Essay HR’s Role in a Strategic Acquisition – Report Writing – Human Resource Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Gemma is the HR manager for Wordsmiths, a retail bookseller with 32 stores in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, the ACT and South Australia. The company has recently acquired Mainly Books, a smaller book retail chain with 18 stores nationwide, including stores in Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Mainly Books has been struggling in the very competitive book market, and had been trading at a loss for the last three years. Wordsmiths was able to buy it for an excellent price. Strategically, the acquisition was seen as an opportunity to enhance the company’s market presence and to become truly national in its market penetration, like its major competitor. In the two years that she has been with company, Gemma has tried hard to raise the status of HR from being a purely administrative function to being a strategic function, though, like many HR Managers, she has found that she ad her small team are often overwhelmed with day-to-day issues like payroll administration, recruitment and keeping track of employee entitlements. She sees the Mainly Books acquisition as an opportunity to demonstrate HR’s capacity to contribute to the company at a strategic level. Today is an important day – her meeting with the CEO. Her phone rings and she jumps – she’s a little nervous. It’s Alan, the CEO. ‘Ready when you are, Gemma’, he says cheerfully. ‘On my way!’ replies Gemma in her most enthusiastic voice. She gets her papers together, takes a deep breath, gathers her thoughts and marches purposefully towards Alan’s office. Over the past couple of weeks, Gemma has been familiarising herself with the details of the acquisition as well as the company’s plans for the coming year. Wordsmith’s business plan includes rebadging all Mainly Books stores as Wordsmiths stores; establishing an online store and website based in Sydney; and developing a self-publishing service, whereby Wordsmiths provide editing and design services and produce books on a fee-for-service basis with exclusive distribution deals across its network of outlets. Currently, Wordsmiths employs more than 600 people in its stores, about half of whom are full-time. The rest are part-time and casual. Mainly Books currently has 225 employees, mostly full-time. Analysis of Mainly Books’ operations and costs has revealed that most of the stores are overstaffed, and the balance of full-time and continent workers is not right. This has been part of the reason for its poor financial performance over the last three years. Mainly Books does not have a separate HR function. Employment matters are handled by store managers and the payroll function has been outsourced. This got Gemma thinking about the way her HR department operates. Taking on payroll and recruitment functions for the additional Mainly Books stores would add to its already heavy workload. Maybe it would be better to adopt the Mainly Books model of devolving day-to-day functions like recruiting to store managers and outsourcing payroll so that she could focus HR’s efforts more on strategic issues. Mainly Books also has no HR information system. In fact, there is almost no workforce data available. Fortunately, Wordsmiths has a very good system that is capable of generating a wide range of reports about workforce characteristics and trends. Incorporating data from the Mainly Books workforce should be possible, although there wouldn’t be much historical data for the Mainly Books outlets. It is clear to Gemma that a certain amount of downsizing in the Mainly Books outlets will be necessary. It will also be necessary to reduce the dependency on full-time employees. Staffing levels in Wordsmiths stores is based on revenue and input from store managers about local conditions and seasonal fluctuations. Based on the revenue figures, Gemma has calculated that probably about 80 full-time positions at Mainly Books will need to either be abolished or made part-time or casual. Gemma also thought about the company’s planned new ventures – the online store and the publishing service. There are staffing implications there too – new roles to define, new people to recruit. Alan is expected to appoint someone to oversee these important new aspects of the business very soon, and she can see that she will need to work closely with that person. Despite her efforts to raise the profile of the HR function, Gemma also suspected that, unless she took the initiative, HR would probably not be part of the decision-making processes concerning the acquisition and the development of the new ventures. So, she put together a discussion paper for Alan, outlining the various HR issues as she saw them, and highlighting the decisions that needed to be made. She submitted the paper to Alan a week ago, and their meeting today is to discuss it. The discussion paper included the following issues:

• the downsizing process for the Mainly Books stores

• the need to incorporate the Mainly Books workforce into the existing HRIMS

• the need to plan for the staffing of the new ventures as well as for the enlarged network of retail outlets

• the differences in the way that Wordsmiths and Mainly Books manage their HR issues and processes.