Read below and write abstract. To earn full credit, all posts must be substantive and well written. You must use a citation and reference, APA 7th ed. style, in your initial post and in at least one of your response posts. BE AT LEAST one PARAGRAPH IN LENGTH (250 words) Quantity is IMPORTANT BUT QUALITY is just as important Do not use Natural language processing (NLP)

References

George, J. M. (2024). Contemporary management (12th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Bardoel, E. A., & Dalton, B. (2023). UTS research reveals success of Unilever four-day work week [Press release]. University of Technology Sydney.https://www.uts.edu.au/news/2022/11/uts-research-reveals-success-unilever-four-day-work-week

Tyagi, S., & Agrawal, R. (2023). Could the four-day week work? A scoping review of global trials. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, 1-17.https://doi.org/10.1111/1744-7941.12395

Unilever. (2022, November 1).Four-day work week trial to start in Australia.https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2022/fourday-work-week-trial-to-start-in-australia

Unilever. (2023a).The Unilever Compass for sustainable growth[Company overview].https://www.unilever.com/about/who-we-are/about-Unilever/

Unilever. (2023b).Investor relations and strategy overview. https://www.unilever.com/investors/

Case in the News

At Unilever, Motivation Is a Global Effort

For Unilever, a global marketer of consumer packaged goods, motivation is a massive challenge. The London-based company must motivate 148,000 employees in almost 200 countries as they innovate, distribute, and promote 400-plus brands, including Dove, Axe, and Ben & Jerry's. Like other businesses, Unilever sets financial targets for profitability and growth. It aims to be in the top third of companies by total shareholder returns (what investors receive from dividends and gains in the value of their shares). To get there, Unilever's executives set the broad strategy, "where to play," as follows: business areas with growth potential; brands where the company can excel; geographic markets where it expects growth; and distribution channels it expects customers to embrace. The executives acquire or divest brands or companies to keep Unilever adhering to these criteria. Unilever's strategy and structure help its people stay on track. The current structure includes five businesses: beauty and well-being, personal care, home care, nutrition, and ice cream. Business leaders are responsible for pursuing growth by investing in promising brands and markets. Managers make decisions about pricing, distribution, and other success factors. For example, facing rising costs in 2022, Unilever businesses raised prices and then measured the impact on sales. For ice cream, Unilever saw a 1.6% decline in volume sold, but because of the price increases, its sales revenue rose by 10.6%.

Unilever links its strategy to its purpose, "to make sustainable living commonplace," based on the idea that purposeful brands grow robustly because consumers appreciate them and gain from using them. Further, the chance to work for a company doing good can attract the best talent. Unilever has broad objectives for fulfilling its purpose: improve the planet's health; improve consumers' health, confidence, and well-being; and contribute to making the world fair and more socially inclusive. Specific targets establish how to do thisfor example, by achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2030, cutting food wasted in manufacturing in half by 2025, and having 5% of Unilever's workforce be people with disabilities by 2025. Purpose can inspire employees. Gina Kiroff, who manages the Knorr brand of soups and condiments for North America, sees herself contributing to the mission to make nutritious food available to everyone, including by encouraging farming practices that regenerate the soil. Unilever's purpose-related objectives include treatment of employees. For these stakeholders, the company aims to foster equity, diversity, and inclusion, partly by moving diverse employees into leadership roles. Unilever also aims to pioneer flexible work arrangements, making them widely available by 2030. In a pilot test of a four-day workweek in New Zealand, employees earned the same level of pay for doing their previous five-day jobs. Unilever provided new technology and tools to help them become more efficientsay, by spending less time in meetings. After the trial, employees reported less stress and a better work-life balance, so Unilever announced a larger trial in Australia.

Employee-related purpose also addresses how technology is enabling companies to do more with lessthereby transforming required skill sets. Rather than slashing the existing workforce to boost efficiency, Unilever has given employees an opportunity to learn skills the company expects to need. Employees participate in a process in which they explore their values and goals to define their purpose, which provides a basis for selecting training, planning a career path, and perhaps moving to contract work or even another employer. In the effort's early months, Unilever has retained most workers whose former jobs were automated.

Another group of stakeholders, Unilever's investors, play a motivational role, especially affecting top executives. Since the key measure of Unilever's performance is total shareholder returns, the price investors are willing to pay for Unilever's stock defines executives' success, and major investors sometimes pressure the company to focus more on growth. Such activist investors include Nelson Peltz, whose Trian Fund Management bought a stake in the company. Peltz pressed Unilever to focus on efficiency and to bring its value more in line with others in the industry. He obtained a seat on Unilever's board of directors, where he may influence decisions such as executive pay structure.

Despite its 2022 price increases, Unilever has posted growth in net sales. Other concerns include mixed forecasts for the global economy, especially since the company is heavily involved in high-inflation, low-income economies. Still, Unilever predicted it could maintain growth at 4.5 to 6.5% in 2023, versus 8% in 2022, by focusing on its faster-growing businesses.