CASE 9

CASE: Child refugees in Turkey making clothes for UK shops

There are three main challenges that managers have to face in today’s organizations, and it’s important to deal with them effectively in order for the company to stay competitive. These challenges can be classified as environmental challenges, organizational challenges and individual challenges.

• Environmental challenges: External forces influencing organizational performance, beyond management’s control. These forces include the constant rapid change of the business environment, the internet revolution transforming how firms manage their human resources dealing with information overflow and online learning, workforce diversity where there’s an increasing number of women and minorities, globalization that results in competition against foreign firms, legislation, evolving work and family roles where companies are introducing “family-friendly” programs especially concerning dual-career families, skill shortages and the rise of the service sector, and natural disasters and terrorism resulting in managers dealing with new and urgent HR issues.

• Organizational challenges: A company’s internal concerns and problems, often affected by environmental forces. Here proactivity is key for managers to find the organizational issues and deal with them before they become critical. Different HR practices can help with that, including decentralization which transfers responsibility to more relevant locations, downsizing to improve the company’s bottom line, organizational restructuring, implementing more self-managed work teams, adjusting the organizational culture to keep up with the environmental changes, utilizing information technology, internal security and data security, saving costs by outsourcing, and monitoring the company’s product integrity.

• Individual challenges: HR issues dealing with the decisions that are most relevant and important to individual workers. Individual challenges and organizational challenges have an affect on each other, and can both be addressed by using effective HR practices to manage the company and its workforce. These challenges include matching people and organizations, implementing ethics and social responsibility as an important ground factor for the workforce, the difficulties of maximizing productivity, ability and motivation in the workforce, offering a high quality of work life, finding ways to empower employees, the liability of brain drain, and job insecurity as a result of layoffs.(Gómez-Mejía, Balkin & Cardy 2016, 31-48.)

Strategic human resource (HR) planning captures the process of designing HR strategies and installing programs or tactics to implement them.

• There are many benefits of strategic HR planning: Encouragement of proactive rather than reactive behavior, explicit communication of company goals when they develop strategic objectives that exploits on the firm’s special talents, stimulation of critical thinking and ongoing examination of assumptions during a flexible process, identification of gaps between current situation and future vision, encouragement of line manager’s participation, identification of HR constraints and opportunities when overall business strategy planning is done together with HR strategic planning, and creation of common bonds as a result of a strategic HR plan that reinforces, adjusts, or directs the organization’s present culture in order to foster customer focus, innovation, fast growth and cooperation.

• There are also many crucial challenges that a company faces when developing an effective HR strategy: Maintaining a competitive advantage by establishing programs to expand present employees’ potential through carefully developed career ladders, reinforcing overall business strategy, avoiding excessive concentration on day-to-day problems and focusing instead on the long term goals, developing HR strategies suited to unique organizational features in firms that operate with different culture, leadership style and technology, coping with the environment within companies that deal with different industry environments, securing management commitment at all levels to support the HR strategies, translating the strategic plan into action that will affect practice, combining intended and emergent strategies to recognize environmental opportunities and threats, and accommodating change with a flexible HR strategy.
  (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2016, 49-52.)

Strategic HR choices are the options available in a company when designing its human resources system. Some common strategic HR choices are:

• Work flows
• Staffing
• Employee separations
• Performance appraisal
• Training and career development
• Compensation
• Employee and labor relations
• Employee rights
• International management
  (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2016, 52-55.)

Case summary:

Syrian refugee children have been making clothes for British shoppers, an undercover BBC investigation has found.

Panorama investigated factories in Turkey and found children had been working on clothes for Marks and Spencer and the online retailer Asos.

Adult refugees were also found working illegally on Zara and Mango jeans.

All the brands say they carefully monitor their supply chains and do not tolerate the exploitation of refugees or children.

In this case presented the challenge an organization can face when it comes to ethics and social resposibility.

Sources: Gomez-Mejia, L.R., Balkin, D.B. and Cardy, R.L. 2016. Managing Human Resources. Global Edition 8/E. Pearson. London.