The Case of Serena de Wynter
Use of this short case study in a HRM examination paper.
Serena de Wynter is a Personnel Admin. Officer for a local biscuit manufacturing firm employing 550 staff. She reports directly to the Personnel Director and has responsibility for the company's personnel records system e.g. relating to
- recruitment of new staff to production, warehouse, distribution, engineering and technical and office functions.
- internal promotions and transfers including administration of the probationary period system for new staff
- staff absenteeism
- records relating to the training and induction of new members of staff and recruitment/training correspondence.
Each employee has a personal, confidential file which contains copies of all key documents relating to their employment.
As well as these duties she supports the Health and Safety Officer in carrying out health and safety audits and documentation relating to accident and incident records
The role involves doing analyses of job and staffing information for the Personnel Director. As a recent exercise she determined that the company over the last year has on average had 350 staff employed in biscuit producing and distribution operations. In that time there have been 95 leavers. The last staff statistics report showed that of the 350 production and distribution staff, 295 have had at least one year's service and 273 have had more than two year's service. Of 36 employees in supervisory and junior management positions more than 90% have been in post for more than 8 years and one third are within 4 years of their retirement age.
Serena is aware that the Personnel Director is keen to announce a new policy. This will state that the company will take make every effort over the next two years to ensure that there will be no redundancies and that if job reductions and changes are required these will be achieved by natural wastage and re deployment.
BOLA Cases
These case studies © were written for examination purposes by Chris Jarvis
URL: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~bustcfj/bola/cases/wynter.html