Inefficiencies in Managing Human Resources
MGT 3059
March 25, 2015
I worked at circuit city until the very end in January 2009. There were plenty of issues going on inside that I’m more than sure most people knew about but some of the issues were on that some did not.
There were issues when it came to reaching back or getting in touch with someone when you would call, email, or submit to the ethics hotline.
I applied for several promotions within the company and they have to be approved by HR before they are moved on to the second manager to be reviewed. Most of the time it was never approved or even looked at by the HR coordinator. There were also inefficiencies in the response time in reporting an issue. I had a problem with my direct supervisor and the way she talked to me. I complained several times and it seemed that it fell on deaf ears.
Had Circuit City stayed around there were many things that could have been done to help out the company. It would have required a complete overhaul of the company and that means replacing some of the people that had been around for a while but not really producing the way that is up to the new company standards. When companies get away from what is really important it starts to go down a really bad path and sometimes they are not able to recover. HR was just one of many issue with Circuit City. It needed changes to the staff in store to make them more knowledgeable. Getting back to the basics of customer care.
Due to its nature as a business to business supplier, and not being the strongest supplier in the market, the company served as a standby or back up option to the customers’ main suppliers. As a result of this, the orders from these customers were irregular in interval and the volumes were always varying. Subsequently, the process of determination of work load and timely deployment of people and proper planning was always left to guess work. The risk was always there, keep staff and risk overstaffing, relieve them and the next order arrives. This meant that at any one time, the production and dispatch departments were either under staffed or overstaffed.
This was further compounded by the management’s policy of keeping finished goods at the minimum. Any time a client placed an order for a product, about 80% of it had to be manufactured.
Among the problems arising from this mode of doing business are, the challenge of how many staff to retain, how many to employ on permanent basis, how many to keep on standby, how many to have as casuals among others. This inability to be sure of the exact work load and therefore the required staffing levels meant the production department was always inefficient. Sometimes it engaged more staff leading in over production and other times could not locate enough staffing in time thereby missing clients’ vital deadlines.
Due to the lack of a system of engaging the right amount of staff, the resulting lack of job security meant workers could be picked as easily as they could be dismissed. This resulted in an untrained, highly fluid, unsecured, barely performing production staff. The company could not invest in training them since they were mostly temporary whereas the employees would work just for daily wages since the job was periodic. This high rate of turnover of employees meant the staff had minimum competencies and the training regime was far from ideal. This meant there were no structures for proper succession planning and skill transfer. This was one of the major causes of inefficiency. Inefficiencies from the untimely customer orders and sporadic nature of production could be stemmed by a two-step process. Firstly would be to negotiate with the customers for a minimum monthly order. This would mean better production planning, working with known quantities and fixed production and delivery timelines. Secondly, the management should consider holding minimum stock to cater for sudden orders. This would potentially tie up cash in
