Having developed a picture of the number of individuals Tanglewood will need to fill their positions in the coming year, there are several important decisions to be made regarding how to fill these gaps. The company’s philosophy for filling vacancies is a combination of tactics. Tanglewood has one managerial track that promotes sales associates to be shift leaders, then promotes shift leaders to be department managers, and so on up the managerial hierarchy. An alternative managerial track is bringing in either recent college graduates or individuals who have extensive experience in another store chain directly into the assistant store managerial position.
Regardless of where employees come from, the corporate staffing function endorses a strong commitment to developing long-range relationships with its workers. Many employees initially have difficulty adapting to the unique culture of Tanglewood, so the company is not happy to see experienced employees who have been socialized leave. There are also concerns that having too many employees come and go will dilute the company’s strong culture.
There are reasons why the company may consider alternative perspectives on the employment relationship in the near future. First, fluctuations in the economy have meant that the company carries excess employees during some periods of the year, and has a deficit of employees during other periods. There is some seasonal hiring for store associates (e.g., hiring temporary employees for the holiday season in December), but the managerial workforce numbers are typically fixed. Second, to preserve the company’s culture, some have suggested having all new managerial employees spend at least a little time in the Washington stores to get a sense of how the stores originally worked. These assignments would be short term in nature and would probably require a more contingent outlook for the employees they supervise.
Representation Concerns for the Flagship Store in Spokane
The problem of selection planning is made considerably more complex because of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) requirements that fall on organizations that do business with the federal government. Because several Tanglewood locations are near military bases or government offices which have expense accounts for general merchandise items at Tanglewood, all staffing must be done consistent with the OFCCP affirmative action requirements. In the current case, Tanglewood needs to use information from their staffing records to examine whether the company has a disparity in outcomes for different groups of employees. When the proportion of protected classes being hired or currently employed falls below the proportion in the labor market, this may indicate intentional or unintentional discrimination in hiring and promotions that will need to be addressed through affirmative action planning. There are also growing concerns within the organization that a combination of rapid growth and high turnover threaten to create real problems in terms of the demographic breakdown of employees at the organization.
Acting as part of a team of staffing professionals, you have been asked to analyze the hiring and promotion activities of Tanglewood as they relate to the issue of disparate impact. The first level of disparate impact analyses for the purposes of OFCCP reporting and affirmative action planning are always done at the establishment level. An establishment, for Tanglewood, is a single store.
This analysis will concern the corporate flagship store in Spokane, Washington. This is the largest location within the Tanglewood chain and serves as an example for all other locations. The store has approximately 75% more employees than an average location, making for a total of 30 department managers, 42 shift leaders, and 300 store associates. There are five assistant store managers and one store manager. The primary concern for representation data is in the groups of department managers, shift leaders, and store associates.
To assess the problem of discrimination, data from the previous year’s employees stocks in Spokane were assembled. The data on the next page are broken into two tables. The first shows the company’s current employee availability data, and the second provides a template for comparing incumbency to availability.
Analyzing utilization of protected classes from the labor market requires comparing the availability of protected classes (i.e., the proportion of the available work force who are members of protected classes) to the utilization of protected classes (i.e., the proportion of those hired or employed who are members of protected classes) for each job. You can find additional information on this topic in your textbook.
In a stock analysis, data from the Census are used to determine how many people in a certain region are available to do the job (including those currently employed in similar jobs). The census data for the current analysis comes from the Bureau of the Census EEO data tool (http://www.census.gov/eeo2000/index.html), which was specifically designed by the government for the purpose of conducting EEO analyses.
The appropriate data can be found through the following steps:
1) Go to the website above
2) Indicate that you want data from census occupation codes and click “next”
3) Indicate that you want data for metropolitan areas and click “next”
4) Indicate that you want data for Spokane, WA and click “next”
5) Find the appropriate occupation codes as described below, and “Show Detailed Race/Ethnicity Categories”
6) The appropriate table should be displayed.
Store associates and shift leaders are considered for the present analysis, as retail salespersons, while department managers are direct supervisors of retail salespersons.
The Procedure for Developing an Affirmative Action Plan
