Important Tips:

1. Read the cases thoroughly. Use the case information, relevant theories,

Examples and research findings while presenting your answers.

2. Please DO NOT copy somebody elses work. Plagiarism is unethical

and a violation of a basic principle of academic discourse. Paraphrase

Your work and use citations accordingly. Use the APA referencing style.

Part A

As an HR consultant, your job normally involves reviewing HR

strategic plans and systems of small to medium size companies,

then making recommendations on how to improve. Most of the

companies you work with do not have large HR departments, and

they find it less expensive to hire you than to hire a full-time person.

Your current client, Pacific Books, is a small online retailer with

forty- seven employees. Pacific Books has had some challenges, and as

the economy has improved, several employees have quit. They want

you to look into this issue and provide a plan to improve retention.

Pacific Books currently has just one person managing payroll and

benefits. The individual managers in the organization are the ones

who handle other HR aspects, such as recruiting and developing

compensation plans. As you speak with the managers and the

payroll and benefits manager, it is clear employees are not happy

working for this organization. You are concerned that if the company

does not improve its employee retention, they will spend an excessive

amount of time trying to recruit and train new people, so retention

of the current employees is important.

As with most HR issues, rather than just guessing what employees

want, you develop a survey to send to all employees, including

management. You developed the survey and asked employee

satisfaction questions surrounding pay and benefits. However, you

know that there arc many other things that can cause someone to be

unhappy at work, so to take this survey a step further, you decide to

ask questions about the type of work employees are doing,

management style, and work-life balance. Then you send out a link to

all employees, giving them one week to take the survey. When the

results come in, they are surprising. Out of the forty-seven

employees, forty-three selected "dissatisfied" on at least four or

more areas of the five-question survey. While some employees are

not happy with pay and benefits, the results say that other areas of the

organization are responsible too. Employees are feeling

micromanaged and do not have freedom over their time. There are

also questions of favoritism by some managers for some employees,

who always seem to get the "best" projects. When you sit down with

the CEO to discuss the survey results, at first she defends the

organization by saying the company offers the highest salaries and

best benefits in the industry, and she doesn't understand how

someone can be dissatisfied. You explain to her that it is imperative

that the company chooses the right pay, financial benefits,

motivational tools rather than just choosing the highest salaries.

She listens intently and then asks you to develop a motivation and

incentives plan that can improve the organization.

Question:

1. What are the core problems in the case organization? Design solutions for each of

the problems?

2. Design some incentive plans that will help the organization retain their

employees.?