Student Number: HAN20110028 Module: Managing People and Organisations MBA Assessment: Everlane Case Study Analysis Word Count: 3138
PART A 1.Introduction In this Everlane Case Study, I will utilize my knowledge and references about Recruitment & Selection and Workforce Planning to clarify major issues that Everlane has been facing when intensifying its number of employees when transferring from an online retail system to offline retail stores in both negative and positive aspects. Furthermore, some limitations will be figured out and some long-term suggestions would be provided to iron out these problems in the near future. 2.About Everlane - the fashion retail company that has always promoted and supported a solid vision about “radical transparency”. From the customers’ views, the products processing, the supply chain seem to be sustainable and transparent and the other humane conditions for every blue-collar worker has reach the standard. However, from other workers' perspective, the transparency was not extended to their working conditions and this complaint had persisted with the information missing of Everlane. In detail, ten retail ambassadors in Everlane affiliation at New York now unionizing and reporting about the “low pay, nonexistent benefits, unpredictable scheduling,” and the most serious one that the management team thinks it is will violate both federal and state labor laws is the discussion about wages with other colleagues. In 2017, Everlane decided to open a flagship store on Prince Street in Soho, New York, and since expanded to four other stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Palo Alto, which had reserved the swear of “never open brick-and-mortar stores” since last year. The reason behind this decision was published by Micheal Presyman – Everlane CEO: “We realized we need to have stores if we’re going to grow on a national and global scale” (Washington Post, 2017).
3.Problems With the significant transformation from online to offline apparel retailers, the company may not yet be adapted to the physical operating retail changes as Everlane had attempted on the traditional functions and focused on raising brand awareness. However, this transition had itself caused workforce planning and recruitment & selection problems. 3.1. Problem 1: Workforce Planning Human Resources management has become crucial than ever in handling the first problem of non-rational people allocation when Everlane has been recorded in transitting from online to a series of “brick and mortal” stores. In the first two months, the second New York store at Williamsburg was seriously understaffed and causing other employees to leave their jobs. Confront with this issue, Everlane had started a mass of hiring new employees and simultaneously pushed other existing employees into the state of cutting down the working timeframe. On the other hand, Everlane’s employees had faced a significant transformation beyond their expectations, including working environment, working schedule, unfair treatment, and non-qualified salary and wages. Due to the unreasonable workforce planning of the management team, Everlane’s employees had facing up with the undervalued between them and peers and high risk of losing their job. Moreover, unfair treatment situations were now appearing because of the same value of wages between the senior employee and new hires even though they had not been productive. 3.2. Problem 2: Recruitment and Selection Next, the significant transformation of Everlane has been created a chance for Everlane’s workers, part-time employees, or full-time ambassadors in experiencing themselves in the new working environment, getting advancement prospects. Besides, new mass hiring will allow Everlane to access larger talent pools and liberate valuable time for other vital activities. However, this decision that time with the vast gap inside the Human Resources departments’ recruitment process was also risky to Everlane. A store manager is the one who conducts an interview, but they only hired the “potential recruit” – an applicant that they “feel a connection” by examining their CV and cover letter and then conducting only one interview. This process was applied for not only non-previous experiences and both senior employees. Hence, several less qualified staff or unfitting employees who had been hired for two years until now then held significant impact on the unfair treatment between them and other ones.
Furthermore, with this recruitment and selection process, Everlane could be miss several qualified candidates who are needed for the company and hired unqualified ones. Lastly, with mass hiring, control over HR activities will become a great challenge for recruitment managers. At the moment, Everlane had responded that they made mistakes in the growth even when the company still follow all the legal guidelines, especially in Recruitment & Selection processes and Workforce Planning. Solutions had provided for addressing the long-term problem but seemed not to work. Hence, the company should put the fast timely changes into consideration, according to the needs and values that the company is aiming for, solving outstanding problems in workforce planning and improving the recruitment and selection process. 4.Discussion: 4.1. Workforce Planning 4.1.1. Theory and model In every organization, to ensure that the future business plans are on track and achieve thier goals, the people within the organization need to be managed and organized in a proper way(Cotten, 2007). To clarify what is workforce planning, while Ripley (2000) defines it as: “a systematic assessment of workforce content and composition issues and determination of what actions must be taken to respond to future needs”, Curson and his partner also suggests workforce planning as the important elements in the human management strategy because of the process of analyzing, evaluating the workforce needs and forecasting the supply and demand of the workforce in particular context (Curson et al., 2010). In short, based on the aforementiond definiton, the aim of this process is concluded into 4 main points: i.Identifying the organization’s strategic (in both present and future). ii.Obtaining the clear organization workforce in present and human capital needed in the future. iii.Developing a comprehensive plan of aligning appropriate people to ensure the success and to have contigency plan for changes in future. iv.Marshalling people to implement the plan, evaluating the strategies or programs to ensure the human capital available in future. In reality, in order to support every changes in management policies, the workforce planner needs to have a strong conviction and strategy as well as a clear basis for human
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