edf40wrjww2CF_PaperMaster:Desc
1. Introduction
Klad-it, a small company manufacturing light weight, low cost house cladding, was founded by the carpenter Jo Bundy and his engineer Al Jolson. After 8 years of establishment, the company has developed very fast, expanding its market to Asia, increasing staff five times to 100 people, and moving to new premises. Management is held by a small team of six, led by Jo Bundy as Managing Director. Jo Bundy is worried as the company’s profit has dropped for the last 18 months and several issues have come up related to human resource management (HRM) recently. Klad-it is not the only growing small firm that begins to “experience problems with HRM due to the complexity that increasing size imposes” (Mayson and Barrett, 2005 cited in Barrett 2006, p. 107). The issues Klad-it is experiencing are occupation health and safety (OHS), planning of production staff, turnover and retention of skilled and knowledge workers, and sexual harassment. These immediate problems are caused by an underlying problem which is no strategic approach to human resource management of the company. This paper will analyze these problems and propose some human resource activities and approaches to deal with them. The solutions are drawn with assumptions that Klad-it operates in Victoria and complies with Australian legal system, having its effective performance management. Another assumption is Klad-it has no compensation problems and its compensation is relatively competitive. This assumption is based on the findings of a study on over 2900 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by Rutherford, Buller et al (2003) that compensation problems were lowest in high growth SMEs. The paper has 6 parts: introduction, imm ...