hand, through the mediocre score that safety received, we can determine that work
environment is generally safe. However, in the last two categories, an issue could bbe
highlighted by the human resource department. From the low score of 2 points from
Knowledge of Business, we can determine that by training employees, it may fill in
the gap of knowledge. Through Managing Change, we can deduce that they don’t
understand the importance of adaptability.

5. As stated by the store manager and the operations manager, the human resource
department seems to be understaffed for the hundreds of employees they have to deal
with on a daily basis. They could either hire more personnel for this department or
allow the store managers deal with problems that are more specific to their individual
departments.

On the other hand, there is a lack of proactive career development discussions for
sales support staff. We can solve it by reinforcing the importance of career
development discussions for all employees during performance evaluations.

There are also delays and challenges in addressing employee-related issues, as

reported by the operations manager. They could streamline and expedite processes for
addressing employee-related issues and queries.