Racquel Campbell Introduction

Case 1: Staffing

Tanglewood is a chain of general retail stores featuring items such as clothing, appliances, electronics, and home decor. The company operates in the moderate price niche, targeting middle- and upper-income customers. Tanglewoods strategic distinction is an outdoors theme, with a large camping and outdoor living section in every store. The store also distinguishes itself by its simple, elegant, and uncluttered design concepts for the store and their in-house products. It was founded by two best friends in 1975 by Tanner Emerson and Thurston Wood and later renamed their store chain to Tanglewood in 1984. Initially it operated as a single store and as years went by, as the business developed from 1975 to 1984, the business had grown substantially with a strong base of employee participation, customer satisfaction, and profitability. The company grew to other parts of America and today has a total of 243 stores open in the states of Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona. As an external consultant for Staffing Services I have reviewed your Organizational Structure as it pertains to staffing your new stores and your stores that are already in business. In my report you will find that there are many things that I agree that your organization does, however there are some that I feel that you could change to benefit your strategic staffing levels and quality. The staffing strategy requires making key decision about the acquisition, deploying and retention of the organizations workforce. Below I have identified the nine staffing levels that were presented in exhibit 1.7:

Staffing Levels

Racquel Campbell 1. Acquire or Develop Talent

Case 1: Staffing

Tanglewood has a very unique strategy encouraging all of its employees to be selfsufficient and voice their opinions when they have ideas for improving the company. We believe developing talent from within will go hand-in-hand with this strategy. By training existing employees to be managers, Tanglewood will be able to teach them a style of management that they feel is in line with the its mission and vision. The companys investment into the employee will also act as a motivator for the employee. This will in turn lead to greater overall performance. 2. Hire Yourself or Outsource Being that Tanglewood already has a Human Resources Department there is no need to outsource. Outsourcing also is a costly option. Another possible disadvantage is the recruiter has no idea or feel for the company and its culture. By doing the hiring yourself, it has implications of providing better quality employees that fit the companys ideal employee profile. It will be easier to screen candidates since you know the strengths you would like an employee to possess. This will help preserve the unique culture at Tanglewood. 3. External or Internal Hiring Internal hiring is a better strategy for Tanglewood than external hiring because it allows everyone to start at the bottom as an associate and to work their way up in the company if they work hard and have the desire to move up. This strategy also allows company culture to thrive. Each employee is able to understand the culture of the company by starting out fresh as an associate and being taught how the company operates and to learn about its culture. If we look deeper to Tanglewood

Racquel Campbell

Case 1: Staffing

culture and values we can find that all employees are working as one family and we think external hiring will affect this strategy. 4. Core or Flexible Workforce Since Tanglewood views a core workforce as being essential for the organizations values and culture, it feels there must absolutely be a work force of committed, qualified individuals who will help carry the Tanglewood philosophy into the future. I believe it will be difficult for Tanglewood to continue on with its current philosophy if it uses a flexible workforce. To maintain and develop corporate values and culture, Tanglewood should continue to use a core workforce. As Kammeyer-Mueller states, Tanglewood does not extensively use a flexible workforce, such as temporary employees. Tanglewood is a teamcompany (2012, p. 7). It will be very difficult to have a team based environment with temporary or contract workers as these workers are only employed for a short period of time 5. Hire or Retain In our opinion, Tanglewood should focus on retaining their employees and develop their talent and skills instead hiring new ones. If they plan to follow an internal hiring strategy and maintain a core workforce as per our suggestion, then they must focus on retaining these employees. It would be difficult to maintain a consistent company culture if they have high turnover rate of employees. When employers retain higher levels of stag the experience lower cost0per-hire, higher morale, increased productivity and improved succession planning.

6. National or Global

Racquel Campbell

Case 1: Staffing

Tanglewood is a retail store known all over the region and overseas. Each region enjoys its own culture and values, which distinguishes from others. The pattern and the processes of Tanglewood has to be similar, however, internal department method will run depending on the regions culture. On page 12 of Tanglewood case book (under Organisational Culture and Value, paragraph 1) its states that; If you tell someone exactly what to do, you are only getting half an employee. If your given someone the space to make their own decisions, you are getting whole person. We encourage this philosophy to be spread and worked with among all the regions.

Tanglewood like other stores has the same tools, clothing, equipment, electronics and much more. These retailers have to be engage in both overseas out-sourcing and off-shoring by hiring high tech and talented, sufficient employees to deal with this globally and locally that will help Tanglewood reach and exceed competitive levels among others.

7. Attract or Relocate The main idea that most of the organization is following to be more successful that is to bring labor to a company rather than taking the company to the labor. Tanglewood retailers, have to establish locations closer to their distributers, this is because Tanglewood has 12 geographic regions and 20 stores per region. This mean the regional managers have little experience on how human resource runs throughout the 20 stores. Tanglewood needs external and internal training for these

Racquel Campbell

Case 1: Staffing

managers and continuously update them with new policies and guidelines, to keep Tanglewood with the other competitors. Another way to attract employees to Tanglewood is there high education quality that is expected of them when applying. This will lead to our last factor of quantity exhibit the short or long term focus.

8. Overstaff or Understaff The individual stores should rely heavily on overstaffing, as lower level retail positions are projected to result in high turnover. Overstaffing will create room for error and also give stores a chance of finding employees to promote through succession planning. Overstaffing specific positions may be profitable for Tanglewood. Customers appreciate having assistance when they are looking for specific merchandise. Customers appreciate when there are ample amount of cashiers working, and they do not see twenty shopping carts lined up at three different registers, when there are over twenty closed lanes. Time and focused planning will make feasible goal to narrow the representation gaps while reaching organizational goals. 9. Short or Long-Term Focus Setting a goal is easy for a company, however, balancing and how to achieve that goal is challenging. Tanglewoods goal is to expand their company further and attract more clients. The human resource functions for Tanglewood among the regions has less experience because they are not connecting with each other very well. The short focus plan has to improve the human resource function and develop and increase the knowledge of their department. This will lead to the long term focus that will help them understand how to reach their long term focus. Most talent management program is

Racquel Campbell

Case 1: Staffing

focusing on a long term focus and this is the only way human resource can be successful in Tanglewood. Expanding and well staffed will be the result of the human resource doing a good job.

Staffing Quality: The four staffing qualities Tanglewood human resource managers and employees need to focus on when starting to except new applicants that fit in the correct position. Any successful staffing design has to start with the job attraction from its employee to perform the job successfully. With the large staffing in Tanglewood human resource has to put a plan to distinguish the good from the bad employees. Person/Job or Person/Organization Match Tanglewood has a specific mission and set of values it wants all of its employees to share, from sales associate to vice president. This is one of the reasons the company encourages all employees to spend some time working as an associate. Typically, the average store associate is very fluid with very general job descriptions and this seems to be focused even more at Tanglewood. While some of the upper level positions may have to focus a little more on the person/job relationship, over all Tanglewood should have a person/organization focal point. Specific or General KSAOs Having flexible job responsibilities and duties requires a person that has general KSAOs, not specific skills and knowledge staff that have a variety of knowledge and experience will serve best at this company. Tanglewood needs someone who can adapt to the agile requirement of the company and changing business world. As

Racquel Campbell

Case 1: Staffing

the company expands, many changes will take place. Someone who can fit both now and future will be perfect if the candidate has a general KSAOs. The only exception should be for the store associates to make sure their characteristics match the companys mission. Specific KSAOs would be more applicable for any promotions/upper level positions. Exceptional or Acceptable Workforce Quality The Law of Large Numbers states that hiring a lot of acceptable workers will result in obtaining a good number of exceptional. If we focus just on exceptional workers, there many good workers that may not be hired, but may be very beneficial to Tanglewood. Promoting training programs or incentive programs would help compensate when exceptional workforce quality is not available. Active or Passive Diversity Having a diverse workforce would be ideal for Tanglewood. By allowing the company to become diverse, they can monitor if the culture changes, and how the current employees accept diversity. Tanglewood should be able to gradually integrate its diversification strategy. One of the challenges with diversity, particularly those dealing with language barriers, deals with having management trained with these specific diversities. Some of our locations have growing Hispanic communities. Tanglewood needs to train or hire multi-lingual employees to prepare for Hispanic diversity. This can still be done passively. Diversity can be obtained within a workforce without actively pursuing it (p. 30). Conclusion:

Racquel Campbell

Case 1: Staffing

Since the aim of Tanglewood is now to expand, their management must understand KSAOs and motivation to its employees, how to attract, retain, perform and satisfy customers. Though we have given the explanation based on the information from Mr Penchiala and Ancheley, both must be careful and prudent while implementing changes to the policy and processes. Thirteen different dimensions regarding staffing have been proposed to Mr. Penchiala, with our suggestions. Recommendations include: developing talent, limited outsourcing, internal hiring, having a core workforce, retaining workers, national focus on staffing, attracting over relocating, overstaffing, long-term focus of staff, having workers with general KSAOs, having an exceptional workforce, and working on passive diversity. It is important to retain a strong workforce with skills, qualifications, education and knowledge, which will surely lead Tanglewood to have the competitive advantage to stay ahead of its competitors and be a price / product leader.