Director

| | Treadway Background and History The Treadway Tire Company is located in the United States, and employs 9,000 people nationwide. The company is a major supplier of original equipment and replacement tires of Treadway brands and some private tire company brands. They have recently closed several manufacturing plants leaving the company with a remaining total of 8 plants nationwide. The concentration of this analysis is focused on the Lima Tire Plant, located in Ohio. Treadway employs a mix of salary and hourly employees. The hourly employees are union workers while the salary employees are not. The Lima Plant is composed of 1,120 employees with a breakdown of 970 hourly personnel and 150 salaried personnel. The Key players in the Lima plant are members of management at various levels. Ashley Wall, the Director of Human Resources has recently been moved from a Treadway plant closure and has been asked to address one of the main concerns of the Lima plant. The issue to address is the high turnover rate of the middle management, the line foremen. She has developed a education training/orientation program for the foreman. She is also currently working on ways to increase the company’s morale. Robert Henry, the Personnel Manager has observed the employees in action and sees that the new line foremen are thrown into the job with little training and suggests that the company needs to provide more training to its employees training. Brandon Bellingham, the Plant Manager agrees that more training is needed but states it is not in their budget at this time and proves not to be very cost effective at this time. The Treadway Lima Plant Problem and Issues During the company analysis, many problems within the Treadway Tire Lima factory plant have been identified. The main problem found at this plant is the high employee turnover of the line foremen position mainly due to job dissatisfaction. The employee turnover rate for the line foremen position is approximately 23 of 50. Looking closer at the turn over number of those 23 employees 6 were of external hires, new grads and 17 of the employees were internal hires or company transfers. The items that can be addressed and fixed at the Lima plant include allowing an education process to be put in place, find ways to reduce pressure on middle managers and improve the company culture and morale. All of the problems noted are caused by an inefficient training/orientation program not being in place. The lower level managers at the plant were either under trained or received no training at all. An organized training / orientation program for all new employees, regardless of where if they are external or internal personnel. Decrease pressure on the line foreman and supervisors for immediate results on things like employee absenteeism and technology failures. Increase support for the Foremen as they are powerless when it comes to disciplining a unionized employee. This powerlessness causes a negative culture at the Lima plant because the Foremen feel they have to rule with an iron fist, “Because it’s the way it’s always been done”, thus, causing a gap to grow between the managers and the line union workers Relevant Theories or Models The organizational structure used by Treadway at the Lima plant utilizes a centralized decision making process. The analysis of Treadways processes categorizes the company into the Mechanistic model. This model is very similar to the bureaucracy model in that it has extreme departmentalization, high formalization, and little lower level decision processes. The model also has high specialization, a clear chain of command with narrow spans of control and centralization. At the Lima plant, during the day to day operations neither the foremen nor employees have much say over what happens. The foremen are told they have management level decision making authority but are not included when it comes to employee discipline matters. The work at the Lima plant is relatively specialized as it is at most manufacturing plants, but this can cause high burn out and turnover. Although having specialized production units is a good way to maximize production and productivity, this can hinder a company if the repetitiveness of the position leads to decrease of interest and a decline in production. If Treadway Tire implemented an organized training program and revamped the culture of being evaluated on the productivity management of your production line. It will eliminate the sink or swim mentality forced on the foreman and supervisors. This management style has produced a company culture of aggressive leadership and low morale among all levels of personnel. When employees do not feel that they are an integral part of their company they eventually will turn to the belief that they are not satisfied with their jobs and the lack of engagement in their job will decrease attendance and productivity. This being pointed it out; the company culture can be categorized under the job satisfaction category perceived organizational support. The POS components simply look at the degree to which the personnel of the company believe the organization as a whole care about them as an individual asset to the company. There is little employee engagement in the management process at Treadway again leading to high job dissatisfaction and employee turnover. Solving the problem requires rethinking the philosophy that guides workforce management and changing the Treadway culture that has grown up around that philosophy. When looking further into employee dissatisfaction I would encourage Mrs. Wall to educate herself on the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) model. This model assumes that job satisfaction is correlated with employee willingness to go the extra mile because they feel that are an integral part of the company. It is clear that this were Mrs. Wall would like to see the Treadway culture. Treadway currently fits into the theoretical model of the exit-voice-loyalty-neglect framework. Exit –neglect behaviors encompass the company’s performance variables including productivity absenteeism and employee turnover. Personnel want to depart from the plant because their perception is that the company doesn’t care what they do. They begin to lose the need to please their employer and neglect their duties which leads to absenteeism and reduced productivity. The Treadway Lima Plant Alternatives Solution One: Implement Line Foremen Orientation/Training Program If Treadway Tire implements the organized training program by Mrs. Wall the managers of each department will not have to develop individual orientation programs. This will eliminate the trial by fire mentality forced on the foreman currently. By establishing a companywide program transferred employees would need little training to the company and this would save on orientation/training costs. Induction to the company and instruction on how an employee can obtain education and potentially advance in the company would increase morale. The ideal program would contain the important aspects including. Orientation to plant operations with specialized training by departments if needed. Instruction on how to handle interactions and relationships between Treadway personnel and union line workers. The company policy on proper disciplinary actions for employees and what can be expected from upper management during this process. Finally, educate the new personal on management education and advancement opportunities in the company. Solution Two: Institute employee education days The implementation of plant wide employee education days would enable Mrs. Wall to reach out to all levels of personnel with the same educational each year. Topics on the company’s mission, vision and values can be included. This would help to educate the employees on the fact that company cares about them and also provide special training in accordance with the newest technology, policy changes etc. Another benefit of events like these is that it provides a social setting for managers and personnel to visit and learn together. The down side to having organized education days is that you would have to have several opportunities to attend including opportunities for your night shifts. This would cause manager to cover shifts and still pay for the employee in training. If the company experiences decreased revenue then these days would be canceled. Plan of Action Start the organized training program. Although this solution is costly and time consuming it is the best approach for Treadway to decrease turnover and increase employee satisfaction for all employees. The initial training would have to happen right away for all management from foreman to upper level managers. The initial training would help all of the leaders to be on the same page. Once this is completed set up dates and times and have your managers teach different sections of the program. The training course should occur every six months to a year to ensure everyone stay in touch with what is happening at the company. Once the initial training is complete it would be vital to send out a revised staff satisfaction survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the new program and look to see if it needs to be modified to meet further needs of the company. In addition to the training, it would be important to communicate more with and put less pressure on the foreman for things that are outside their control.