MGT600 Management, People and Teams

Assessment 2 Brief
Group Assignment
Group Members:
Idrees Khalid 00246545T
Miriam Jerubun 00194538T
Gayani Kapukotuwa 00226377T
Sudhanshu Thaukur 00272442T
Clarissa Castagnino 00277668T
Executive Summary
Decline in the market share is an issue that worries managers seriously. ComSyst Technologies (CST)
has recently lost three major tenders to competitors mainly because of decline in its staff retention
and poor employee performance. In addition to these issues, a gap has also been highlighted in the
CST’s technical skills and the technological advancements elsewhere.

This report aims at helping the CST in becoming a well-positioned organization by attracting and
retaining the best talent possible and creating a team based high performance culture specifically in
the next two years. Assessment starts with the brief introduction of ComSyst Technologies and then
in the background section, there is a discussion about the problems and issues that the company has
probably faced in the last two years. The main discussion heading sheds light on the ways that how
CST would be able to build employee capability and performance in the next two years. Key
employee motivation diagram would be helpful for CST management to motivate and retain their
staff members. Main components of a good organizational culture that CST is lacking have been
discussed. For creating a global team, HR roles and influencing factors arising in global environment
has also been summarized in this report.

Finally there are the recommendations that how the CST would be able to fill its top positions of local
offices and how to develop their local staff. A figure has also been included in this section to help SCT
to develop its organization’s culture. In this section, an impressive example of building a “Dream
Team” (Netflix) has been added to help the CST management for boosting up their business and
employee performance.
Context:

Though challenging, group assignments are designed to reflect the reality of the workplace. In this
instance, people coming together to contribute knowledge, experience and skills to produce a
desired outcome. This assessment encourages students to develop their knowledge in relation to the
key topics of attracting, developing and retaining employees, teamwork, performance management,
team development and change management. Students will be allocated into groups by the learning
facilitator. The group will work together to analyse the given company and provide recommendations
to improve on attracting, developing and retaining employees, teamwork, performance management
and team development.

Instructions:

Your group is from a well-regarded consultancy firm and has been engaged by your client, ComSyst
Technologies (CST) to provide advice on addressing a variety of challenges. CST is a multi- national
communications software and systems developer serving the defence and emergency services
industries. CST has offices in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Philippines, India and South
Korea. CST has recently lost three major tenders to competitors and their market share has declined
substantially in the last two years. This has been attributed to some significant people related issues
including poor employee performance, low employee engagement, a decline in staff retention and
resignations of some key specialists. Technological advancements elsewhere have highlighted a gap
in CST’s technical skills and capabilities. Your brief from the client is to prepare a report with
recommendations to achieve the following objectives over the next two years:

1. Ensure CST is well positioned for the future by attracting and retaining the best talent possible

2. Create a team based high performance culture

3. Build employee capability and performance.

To address these objectives your consulting team will need to draw on content from modules two,
three and four. Some consideration may need to be given to other module content if deemed
relevant. It is also expected that groups conduct research beyond the resources provided on the
subject site. For each of the objectives mentioned above, you must include at least one real world
example / case study from the literature of how other organisations have successfully achieved the
same or similar. Your group must prepare a business style report for the Chief Executive and Board of
ComSyst Technologies.

Whilst the format may vary, it must include the following:

Cover page(Idrees)

Executive Summary(Idrees)

Table of Contents(Anshu)
 1. Introduction.

2. Major factors of downfall.

3. Ensuring the future impact by retaining the human resources.

4. Development of high culture performance for positive results.

5. Methods of building high capability work environment.

6. Summary.

7. Conclusion.
Introduction

Introduction-:
ComSyst Technologies is a software developer company that was established in
1971 by Mr. Flemingo. The organisation got highly influenced and fulfil the
market structure in the year 1984s and established a profitable position later.
ComSyst Technologies (CST) is an organisation, which influenced the market
and was responsible for the huge profit, which provided a threat and the best
competition to other software developing organisations. The workforce and the
shareholders involved had a huge impact with positive results every year. With
every change, the organisation always had a growth with huge profits and
benefits. CST influenced and encouraged the workers with positive attitude.

The regular change in environment culture and policies led to the downfall of
the organisation. People were lacking the experience and were enforced to leave
the organisation, which served as negative impact of the company. The
organisation over ruled the previous policies structures and replaced them with
technological advancements to create a huge turnover, which thus back flipped
the protocols. Thus was not able to recognise the factors that were responsible
for downfall.

We as a consultant team worked together to know the factors and evaluate them.
The case study also shows the “could have and should have” factors. The
evaluation is based on the performance and the environment culture. The study
also influences the criteria of the method that is utilised as a source of ensuring
the future position within the market. The utilisation of human resource that
may be integrated for high performance of the organisation. We as a consultant
team members analysed the factors that are responsible for growth and
degradation level of the organisation. The organisation is well compared in this
case study with real world scenario, which differentiates the operations that
were thus responsible for the downfall of the organisation.

Background(Clarissa)

ComSyst Technologies (CST) is a multinational software and systems developer, providing

services to the emergency and defence industries. They have requested our analysis and a full
report with recommendations and advice on how to overcome their biggest issues. The last
two years have been particularly negative for CST, with offices in Australia, New Zealand,
The United States, Philippines, India, and South Korea, their market share has declined
considerably and they have lost three major tenders to competitors.

CST has some worrisome characteristics we believe were responsible for such fast
and acute deterioration. They carry the same traditional structure since 1971 among the six
branches, making communication and decision making both problematic and slow. They also
operate as a stratified organisation, meaning they have a small group of top talented people, a
large group of average performers and a small group of poor performers, which can bring
motivation to a low level. Another issue is the lack of training and further education
incentives to their team members. As a technology company, CST needs to be up to date with
every trend and improvement in the market, or else their product will become obsolete.
Finally, they neither provide nor discuss career paths with the team, their employees do not
see future development in their careers in CST.

Main Discussion

Employee experience:

CST has a high staff turnover which in turn has a huge impact on the organisation’s
[Link] organisations are obsessed with customer experience and forget/ignore the
factor creating the experience which is their [Link] are the brand,and if the brand is
a promise,employees are responsible for fulfilling that [Link] are the face of the brand
and business to the [Link] customer experience is a direct result of the engagement and
behaviour of [Link] behaviour of employees is a direct result of the organisation's
investment in employees [Link] experience affects organisation’s capacity to attract
talent,retain top performers and drive results.

Key employee motivators diagram

Organisation’s culture:

Every leader wants their organisation to be [Link] some success means creating great
products and services,for others its about profit growth and for others still it's about adding value to
a world that needs [Link] success means to an organisation ,it’s the leader’s responsibility to
achieve it,and that begins with a [Link] to implement a strategy is dependant on an
organisations [Link]’s current organisational structure is not functioning [Link] following are
some components of a good organisational culture that CST is lacking.

Issue of losing three major tenders to competitors and decline of market share
Being a knowledge-based organization, ComSyst Technologies (CST) might focus on how to leverage
knowledge efficiently and effectively than competitors. Research prove that the success in knowledge
intensive organizations is derived through how well the organization manage knowledge workers,
identifying HR strategies for people management- learning to learn, effective HR systems in
recruitment, employee retention, performance based evaluation and reward management.
Creating a global team
Thite (2014) argues that MNC’s must adopt wider HR roles which have more dimensions and
complexity compared to general HR functions. Formal managerial alignment of processes and
systems along with the informal people alignment overcome the issue faced by MNC’s in transferring
HR practices among subsidiaries.

The figure summarizes the HR roles and influencing factors arising in global environment.

Issue of Employee Retention

According to Smith and Kelly (1997) “…. Future economic and strategic advantage will rest with the
organizations that can most effectively attract, develop and retain a diverse group of the best and
brightest human talent in the market place”.
Scholars emphasize the importance of analyzing the determinants of employee retention and
developing strategies to mediate the influences of the staff turnover. According to Riche 2007,
international staffing practices affect in different levels for foreign and local employees. When the
foreign expertise are appointed to the top positions, local staff has less vertical mobility due to
restriction of career development to lower management positions. It creates considerable income and
status disparity leading dissatisfaction and turnover of local employees.

Recommendations

Designing polycentric international staffing system will fill top positions of local offices extending the
career path and development of local staff.
Ways of mediating the influences of staff turnover and instruments used in retention strategy are
summarized in the following figure.

Change organisations [Link] figure below illustrates some steps in changing an organisation’s
culture.
Building the dream team

Jackson (2011) says that large companies have been struggling to retain their best talents, and
one of the reasons is exactly what happens at CST. Because of its stratified team, the top
talented members are demotivated working with poor performers. The best people need to be
surrounded by other great achievers.

Netflix is an impressive example of building a “Dream Team”. They have updated

their credo, the Netflix Manifesto from 2009, to a ten-paged document named Netflix
Culture, in which one of the basis is simply to attract the right talent and give them freedom
(Stackhouse, 2018). According to Netflix Culture, “a dream team is one in which all of your
colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and are highly effective collaborators”. They
believe the best way to have high performance is to have the best team working together to
win, pushing themselves to be the best teammates, caring and knowing their jobs are not
guaranteed forever. It might seem like a lot of pressure and competition, but it is actually a
safe place for making mistakes when seeking improvement. The team is built on trust and
collaboration since everyone is exceptional at what they do, people share information and
work together.

Our recommendation to CST is to consider building a top talented, high achiever team
inspired by Netflix. Having the same costs CST has today, they could have fewer people
working, more attractive salary packages and much higher performance, motivation, and
retention. It is important to hire well, though. Boss (2018) said not to hire someone to fill a
role, but to fit in the team and the company. If you reunite like-minded people, who believe in
what they are working for, cohesion will come almost naturally.

Career Development
One of our recommendations to CST is to invest in training and career development.
According to BetterBuys research, when employees feel they have space to grow, they are
more likely to stay longer in the company. The research involved more than two thousand
employees to understand the importance of career development. They have discovered that
92% of employees believe career development incentives are important or very important;
employees with access to a career development plan show 34% higher retention and are 15%
more engaged.

Training courses, workshops and further education incentives such as tuition reimbursement
are good ways to focus on developing the team. Training courses and workshops can be
offered internally or from outside sources like training companies or even websites. They are
a positive chance to expand employees skills and keep them up to date with the most recent
technology (Wick, 2018). This implementation can reduce turnover, improve employee
engagement and also bring knowledge to the team. Which could potentially fill the technical
gap between CST and competition or even overcome it.

Hyatt, one of the world’s top hospitalities companies, has a great training program focused on
employees development alongside with a hire from within culture. Their retention rate is
impressive, approximately 20% of USA employees have worked for more than ten years for
the company (Son, 2017).

Hyland, a business software firm based in Ohio is another good example: they offer up to
$10,000 in tuition reimbursement for further education, plus more than 60 hours of training
per year. Deloitte also stands out from the crowd when it comes to education: every employee
is supported with tuition reimbursement, and the company has a special development
program that delivered four million hours of training in 2015. Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe,
a law firm, offers their partners $3500 to invest in business developing coaching. These
companies investments in educational development and professional growth have translated
into extremely low turnover through the years. (Fortune, 2016)

Conclusion

References (All to insert)

Reiche, B. (2007). The effect of international staffing practices on subsidiary staff retention in
multinational corporations. The International Journal of Human Resource
Management,18(4), 523-536.
Retrieved from [Link]
databaseList=638&queryString=How+to+address+employee+retention+in+knowledge+based+MNc
%27s#/oclc/361145777

Thite, M., Budhwar, P., & Wilkinson, A. (2014). Global hr roles and factors influencing their
development: Evidence from emerging indian it services multinationals. Human Resource
Management, 53(6), 921-946. doi:10.1002/hrm.21621
Retrieved from [Link]

Smith, A.F., Kelly, T. (1997). Human capital in the digital economy: The organization of the
future, Jossy-Bass, San Francisco, CA

BetterBuys. (n.d.). The impact of professional development. Retrieved from

[Link]

Boss, J. (2018). Leaders only need to do this to retain top talent. Retrieved from
[Link]

Fortune. (2016). Human Capital 30: Companies that put employees front and center.
Retrieved from [Link]

Jackson, E. (2011, December). Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their
Best Talent. Forbes. Retrieved from
[Link]
fail-to-keep-their-best-talent/#40040a48741d

Netflix Culture. (n.d.). Retrieved from [Link]

Son, S. (2017). 5 companies with strong employee retention strategies. Retrieved from
[Link]

Stackhouse, J. (2018). Testing, Testing: how Netflix built a culture of innovation. Retrieved
from [Link]
stackhouse/

Wick, K. (2018). How Managers Can Promote Professional Development. Retrieved from
[Link]

Appendices(All to insert)