Reference no: EM132940349

JULISHAM INTERNATIONAL LTD

Julisham International Ltd is a logistics company operating in the East Africa, with its headquarters in Kampala. The company employed 500 full-time staff at the beginning of the year 2019 and by December 2019 had 504 workers assigned in five departments: Operations (349 employees), Marketing (120), Finance (20), Human Resource (10) and Research (5). In January 2020, in a strategic planning meeting with the Board of Directors (BOD), the new CEO proposed that the company needed total reorganization centred on the Human Resource (HR) function. He argued that Human Resources Management (HRM) is a value-adding function that that will steer the company to realize its strategic objectives of increasing its market share by 100% by 2026 using product innovation strategy. 

However, the company has been facing critical HR challenges. On the one hand there is high rate of absenteeism. In 2019, for instance, 252 employees were absent for 22 days, 157 were absent for 26 days, 56 for 28 days, 20 for 38 days, 12 for 47 days and 5 for 52 days. The operations manager argues that the high rate of absenteeism is caused by over staffing that is not aligned to company objectives and strategy. A HR Audit report by Ernest and Young (EY) in January 2020 made three recommendations. Firstly, streamlining and simplifying current business processes using appropriate technology so that the company would need only 60% of its current staff. Secondly, there is need to design a structured management approach to handle the issue of senior managers retiring due to advanced age. Thirdly, there is need to revisit the low level of employee productivity. The report cites interviews with employees which betrayed duplication and ambiguity of tasks, job satisfaction, declining intrinsic motivation, and poor quality of work outputs that has led high levels of turnover. In the year 2019 as many as 62 employees left the company.

The recommendations by EY, however, create new challenges. What should be dome to excess staff? How does the company select the so called "excess staff"? One way to of doing this is to use appropriate performance appraisal methods that carefully assess the right criteria that distinguishes between poor and best performers.

Question 1

a) Assuming the company operates on a 5 working days per week and that there were 13 public holidays that fell on working days, calculate the rate of absenteeism at Julisham International Ltd in 2019.

b) Calculate the turnover rate in the company. Is this acceptable? Justify your answer.

Question 2

a) Advise the CEO at Julisham International Ltd on the Strategic steps his HR manager should undertake to plan and ensure that that the company has the right number and quality of people to achieve organizational objectives.

b) Recommend one best acquisition strategy that will ensure that there is a match between demand and supply of HRs in the company (as described in the case)