Introduction
This paper seeks to offer an in-depth analysis of the provided case study of Narkee Ltd by identifying and discussing the emerging people management challenges, applying the four V’s model operations processes, and making recommendations to help Narkee improve their people and operations management to improve their performance. Njoku et al. (2019) argued that employees are among any organisation’s most critical assets. Through their performance, they significantly impact the bottom line the in different ways. Thus, according to Armstrong (2020), in addition to hiring skilled leaders, a mechanism must be in place to guarantee proper employee management to ensure a positive impact on the firm’s overall performance. Thus, the management team must have fine details and principles regarding people management and accrue the necessary skills of exceptional management to help harness their teams’ talents and potential to ensure success. People management defines a human resource subset concerned with organising employees and building teams to optimise business performance (Sawe et al., 2021, p.2953; Whitter, 2022). Rahim et al. (2018) pointed out that the entire people management process entails hiring and training employees with the right skills and helping each employee through guidance and empowerment to reach their maximum potential. It also constitutes effective communication across all teams and offers direction to all team members toward achieving a common goal. Two main challenges Narkee Ltd faces are people management and operations management, which the firm must fix to remain competitive.
Apart from adequately managing its employees, an organisation must ensure it delivers the highest product and service quality to attract customers. Consequently, it must give special consideration to prominence and ability. While prominence is crucial to bringing customers, the ability is vital for retaining them (Olsen & Tomlin, 2020). Thus, the ability helps to inform the customers and potential customers about the organisation. Four operational processes constitute prominence and ability. These processes include volume, variety, variation, and visibility, commonly referred to as the four Vs model of operational processes (Brown et al., 2018). The firm’s survivability is hinged on the operational managers and their ability to manage core activities that transform resources into deliverable services and products. The fundamental basis of product and service creation and transformation into a deliverable form is creating value in every operational management process.
The People Management Challenges Associated with Managing Performance, Discipline, and Grievance at Narkee Ltd.
Among the people, a management challenge emanating from Narkee Ltd is the recruitment of employees. Recruitment is a triad on the most fundamental level. Every effective hiring and recruitment narrows down to three decisions: quality, cost, and time (Pambreni et al., 2019, p.1397). Thus, Leroy et al. (2018, p.249) opined that every recruiter that is hiring should be thinking about these foundational recruitment principles. However, Narkee Ltd slacked on their part during recruitment as they needed to consider these three principles more keenly. The Narkee recruitment process happens only through a single interview with a team manager from the appropriate team. This approach can pose the danger of having limited choices to help make decisions between similar candidates with certainty (Armstrong, 2020; Bratton, 2020). Besides, the company has changed its recruitment approach, only targeting potential employees through posts on the company’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Thus, the company limits the potential applicants to young people under the age of 30 years. While young employees can bring innovation and diversity to Narkee, the company risks needing more appropriate experience, a crucial aspect of any industry.
Besides the underwhelming recruitment and hiring process of the new staff, Narkee also does low-quality work in the induction and training of the newly recruited employees. The induction process is critical to helping new employees adjust and acclimatise to their new roles and the working environment (Jehanzeb & Mohanty, 2018, p.175). It is good practice for the recruiting company to have a concrete orientation process for recruits to attend. Through these programs, the new employees get to socialise and be informed of how they will build working relationships within their new teams (Whitter, 2022; Bratton, 2020). These orientation programs should also incorporate training to allow employers to note the skills and knowledge they would like their employees to possess. These programs can also serve as educative programs to employees concerning new skills and provide updates regarding existing skills, thus enhancing their productivity (Caputo et al., 2019, p.1315). Conversely, Narkee needs to give more attention to its new employees’ induction, orientation, and training. According to one of its current employees, through a documentary aired on television 6 months ago, he criticised the induction process of Narkee, alleging that it only took half an hour. In this induction, only the company Managing Director held a talk with the recruits informing them of what the company expects of them regarding competitiveness and what drives it. The company should have taken more time to take the new employees through the company’s various sections and functionalities. During training, the employee was only shown using one of the machines and some e-learning packages on health and safety and manual handling. However, another employee opined that continuous training is only available to senior employees. The company needs to do better regarding the future induction and recruitment of its new employees.
A good employee appraisal and reward system is necessary for a serious corporate company, which Narkee needs to improve. A performance appraisal and reward system recognises and rewards employees that help advance the company’s goals. Whitter (2022) posits that the appraisal is also helpful to the employees in regards to assisting them in setting their goals and refocusing their energy in the right direction. The appraisal is also critical in helping to counsel underperforming employees by pointing out their strengths and weaknesses. Employees can then improve areas where they still need to meet the company’s requirements (Rahim et al., 2018). In the case of Narkee Ltd, the employees are not accorded this opportunity. The employees of Narkee Ltd are disgruntled about the company’s appraisal and reward system. Their main concern is that the company does not appreciate the extra effort that employees put in to cover for their sick colleagues and cover up for the vacant positions. However, the management of Narkee Ltd is quick to punish the employees in case of the flimsiest mistake. Consequently, the company needs to review its performance appraisal and rewards system to be objective and to take the interest of both the shareholders and the employees.
The last challenge Narkee faces in its people management are poor communication between the management and the junior employees. According to Njoku et al. (2019) and Pambreni et al. (2019, p.1399), effective communication greatly impacts the success of an organisation in numerous ways. It helps to build employee morale, satisfaction, and engagement. It also helps employees to appreciate the terms and conditions guiding their employment (Sawe et al., 2021, p.2957). Thus, effective communication makes it easier to drive employee commitment and loyalty. It is plausible that the root cause of many complaints by the Narkee Ltd employees is the lack of effective communication between the senior management and the junior employees. The employees complain about the managers not listening to their ideas and suggestions. They either rubbish them off or ignore them completely. Thus, the employees seem disgruntled by the managers assuming they are just conveyor belts to execute what they are told and not be heard. If unchecked, this behaviour is a ticking time bomb that will explode all the positive gains of the company. For Narkee Ltd to put its operations in order and maintain its competitiveness in the entire market, it should fix its communication channels between the management and the employees.
Analysis of the Four V’s Model of Operations Processes
Importance of the Four Vs
Volume
It describes the amount of production of a particular product that is required to satisfy the existing demand. Thus, it describes the physical number of units the company produces (Babich & Hilary, 2020). An example of a high-volume enterprise is a fast-food company like McDonald’s or Domino, which sell millions of its products worldwide. And Dominos has made a reputation for itself as being consistent in all of its products and delivery of services (Reid & Sanders, 2019). On the contrary, a low-volume enterprise may be an artist producing special commissions and artwork. These products are usually unique, thus taking a very long time to produce. Volume is used to measure the buyers’ confidence in the products and services of the company. However, it is inappropriate to rely on volume alone in determining the price and selling patterns. The business should use it to gain market insight and determine strategies.
Variety
Variety describes the number of various products and services that a company produces or provides and how they differ. Thus, according to Pandiangan (2022), variety concerns the diversity of products and services. An organisation dealing with various products and services helps increase its sales and the potential to incur profits. It also plays a key role in reducing the organisation’s dependence on only one or two products, which risks leading to business closure in the waning demand for those products or services (Ivanov et al., 2019). Wide variety helps the organisation to have the flexibility to produce goods and services that match the customers’ requirements. There is a close correlation between variety and volume, with the volume of the products and services reducing with the increase of variety and vice versa.
Variation
Variation defines the change in demand for products and services over time due to external factors. It is difficult to predict the variation of an organisation due to several factors (Babich & Hilary, 2020). A perfect scenario was the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic that struck the entire world, making it topsy-turvy in every form and shape. Most organisations exist as a plurality of variants needing collective management, assuming that points and drivers of variation are provided as inputs (Brown et al., 2018). A lot of experience and maturity are required from managers to fill the gaps within the question concerning how process variation is drawn and conceptualised.
Visibility
The last V is used to define the value chain of the organisation’s processes. Customers must experience the products and services of the organisation. The service industry accrues a high visibility compared to the businesses that engage in manufacturing (Kumar, 2022; Olsen & Tomlin, 2020). An example of an organisation with exceptional visibility is Amazon which has software on its website that tracks and traces its activities enabling customers to have visibility of the location of their packages. It is essential for potential customers to easily locate the company they are looking for after there have been reported cases of being lost (Brown et al., 2018). Thus, organisations must ensure that they have clear signposts strategically placed in locations visitors can easily locate. The absence of this consideration can turn into a negative experience for the customers.
Application of 4Vs to Narkee
Volume
Narkee is an organisation that prides itself in low volumes specialising in sports shoes and sneakers. It also produces special brands such as Activ8 and Comfee targeting families that may want shoes to wear while going to the beach or the park to play games casually. The company’s total annual sales are only £20m, and its main aim is balancing the quality and the cost while leveraging a lower profit. The company has only 250 employees to cater for its operations. Besides, it operates a single production line that sees the production of mid-market and high-end footwear products taking on the same product that must be reconfigured every time switching between the product ranges is necessary.
Variety
Narkee also has great variety, embracing high quality and differentiation. They have high-cost specialist shoes such as Optima, Innov8, and Excel. These brands attract premium prices and are made specially for a smaller market that engages in serious competitive sports such as world-class professional sports. Narkee can personalise some elements in these brands to suit the customer’s needs. Other than footwear products, Narkee also provides footwear repair services as part of its sustainability strategy. The customers can send their old should or trainers back to the factory for repair and restoration.
Variation
The operations of the Narkee are largely characterised by high variations in demand, leading to relatively unstable demand for footwear. However, the demand for repair services is relatively stable. For the case of footwear, the mid-market ranges experience a gradual increase in demand from its relatively high base level in March, though to a peak in June and July. Thereafter, this category of footwear experienced a gradual decrease, hitting its base level again in October. On the contrary, the demand for the high-end specialist ranges is the most unstable. The demand increases quickly and significantly during international football or tennis tournaments. But this demand also decreases quickly within a week of those events finishing, hitting a very low base level of demand that persists until the next event.
Visibility
The visibility of Narkee Ltd is low, but the repair services are arguably more visible than the manufacturing side. The footwear repair side is relatively more visible to customers, and the customers can interact closely with the company employees. For instance, if customers need their shoes repaired, they can call the customer services team to log in with their issue and take payment. The team can then communicate with the repairs team regarding the issue. The customer sends the shoes back to Narkee Ltd, which gets fixed and returned to them. On the contrary, the entire shoe manufacturing process happens in secrecy with any customer interaction, save for cases where a customer requires special features to be included in their footwear. The design and development team drive new designs for both footwear product ranges. This team works in absolute secrecy on new technologies that can be patented.
Recommendations
Among the areas that Narkee is found wanting is its people management skills. The company should institutionalise a tighter recruitment process for new employees. In addition to its one oral interview that only takes 30 minutes, the company also consider adding at least two more sessions where potential employees take tests on their professional qualifications and suitability for vacant positions, aptitude test, and testing of specific skills as may be fit for the company. Different people should also conduct these interviews to ensure the chances of bias are significantly reduced. It is also critical that Narkee pays more attention to the induction and training of its new employees. The first impression of the company that new employees get plays a big role in shaping their commitment to the values and goals of the company. Thus, Narkee must ensure that it puts everything in place to guide its employees to acclimate to the company and its range of machines before embarking on their roles.
Communication between managers and employees is also an area that Narkee Ltd must improve. Communication impacts the operation of the organisation greatly. Thus, cases of complaints among employees due to poor communication channels within the organisation are detrimental to the organisational health. Narkee Ltd should also embrace appraising and rewarding outstanding employees. It will help them in resetting their goals and motivate them. Correctly fixing these areas in the people management section will help Narkee breathe a new leaf of life and could become more competitive again.
Conclusion
Narkee Ltd has interesting emerging people management challenges and facts concerning the four V’s model operations processes. Employees are among the most important assets of any given organisation. Through their performance, they greatly impact the bottom line of the organisation in different ways. However, Narkee faces several challenges in its people management, starting with a recruitment process that needs to be concrete enough to guarantee high-quality recruits. Narkee also does low-quality work in the induction and training of the newly recruited employees, aside from not failing to offer their employees performance appraisals and rewarding outstanding behaviours. This reward system is critical to recognising and motivating employees to advance the company’s goals. Lastly, Narkee has a poor communication system between the management and the junior employees. Effective communication greatly impacts the performance of an organisation.
Regarding the four V’s model of operations processes, Narkee is an organisation that prides itself in low volumes specialising in sports shoes and sneakers. It also produces special brands such as Activ8 and Comfee targeting families that may want shoes to wear while going to the beach or the park to play games casually. The organisation also has a great sense of variety, embracing high quality and differentiation. Its operations are largely characterised by high variations in demand leading to relatively unstable demand for footwear, especially high-end range. However, the demand for shoe repair services is stable throughout the year. Regarding visibility, Narkee Ltd is low, but the repair services are arguably more visible than the manufacturing side. Lastly, the organisation should streamline its people management challenges to optimise its productivity.
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