A clothing retail company with three locations in a popular beach resort area has been in business for over three years. There are two similar retailers in the same beach town competing for the same customers and labor pool.

Recently the company has had extensive growth due to a new clothing design. Despite the growth in sales, their turnover is high. Employees do not stay longer than 90 days, as the competition is enticing sales staff away. Turnover is now affecting their customer satisfaction and increasing the workload on the remaining staff.

Most of the management staff started as sales floor employees and received little to no management training. One of the key criteria used in promoting staff is their success on the sales floor, leading to complaints of internal selection unfairness.

Recent exit interviews suggest low morale, poor leadership, and lack of work/life balance as the top three reasons for leaving the company. Knowing that there are plans to launch two new product lines in the near future, the CEO has asked the HR director to search and find a new supplier to provide new employee orientation for all new sales staff. Twenty companies have submitted requests for proposals, and the CEO wants a short list to be presented in the next two days.

An applicant from a local competitor has offered to give the HR director information on the previous employer's salary and benefits upon hire. What action should the HR director take in response to this offer?

An organization is experiencing a problem with new hires for a specific position leaving the company within the first six to nine months. They previously had several long-term employees in this position, but those employees have retired.

The HR director performs research and determines that several of the employees have joined a competitor. The HR director decides to employ a third-party firm to conduct a salary survey and do a complete review of the job description and a job analysis for the position. Additionally, the HR director performs an internal employee opinion survey in which employees share their belief that the current benefits package lags that of other companies in the area. The results from the third-party survey confirm that the company is lagging the competitor by a large margin in terms of compensation and that the benefits package is no longer competitive.

The departure of the new hires, many going to a competitor, shortly after starting the job is a cause for concern. Which recommendation should the HR director make in order for the organization to see an immediate reduction in the turnover?

A young learning and development specialist, having recently completed graduate studies in adult education and training, is hired into an HR department that has a strong history of management and employee training programs. For now, the specialist's assignment is to undertake scheduled revisions of specific elements in the learning and development system.

The programs have been well-attended and well-received by the organization, so there has been little need to change the learning approach. The specialist soon realizes that, while the course content is well-designed, built on sound practices, and engaging for participants, it offers little support or direction for transferring learning to the job environment. It is missing a major opportunity for improving job performance. She also notes a lack of competency-based learning that can be used by participants and their managers as performance standards to make it easier to implement and assess learning and performance levels.

The specialist would like to propose changes, but she is new to the company and the HR function. Her colleagues are older than she is and much more experienced. They have created or directed the curriculum that she wants to change. She notices that they smile condescendingly when she speaks at department meetings about her ideas. They seldom talk to her and have been rather harsh in their reviews of her initial projects. It is difficult for her to argue for change using actual data because the evaluation tools the department uses focus primarily on Kirkpatrick's Levels 1 and 2.

How can the specialist improve her relationship with her colleagues?