Formative Feedback

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Appendix A: Case Study

Superbrand
Super brand is a UK based retail organisation with just over 1,000 stores including large and
medium sized supermarkets and 450 smaller ‘convenience’ local stores. Despite intense market
competition and a challenging economic environment the group has seen a small but positive
growth in sales and size during the financial year. This has included the opening of 5 new
supermarkets and 40 convenience stores. The organisation has kept pace with its competitors
with the development of its high end ‘Exclusive’ and lower cost ‘Value’ own brand product ranges
as well as its own online and banking services.
The organisation is focused on food retailing but also offers a small selection of household
merchandise, clothing and entertainment products such as CD’s and DVD’s. The business
mission to be ‘First Choice for Food Value’ is underpinned by organisational values of delivering
outstanding customer service and product quality through engaged employees. The mission and
values are clearly communicated to new employees in the standard company induction programme
and form the foundation for the organisations training and development programmes, including its
internal management development programme, which is well advertised to existing staff members
throughout the retail stores.

Stockington Branch
In January a new HR manager joined The Stockington branch of Superbrand. The branch has a
sales turnover of £1m per week and employs around 500 staff including a team of 31 managers.
Staff are employed on a range of full time, part time and temporary contracts to try to meet
fluctuating customer numbers across the week and during seasonal peaks. The store is divided
into 6 departments, Grocery, Check out, Homeware and Entertainment, Warehouse and
Administration. Each is run by a department manager and assistant manager who report into the
stores senior management team of 3 deputy managers and the store manager. The larger
departments (Checkout and Grocery) also have a small number of team leaders.
In their first meeting together the store manager informed the HR manager that the Stockington
branch had been having some difficulties in the last 9 – 12 months. The opening of a new
supermarket at the other side of town and the continued growth in on line sales had placed real
pressure on store sales figures. At the same time he had noticed some employee problems
emerging in different areas of the store. He asked the new HR manager to take some time to
observe and research what she thought was going on and to present a report of her findings and
recommendations to him and the senior team to help them to understand and improve the
situation. During her first six weeks she spent time talking to and observing the different
departments and made some key discoveries to inform her report.

Checkouts
The Checkout department has the largest team of employees in the store although over 90% of the
staff are on part time contracts. Despite this the department manager has regular problems
staffing busy customer periods fully with staff reluctant to change their shifts around to meet the
needs of the business. Checking the performance metrics the HR manager found absence rates
on the department of 5%, well above the store average of 3.2%. In addition, results from the most
recent employee attitude survey revealed this department had the least satisfied members of staff
including recording the lowest score against the statement ‘my ideas are listened to and valued’.

These results are disappointing as the organisation has spent a lot of time and money developing
its recruitment processes to ensure staff are happy in their work by appointing employees with the
right personalities to fit the job descriptions. They have introduced personality tests based on the
‘Big Five’ into the online application process. This aims to find applicants who will enjoy providing
outstanding customer service by identifying those with scores which are high on openness and
extroversion. The HR manager also observed ‘regular team briefings’ being conducted at the
beginning of each shift. The briefings started with the department manager giving clear instructions
to the assistant managers about what she needed them to achieve each day and to pass down
information about the stores sales, its impact on the staff pay bonus, new offers and till
discrepancies. This was then cascaded down through the assistant managers and team leaders to
the Checkout assistants. These approaches don’t seem to be working.
The HR manager was pleased to see that all the appraisals for the department were completed.
Talking to individual cashiers she found out this was achieved by carrying appraisals out in small
groups around the customer service desk. All staff were set the same SMART objectives around
the organisation’s strict performance targets for scanning speeds and till discrepancies but there
was little evidence of training needs or future career objectives recorded on the forms. However,
the HR manager observed a training session for new staff and found that new Checkout assistants
received a very thorough training programme on joining the organisation. Each part of the job was
broken down, clearly explained step by step and practised on the training tills to ensure the
assistant could perform each task accurately, quickly and consistently. In fact, Checkout assistants
spent extra time practising this during their induction while other staff members went on a store
tour with the deputy manager and took part in a question and answer session about the business
with the store manager.

Grocery
Although the Grocery department has a much smaller team of employees, the HR manager
noticed that the manager seemed to have far fewer problems staffing the department fully. He
appeared to be able to easily persuade his team to move their shifts around to cover holidays and
of course he also had less absence to deal with than on the Checkout department. The Grocery
department covers 5 areas, frozen foods, chilled foods, bakery, fruit and vegetables and dried
goods and the HR manager was surprised to find the Grocery staff were being scheduled to work
on different areas each week. Initially she was worried that this might cause problems with their
product knowledge. In fact, she observed some excellent customer interaction and product advice
being provided while she was on the department and was pleased to hear that the Grocery Team
had won a company award for quality customer service the previous year.
However, the department was having problems with the amount of ‘out of date’ stock that the store
had to throw away, referred to as ‘wastage’. The store manager was frustrated with this result as
the company had recently invested in new technology to help address this problem and the stock
manager went on a training course to learn how to use it. The HR manager noticed the manager
running a number of meetings he called ‘buzz groups’ where he drew together different members
of his team and asked them for their ideas about how they could reduce this figure. After holding
these sessions, he introduced a new process. For half an hour every day the whole team would
divide the Grocery section up between them and all check for stock reaching its sell by date. The
prices on these products were then reduced to sell them in time. This was a change to the old
system of having one person on the team looking after ‘wastage’. The team seemed to enjoy the
sessions of frantic activity and started to refer to this time as ‘Bin Buster’ sessions. The wastage
rates appear to be coming down since the new system had been put in place.
Back in the HR office, the HR manager noticed that a few of the Grocery departments appraisals
hadn’t been completed yet, however when she checked she could see that the manager was
making slow progress through them and that those that had been completed had different
challenging targets for each member of staff and clear accounts of discussions about their career
aspirations. She was impressed to see that two of the assistants on the department had recently
been successful at an assessment centre to get onto the organisations internal management
development programme. She also noticed that the staff attitude survey indicted this department
had some very satisfied employees who would ‘recommend working for the company to friends
and family’.

Night Shift
The night shift team has the smallest number of employees in the store and are responsible for
replenishing the shelves from the late night delivery before the store opens at 7am. Made up of
five full time members of staff who have been with the store for many years and supported by a
team of part time employees, including a large number of students, the HR manager was
concerned to see high staff turnover in this team and difficulties recruiting replacements despite the
late night shift payments. The early morning managers complained to the HR manager that they
frequently come in to find the delivery hasn’t been completed and that trolleys of stock and waste
packaging have been left in the customer aisles. Recently a trolley of frozen food was left out too
long by the Night shift team and had to be thrown away. This had a disappointing effect on the
stores wastage results given all the efforts the Grocery team had been placing on reducing this
figure.
Stopping over night to observe the team in action the HR manager notices that the Night Shift
Manager adopts a very friendly and laid back approach to managing his team. He rolls up his
sleeves and helps the team out – he certainly isn’t afraid of a bit of hard work. She doesn’t see
him monitoring the speed at which individuals unpack boxes onto the shelves however, an
important organisational measure referred to as ‘case rate’. At tea break she notices the full time
and part time members of staff sit at separate tables. The full timers laugh when she asks them
about their appraisal targets and complain they are run off their feet trying to get the job done
because the part timers are so hopeless. She can see their point as she has to speak to a number
of part time staff during the night who appear to be standing around doing nothing but finds when
she gets the manager to give them some clear direction about what he wants them to do next they
work quickly and efficiently.
Appendix B: Assignment Submission Title Sheet:
A copy of this sheet MUST be completed and inserted at the front of your assignment

Understanding People in Organisations 4HR503

Student Number:

Please note: You must submit your work using your student number to identify yourself, not your name.
You must not use your name in the text of the work at any point. When you submit your work in Turnitin
you must submit your student number within the assignment document and in the Submission title field in
Turnitin.

1. I confirm that this assignment includes my answers to all 5 short questions

2. I request that the following questions are assessed for grading on this assignment:

To be Question:
graded?*

Yes/No 1. What aspects of rational organisation design are demonstrated at

Superbrand? What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of this
approach and what techniques could be used to minimise any problems

Yes/No 2. With reference to Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model,

compare the characteristics of the jobs carried out by the grocery team
and the nightshift workers. Discuss the possible impact of this on the job
satisfaction of workers in the two departments. How could the nightshift
manager redesign the work to improve attitudes to work in his team?

Yes/No 3. Compare the approach to leadership in the grocery and checkout

department. How is this impacting on teamwork in the two department?

Yes/No 4. What could be causing conflict between the part time and full time
employees on the Nightshift? How could the Nightshift manager try to
resolve this?

Yes/No 5. Why didn’t the change in technology help the store to reduce its wastage
rate? What can the organisation learn about introducing effective change
from the grocery managers approach to the problem?
Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model, also called The Job
Characteristics Theory (JCT) and Core Characteristics Model, was created in
the 1970s and is one of the key models of employee motivation at work. This
model focuses on looking closer into the individual task design included in the
job role rather than the job as a whole. Hackman and Oldham believe that the
implementation of core job characteristics in job design will increase
employees’ work satisfaction.

The Hackman and Oldham job characteristics model is made up of five key
elements that are believed to influence employees’ satisfaction at work. The
five elements of the model that can increase or decrease employee satisfaction
are:

 Skill variety, Jobs should be designed in the way that they require a
variety of skills and talents from employees to be performed. As that will
make jobs more interesting and less repetitive.
 Task identity, Organisations should incorporate tasks that have clearly
defined start and finish meaning that employees will be aware of when
the task is completed. Employees’ job satisfaction may increase as they
will be able to see the outcomes of the completed tasks.
 Task significance, Task must be significant, task should matter and have a
meaning to the company or the society.
 Autonomy, This is the level of freedom for employees to choose a
method and time of how and when to complete a task. Hackman and
Oldham believed that jobs that are made more flexible bring greater
satisfaction for employees.
 Feedback. Employees should have access to sufficient feedback
regarding their performances. As that will assist them in knowing what
areas they need to improve on.