Formulating the Compensation Strategy Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Formulating the Compensation Strategy Case Study Solution

Identification of current organizational problems

Duplox Copier Canada limited company offers the services of selling and installation of the Duplox copiers in Canada and in US. The company is US-based Company with its operations based in Canada and US both.Manufacturing is basically done in US plant while the sales and installation is covered by the Canada plant.

Over the last few years, the company is facing high turnover rate, low employee motivation, Non-diligent working environment and unsatisfactory customer service leading to customer complaints and thus low sales. The core problems identified in the Duplox business are:

The company practiced the long hierarchal system with orders flowed down from the US branch to other branches.This created an ambiguous picture of the business activities and issues of the employee in practicing or implementing certain strategy and thus resulted in improper and inaccurate compensation, salary, bonus plan.
There is lack of empowerment and high bureaucratic system, delaying the flow of communication from one place to another, since the lower management employee has to communicate through the two layers of the management in order to get the query considered, it increases the time and also the inefficiency of the work, leading to dissatisfaction of the client.
Due to long bureaucratic system, the work started by one TSS was not completed by the same TSS mainly because of extended time and friction in the system to communicate and decided the best tentative solution to the problem.
Also, there has been the absence of the “organizational fit” and team synergy.The upper management like TSS director puts his interest over the team performance and failed to communicate the interest of the TSS teams to the top management leading to high turnover rate.Also, there was the difference of interest among the marketing and the TSS department.Since the marketing sales team earn commission purely of the sales of the copiers, they failed to incorporate the company’s vision to offer quality and right match to the clients leading to high maintenance cost. In addition, the sales team and TSS team remain on the different page,the sales team worked to get sales on board ignoring the compliance strategy of the company while the TSS notified the performance and working of the copier to be out of domain of the company.This miss-fit lead to increased customer disaffection and hence reduction in sales.
Lastly, the company failed to develop an integrated compensation plan, along the structural variables likes job design and job nature, decision making, empowerment & leadership and coordination &departmentalization.Over the period of time,the compensation and bonus decreased which lead to low morale and motivation of employees.Since every department has different objectives there was absence of the compensation plan that integrates the employees from different departments with the business strategy.Moreover, since the employees were given no decision-making authority and leadership to resolve the issue on time it eventually created friction in the organization leading to delays in client services and hence customer dissatisfaction.

Section-B: Strategic and Structural Recommendation

The following are the strategic and structural recommendation, Duplox needs to implement.

Duplox should dilute the bureaucratic system of the organization by empowering the business units the autonomy to perform and deiced the business strategy and operations according to the external and internal factors. In doing so, it should allow the business units in Canada, Alaska, Edmond to perform independently in a way that it takes no delegations from the US office in procuring the raw material and designing the compensation plan. This will reduce the (1) Friction in the system (2) will allow the manager to design the specific compensation and reward strategy that best fits the organization (3) will expedite the process of decision-making, hence offering customer satisfaction, leading to increased sales.

Formulating the Compensation Strategy Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

Also, the company should offer the autonomy and empowerment to the employee’s in making day to day decision like the procurement of the copier parts from the market. This will shorten the time period and will make the operations effective.

The company should change the pay plan for the sales team,since currently offering the commission on number of sales done, it should change it to pay-for-performance which should be analyzed with the number of sustained sales in the years along with the maintenance cost associated with-it during the whole period. This will allow the sales team to tame the sales tactics and avoid improper and inappropriate clients.

The company should also develop the communication platform where the employees and director of marketing and technical support could communicate and achieve their goals.Since in current time, both departments blame each other the company should make the hybrid teams of marketing and TSS department for 3 months on rotation, so to offer the vision and perspective of each department leading to more resolving work nature. Also it will improve the coordination and will mitigate the departmental silos.

Section C- Reward and Compensation strategy

Required Behavior:

Duplox requires the candidates/ employees which depicts the behavior of high adaptability since the organizational structure is dynamic and expanded in different regions. Also, because in the future the company will devise the team-oriented structure which would require each member to work at different roles for a particular period of time. The company also needs team players with pro-active approach to the matter. For this purpose the company should be attracting the millennial with strong product and technological knowledge and pro-active approach to resolve these issues. Similarly, the company requires optimistic leading qualities in its employees so they can be utilized to bridge the gap between different departments.Lastly, the company requires the influential employees on board in TSS and Marketing department, so to align the goals of the business in a desirable way to get effective outcome......................

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