Human resource management activities like recruiting, selecting, training, and rewarding employees is not just a job for a centralized HR group for an organization but is rather a concern for every manager and something they all should engage in. This is especially critical for small businesses where there is usually no specified HR staff to rely upon. The success of the entrepreneur is often dependent upon their effectiveness in recruiting, hiring, training, evaluating, and rewarding. Each week you will be given a case study based upon a single company. The company is Laurel Laundry and is co-owned and managed by Erica Laurel.

Laurel Laundry Services

As a recent graduate and as a person who keeps up with the business press, Erica is familiar with the benefits of the program such as total quality management and high-performance work systems. Erica's father has actually installed a total quality program of sorts at Laurel, and it has been in place for about 5 years. This program takes the form of employee meetings. He holds employee meetings periodically, but particularly when there is a serious problem in a store - such as poor-quality work or machine breakdowns. When problems like these arise, he meets with all the employees in that store. Hourly employees get extra pay for these meetings. The meetings have been useful in helping him to identify and rectify several problems. For example, in one store, all the fine white blouses were coming out looking dingy. It turned out that the cleaner/spotter had been ignoring the company rule that required cleaning ("boiling down") the cleaning fluid before washing items like these. As a result, these fine white blouses were being washed in cleaning fluid that had residue from other, earlier washes.

Erica now wonders whether these employee meetings should be expanded to give the employees a bigger role in managing the Laurel Laundry stores' quality. "We can't be everywhere watching everything all the time." she said. Her father replied that "Yes, but these people earn only about $8-$15 an hour, and will they really want to act like mini-managers?"

In light of these problems, Erica's father asked her to answer the following questions, and she would like to know what you would do:

Acting as a consultant for Erica, prepare a report on the following:

1. Would you recommend that the Laurels expand their quality program?
2. If so, what form should it take?
3. Erica has mentioned that she wants to institute a high-performance work system as a test program. Write an outline for her summarizing important HR practices you think they should focus on?

Be sure to provide actionable suggestions to Erica while keeping in mind the costs associated with any suggestion made.