To assess the need for employee feedback from the casual part time staff in Primark(Wembley), a retail clothing outlet?
BACKGROUND:
Primark, a subsidiary of Associated British Foods, is a retail outlet which operates in UK, Ireland and Spain and has in all 135 stores. The area of activity is retail clothing. It targets young, fashion conscious consumer below 35 and promises to offer high quality fashion basics at affordable prices. To provide value for money to its customer is the mission of Primark which is reflected in its statement of ‘Look Good, Pay Less’.
Primark employs in all 16,000 employees. It has the managerial staff which is employed full time whereas the supervisory staff and the support staff is employed part time. For the part time staff, the staffing is done as weekdays staff and the weekends staff.
One of the most busiest outlets of Primark and having the maximum turnover is
the Wembley Branch located on Wembley highstreet near Wembley Central Station, London, UK.
In this busy branch there have been issues related to the satisfaction and motivation of
employees especially the casual part time staff. There is no appraisal system or
feedback system in place forth employees. This leads to the issues that are faced by
the employees at their workplace; unaddressed, unheard and unattended to. As seen in
the diagram below the sequel to dissatisfied internal customer can be disastrous in the long run.
In the light of this, a pressing issue arises weather there is a need for a feedback for the management from the employees. According to the higher level management there is no need as they feel they are sensitive enough to understand their employees. Hence the need for this research to assess this belief of the management.
LITERATURE REVIEW:
BOOKS:
Mark Saunders, Philip Lewis and Adrian Thornhill (2000) Research Methods for Business Students (3rd edn), FT Prentice Hall, London.
Stephen Pilbeam, Majorie Corbridge (2006) People Resourcing: Contemporary HRM practice (3rd edn), FT Prentice Hall.
John Bratton, Jeffrey Gold (2003) Human Resource Management: Theory and Practice, (3rd edn), Palgrave publications.
JOURNALS:
Piper. B, (2006) Why Employee Satisfaction? Professional Builders Vol. 71 Issue 1, p43-43, 1p.
Meredith. B, (2005) The customer must come second NZ Business Vol. 19 Issue 10, p62-62, 1p.
Vora M, (Jul/Aug 2004) Creating Employee Value in a Global Economy through Participation, Motivation and Development Total Quality Management & Business Excellence Vol. 15 Issue 5/6, p793-806, 14p, 1 chart, 6 diagrams
Donnelly, Jr., James H, (Nov 1999) Another Look at Customer Satisfaction Bank Marketing, Vol. 31 Issue 11, p44, 1p
Williams. D, (Jul-Sep97) Employee Relations, Business & Economic Review; Vol. 43 Issue 4, p8, 4p, 1c
Sasser.E, Arbeit. Stephen P, (Jun 76) Selling Jobs in the Service Sector Business Horizons Vol. 19 Issue 3, p61, 5p
Dickinson, J, (2006), Employees’ preferences for the bases of pay differentials Employee Relations, Volume:28 Issue:2 Page: 183, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Vakola. M, Bouradas. D (2005), Antecedents and consequences of organisational silence: an empirical investigation Employee Relations Volume: 27 Issue: 5 Page: – 458 Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
AIM AND OBJECTIVES:
The overall aim is to assess the need of a feedback system from casual part time staff in Primark (Wembley).
The following objectives can be achieved because of it:
1. To study in detail the literature about employee satisfaction and its usefulness in a retail scenario.
2. To provide an objective evaluation to the management if there is any need for the employee satisfaction surveys to be conducted in the organisation.
CONTRIBUTION:
Few of the reasons why I am interested in this topic are as given below:
Ø I have a personal interest and curiosity to further probe into the topic of employee satisfaction and motivation. Researching into this topic would help me study these topics into further detail.
Ø Ease in primary data collection as it is my current work place.
Ø In future I want to be an HR consultant thus this research topic would support my career objectives in the long run.
Also this project will contribute towards the organizational welfare as:
Ø The issue of employees not being listened to and thus getting dissatisfied is existent currently in the organization.
Ø This research will establish and demonstrate to the organization if feedback from employees will help them generate more revenue by improving the customer service by keeping their employees satisfied.
Ø This research also will help the involved stakeholders i.e. the employees to solve the problems faced at work if the management takes the recommendations on board and tries to eliminate the existing problems.
PROPOSED METHODOLOGY:
The design of the methodology for this project is threefold. These design details along with in depth analysis of each has been provided as follows:
1. LITERATURE REVIEW FROM PRIMARY, SECONDARY AND TERTIARY SOURCES:
In order to analyze the importance of employee feedback secondary data from primary, secondary and tertiary sources would be extracted. Only secondary data would be used in the literature review as it brings in the advantage of audited information and is easy to access than primary data.
In order to research about all the work that have been done in the field of employee satisfaction the use of strong tertiary sources is very important. So as that none of the related data is missed out, thus the search of literature in the context of this project would start from tertiary sources like Emerald and Business Source Premier. These powerful sources search for the related documents from a huge database of Academic Journals, Trade Publications, Magazines and Industry Profiles. Thus academic journals play an important role in gathering secondary data. They hold the latest development in the field of the scope of project and such information is crucial for the success of the project.
2. Semi structured interviews: The scope of this project requires having inputs from the part time casual staff about their opinion on having such a system of employee feedback in place. Thus to establish the recommendations from the analysis done through literature review and case study, there is a need to back them up from the practical aspect of the solutions. The Interview would be based on the key findings of literature review and analysis done through case study.
TIMETABLE OF KEY ACTIVITIES:
The key activities and milestones are as represented in the diagram below:
EVALUATION:
The project has a limited timeframe, but the objectives have been set after an in depth analysis of the time constraint. It can be evaluated that the proposed use of methodology, timeframe and resources to achieve the aims and objects of the project has been optimized, so that they all can coexist and therefore it is believed that this project is feasible.
The project falls under the domain of Human resources which is one of the essential learning areas for managers and also satisfies the academic scope of the Master in Business Administration (MBA) thus this project is judged fairly acceptable by me.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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