Staffing Case Study: Tanglewood Department Store

1. Develop recommendations for how the organization should staff its operations, focusing on strategic decisions pertaining to staffing levels and quality. These decisions are discussed in the textbook.

Introduction

Tanglewood Department Store was established in 1975 by two friends, Tanner Emerson and Thurston Wood in Spokane Washington. Emerson and Woods designed outdoor clothing and equipment that was affordable for the everyday consumers. Later to better brand the department store, they renamed the company Tanglewood in 1984. After which the store experienced increase growth and with that growth came the need for other stores and workers (Kammeyer-Mueller, 2015, p. 3). Tanglewood strives on their staff providing excellent customer service

• External or Internal Hiring

External hiring in the case of Tanglewood would be best since the company is increasing and expanding its stores.

• Core or Flexible Workforce

Tanglewood prefers to use their own core workforce instead of “temporary workers” therefore this may not work for the company, but I wanted to mention it as a possibility. Especially since Tanglewood already has a “team” atmosphere.

• Hire or Retain

I would recommend giving perks to internal employees to retain them and allow for in-house promotions. This will continue the values and goals of Tanglewood.

• National or Global

Tanglewood could consider outsourcing or perhaps set up a manufacturing in another country. This will give them a competitive edge over the other companies in their industry.

• Attract or Relocate

Since Tanglewood has 243 stores located across 12 different cities with 12 regional managers and 20 store managers, the company would need to have frequent meetings to have all managers on the same page regarding guidelines and regulations for store and organization. Should Tanglewood consider relocating staff, the staff must have the education, qualification, and person/organizational match along with person/job

Tanglewood would need to thin out the employees and re-engineer the responsibilities by decreasing management. Decreasing the management and redistributing responsibilities will strengthen the workforce, job performance, and decrease the salary output.

• Short-or-long-Term Focus

Since Tanglewood is striving to centralize their human resource department, the short-term focus is to get the managers trained per region and to connect with each other. Once the managers have reached this goal it will assist with the long-term focus of the company and bring about success for the human resource department (Heneman, III, Judge, & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2015).

Next, we will discuss the second level of the strategic staffing decision.

II. Staff Quality (Heneman, III, Judge, & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2015, p.