Reference no: EM133028968

DrainFlow Case Study

DrainFlow is a medium-sized company employing 500 people in the northern province of Greece, with headquarters in Thessaloniki. It provides plumbing maintenance to commercial and private customers in the region and is generally perceived to be a successful company with strong brand recognition.

The CEO - Lee Reynolds - has recruited you as the new HR Director. She tells you that she is not happy with the culture of the company. The staff seems to be either aggressive or dissatisfied and this is having an impact on customer service and satisfaction. She recently sent out customer surveys which indicated that 60% of customers were satisfied, but 40% were unhappy with their experience and would probably use a competitor in the future.

Lee tells you:

"We have three main categories of staff: the licensed plumbers (100 people); the assistant plumbers (around 300 people); and the call-center order processors (50 people). The licensed plumbers are the highest paid at around €40 an hour. The assistant plumbers and call-center staff receive around €15 an hour. Private customers can pay the plumber or assistant plumber by cash or credit card with a minimum fee of €50 per call out, which is generally less than our competitor's charge.

The customers contact us by phone or through the internet and the call-center operator decides whether to send a plumber or an assistant plumber to deal with the issue. If it is a commercial customer, we generally send both a plumber and an assistant. If it is a private customer, the call-center operators will usually send an assistant, since they are cheaper and there are more of them available. I spoke to the Manager of the call center and he said that some 25% of calls do not end up being 'sold' perhaps because the diagnostic questions the customers were asked were too technical. But the questions are important for the operator to decide whether to send a plumber or assistant.

We provide a week's initial training to our assistant plumbers, mostly around the basics of plumbing and how to deal with emergencies. If they want to become a certified plumber, they attend a local technical college to take a part-time course which usually lasts six months (no, we don't pay for this, as it's partly subsidized by the government).

The most frequent complaints from customers are about response time, the cost of the repairs, and the lack of competence of the person sent to do the repairs. But it is difficult to recruit and retain licensed plumbers because they're in such high demand. And there is high turnover amongst the call-center staff as well - when I talked to some of them, they said they were fed up dealing with so many angry customers complaining all the time.

Our HR processes you ask? Well, we have ten offices spread across the region in different cities and each office is responsible for the recruitment and management of their staff. We do the initial training week for assistant plumbers four times a year here at headquarters, but other than that, we don't really know the staff in other cities. Each office has its own Administrator, of course, who is responsible for the payroll and generally managing staff issues. The Office Manager is the person who conducts the recruitment and if necessary, the firing of staff.

We're very cost-conscious here at DrainFlow and we don't want to spend a lot of money on any changes, so your main objective is to improve our recruitment, compensation, and training so that we can keep our competitive position in this region. What do you suggest we do?"

Having done some research into Drainflow's records, you discover the following information:

1) Each office has an average of ten qualified plumbers and 25 assistant plumbers. There is also an Administrator in each office as well as some support staff such as invoicing clerks, purchasing clerks, and sales agents.

2) The Call Centre (CC) is centralized at the HQ in Thessaloniki. The CC staff do not know the plumbers personally and are issued a daily "availability sheet" for each office which they use to allocate plumbers and assistant plumbers to jobs as they are called in. There are often mistakes in the allocation sheets (personnel is ill; have already been allocated jobs by their Administrator etc).

3) The turnover amongst plumbers is high -usually around 30 certified plumbers exit the company every year. Amongst CC staff, the average operator stays only around 6 months and the CC Manager spends most of her time recruiting and interviewing replacement candidates. Assistant plumbers vary widely in expertise and the replacement numbers fluctuate widely between different offices.

4) There appears to be little managerial control-The Administrators complain of being overworked and unable to complete their work schedules since they spend so much of their time having to deal with 'people issues'. The only centralized management process is that plumbers and assistant plumbers have to call the CC when they have finished their jobs and to be allocated the next one. The number of jobs completed per day per plumber varies between two and six. Only emergency repairs (charged at an additional €50) are undertaken after 17:00 on weekdays or at the weekends.

QUESTIONS

1. What do you perceive to be the main HR challenges facing Drainflow in 2022?

2. What recruitment needs do you perceive for 2022?

3. How should the recruitment process (from application to contractual offer) be organized?