Yuppiechef : A human resources case study Background Yuppiechef was founded in 2006 by Andrew Smith and YUPPIECHEF Shane Dryden, from a lounge in Cape Town. They had been building websites and business systems for clients for many years, and got into e-commerce as a way to use their skills to build something for themselves. Shane had always had a passion for cooking, and he noticed that he had friends who wanted particular brands of kitchen tools that weren't available in other stores. Yuppiechef was launched in August 2006 with 35 products from a single international brand, and in its first year they made 200 sales. It was a slow process to gain trust in the market and grow the range, while paying the bills through consulting work. Today, Yuppiechef is South Africa's premier kitch and homeware store, stocking over 300 of the world's leading brands. Yuppiechef has won numerous accolades, including being voted South Africa's best e-commerce store for six years in a row; and is ultimately on a mission to bring people together through the cooking and sharing of good food. HR practices People are at the heart of the success of our business. Every achievement and great idea is because we relentlessly seek to find the best people for each role and then to make sure that they want to stay with us by engaging them in work which they enjoy and are good at. We are a diverse team who are all interlinked by a set of shared values. These values are our common ground and we use them as a foundation for every decision we make from who we hire to what and where our annual functions are going to be. Two of our People Policies Practices which are fundamentally important to the way we operate are: Team - we believe that we deliver better results when we team together. Teaming for us is not about being forced to work together, or even doing the same thing, but rather honouring what each person brings and then using the knowledge of this in order to decide who works on what, when Strengths - we go out of our way to find out the strengths of each individual and then to try and use them to give them the best role possible within the context of the team. Working by leveraging strengths allows us to aim for excellence in everything we do. Having the right people on the team allows you to aim high and then to use your learnings along the way to enhance both your journey and your results. As a result, we have a robust, multi-tiered recruitment process which starts with interrogating the need for the hire HR facilitates recruitment at Yuppiechef, but our people managers own across the business. We aim to check that every candidate who ultimately joins our team has both the right skills and the right values of the two, having a values match'is more important as we believe that it is much easier to teach skills than to change values, Having the same values does not mean that we are all the same or think the same just means that we place similar levels of importance on similar things, In many respects, our recruitment process is based on a fairly traditional hiring cyde to which we have added our own flair. Here is a rough outline of the process we follow Step 1: Requisition Step 2: Advertising Step 3: CV screening Step 4: Phone interviews Step 5: Group interview Step 6: One-on-one interviews Step 7: Skills assessment Step 8: Reference checks Step 9: Offer Step 10: On-boarding Training and development Currently, we offer fairly comprehensive in-house training within very specific areas of our business. They are often areas in which the whole company needs to be involved or in which we place a particular significance. Other than that, we believe that every team member needs to take responsibility for their own growth and development paths and that the company has the responsibility to enable these paths and to act as partners along the way. As a result, training and development is often very individual and quite niche. Performance management We believe that it is important to give regular and ongoing feedback to all members of our teams which we do in monthly one-on-ones. We only move to a formal performance management system where there are specific concerns about an individual's performance This then becomes a very structured process which is facilitated by HR. Labour relations We have on occasion needed to dismiss an employee. Although the disciplinary process is thorough and has proven to work well, we are a very relational company and managing the impact on the rest of the team is always an important challenge. Question 1: Discuss the current HR practices followed by Yuppiechef by means of the four major activities, namely HRM planning, staffing, training and development as well as maintenance. Please do include appropriate examples from the case study as part of your proposed answer. Take into consideration the organisation's unique culture and setting. (12)