Situations, Issues, & Learning Points

Situation – your company is restructuring its corporate strategy which will significantly impact the company's enire workforce planning process.

Issue: Which aspects of workforce planning should be considered?

Learning points:

• workforce planning should examine demand and supply on four different dimensions: current and future demandcurrent and future supply
• internal factors and factors external to the organization need to be considered

Situations, Issues, & Learning Points

Situation – significant training dollars and productivity are being lost due to a restrictive collective agreement regarding training.

Issue: Do we really understand the issue? does more research/discussion need to be involved? Who needs to be involved?

Learning points:

• Employees will never ratify changes to collective agreement language for an issue they do not understand completely
• involving the union eliminates surprise ideas presented at the bargaining table
  

Situations, Issues, & Learning Points

Situation – Your company is adding a new line of business that requires staffing

Key points:

- under a tight deadline

- new organization

Issue: What needs to be involved in developing a recruitment strategy?

Learning points:

Before beginning recruiting, the recruitment strategy needs to:

• be aligned with the business strategy
• include all HR functions (such as job descriptions, compentency profiles, performance measurement, and organization design)
  

Situations, Issues, & Learning Points

Situation – A hiring decision has been made without your knowledge and the salary is not in alignment

Issue: Can you address the salary situation? If so how? How do you address management problem to prevent future occurrences?

Learning points:

• It is critical that internal compensation systems and procedures are followed to ensure consistency of approach and to maintain equality
• Red circles policies are used to withhold increases from individuals who are already earning more than the maximum pay rate for their pay grade until the maximum pay rate catches us to their pay rate
  

Situations, Issues, & Learning Points

Situation – an employee where's an offensive shirt to work. Management doesn't seem to care.

Issue: How large is the Human rights issue? Is it an isolated issue or company wide? How far up does the problem go?

Key points:

• Management has done nothing about it in the past
• President laughs when you explain the situation to him
  

Learning points:

• The solution should address both the specific situation as well as the company wide issue
• The president, management, and the employees need to be educated on basic Human Rights and sensitivity issues