Assignment Details:

Read the following case study and complete the tasks required.

EPLUS is one of the most successful civil engineering firms in Singapore. The company has been around for many years and has collected many industrial accolades for its consistent quality assurance and “Zero Accident” record. The company has been involved in many public project works, many of which have become prominent icons in Singapore, such as the Benjamin Shears Bridge and the Henderson Wave, just to name a few. Despite its many impressive achievements, EPLUS is a very fine-tuned organization and the focus of the company has always been on project management, with very little attention placed on human resource management.

With about 500 staff, many of whom are qualified engineers, it has a very small HR department and the resources allocated to HR management is almost absurd. The hardest working is those involved in the tendering process because EPLUS success depends entirely on the ability of the company to secure new contracts. As the market is becoming more competitive and with project costs increasing, the returns for each project has become low. The onus is now on the people in the tendering team to ensure that the company successfully bid for the high yielding projects.

In the past, everyone in the company would support each other in coping with pressure but of late, everyone seems to be struggling. This can be seen in the more regular heated arguments amongst the senior managers over what would have been trivial matters in the past. The ones who always get the brunt of all these are the junior staff who are caught in the “crossfire” between different project managers. Of late, the company’s failure to bid for certain projects exacerbated the problem. The company has also come close to missing a few important tender deadlines.

There has been a lot of feedback and unhappiness from the companies that awarded the tenders highlighting many significant errors and inconsistencies. In one most recent bid, the company provided two different bidding prices – this has never happened before. Now, the company has only three big contracts which are nearing completion and with no new contracts, the company’s future seems bleak and uncertain. At the moment, the company is only depending on some long term maintenance contracts to provide the bulk of its cash flow. Under pressure, managers often traded bitter recriminations and the one department that will naturally get the most blame is the Tendering Team.

Alan Yee, a well respected senior staff at EPULS currently heads the tending team. It has become obvious of late that he is very unhappy with what is going on. After spending 20 years in the company, he feels it is time for him to move on to join another company where his experience and skills are appreciated. Unless things start to change in EPULS, he seems to be unwavering in his decision and words of his intention to leave the company have reached the senior management.

The COO of the company Samuel Teo invited Alan for a discussion, with the hope to convince Alan to stay on with the company. At the meeting, Alan was honest and did not hold back his frustrations. He asserted that the motivation of the staff in the company is at an all-time low and some of the project managers should be disciplined or fired. During the conversation, the following points were brought up for immediate action by the senior management :

• There is no proper performance management in the company, with many of the project managers deciding on the performance standards which differ between different projects;
• There are too many casual staff employed and no proper training was provided. To cut costs, the company hired many interns on a project basis, many of whom require close supervision. This is time-consuming and takes away people from their core responsibilities.
• The training budget was significantly cut and the staff was only provided with training to fulfill the minimum requirements as stipulated by law. Staff development programs were virtually nonexistent.
• The appointment of Project Managers was casual and mainly dependent on who was free at that moment. As there are no proper selection criteria, Project Managers ‘cherry-picked’ who they feel they can work with without paying much attention to the suitability of the staff to work on a particular project. This has resulted in many staff who were not chosen to feel they were sidelined and never given a chance to excel in bigger and more prominent
• Not enough resources allocated, especially for big projects
• There is an urgent need to revise the reward system. Traditionally, the company has largely focused on performance-based pay which was mainly transactional, depending on the successful completion of the project. While this was a good way to motivate the staff to perform well, it also means those who are ‘cherry-picked’ to be involved in a big project will get
• Communication and information flow in the organization is slow and sloppy. There was no proper consultation.

Alan was unreserved in voicing his displeasure about the management and the way the company is run. He asserted that since the costs cutting measures put in place recently, a ‘them and us’ culture had developed. The lower level staff feel that they are not given a chance to provide feedback to the management or fear backlash for being a maverick. The days where staff could have open communication are gone.

Samuel thanked Alan for his frank opinion and assured him that he would look into his concerns as a matter of urgency. Two months after the meeting, the government called for a tender to build a new highway connecting the city and the future Changi Airport Terminal 5. Samuel announced that the company will be bidding for the project. Since this is a major project and is a ‘final’ chance for the company to get things right again, he expects everyone in the company to work hard to ensure success in the tender.

Alan wrote to Samuel to follow up on their discussion. Samuel gave a standard reply that he was busy but promise he would look into the matter. Two weeks later, Alan sent another email to Samuel, and to his astonishment, he received an automatic out of office reply. Samuel was on leave and will not be back in the office until 3 weeks later. Alan decided that this was to be the final straw and submitted his resignation. A few of the staff in his team followed suit.

The CEO was unaware of the meeting between Samuel and Alan and thus Alan’s resignation came as a shock to him, especially during a time when the company was close to submitting the tender to the government for the mega project. When Samuel was contacted, he too was surprised as he thought he had given his assurance to Alan that he would look into the matters. To this, Alan just simply said, “Enough is enough!”

TASKS :

Write an HR REPORT to address the following :

• Using the various HR diagnostic models taught in class, critically analyze the current situation and the implications to the company’s future Consider the following:
• Do you think Alan’s resignation is symbolic of bigger issues confronting EPLUS?
• Do you think there was a communication breakdown between Alan and Samuel?

Please do not restrict yourself to only the two considerations above. You will need to take on a broader and holistic perspective in diagnosing the various organizational and HR problems highlighted in the case.

• Provide an HR plan to address the future HR needs, based on the issues highlighted by Alan. In doing so, you may make some reasonable assumptions. Include a maximum of THREE (3) HR topics e.g. Performance Management, Employee Engagement, Training and Development, Recruitment & Selection, Reward Management.