Blue Line Hockey: Growing in Romania & Beyond - Essay Sample

Introduction

Hockey play has been growing exponentially around the world. As such, the Blue Line Company has opened new subsidiaries in Northern China, Romania, and Bulgaria to capitalise on the trend. The Vice president of HR for Blue Line Hockey Sticks in Romania is responsible for setting guidelines that protect the company's reputation and the brand's integrity while respecting local values and customs and supporting the company’s financial goals. The role of the HR vice president is hiring and promotion, establishing HR policies concerning working conditions, providing input on the company organisational structure and leadership style. The company finds it imperative to have an effective HR business plan to secure the success of the business. Without a plan, an entity may find its staff not ready to work or underprepared towards organisations goals. It will be difficult to hire new workers and will be unprepared for turnover and succession planning in the administration of the company. In essence, this HR business plan reports on the strategy the HR department will employ in hiring and promotion, improving and maintaining employees' working conditions, and the most appropriate organisational structures and leadership styles.

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Hiring and Promotion

Employment

The organisation’s subsidiary in Romania will start with the vice president of the HR handling employment issues. With the country located near the Black Sea and other European countries, it is an ideal place for Blue Line Company to look for a significant amount of human capital. Nonetheless, hiring workers in the country is not an easy task. Traditionally, the company must set up a subsidiary. The HR will then establish payroll, and then embark on employees' hiring process under the nation’s employment compliance laws. HR will draft a written employment contract in the local language as required in the country. The contracts are normally performed for an indefinite amount of time. Nonetheless, the fixed-term contracts will be 12 months long. Further, the vice president will register each contract with the Employees’ General Register. The employment contract will specify the terms of compensation, the start date of employment, the location of the company headquarters, benefits, termination, and severance (Brown et al., 2005). It is imperative, therefore, for the HR to learn about the culture of the country and its people to avoid tension and misunderstanding as emphasised by Hofstede’s Cultural theory to avoid uncertainty (Hofstede, 1994).

To onboard the workers the HR will clearly define Blue Line code of conduct and workplace culture through curating materials that will assist the employees to embrace the culture the HR office is seeking to promote. Also, HR will sign all the written agreements with the workers. The HR will register Individual employment contracts with the competent labour inspectorate within 20 days of the date of its conclusion. Workers will be promoted on merit as a strategy to motivate them to even work harder to achieve the goals and objectives of the organisation. Thus, employee promotion will recognise their contribution to the firm.

Non-Discrimination Policy

During hiring the subsidiary will not discriminate workers in terms of age, gender, sex, sexual orientation, religion, or political affiliations. In particular, the company will ensure that no workers will be discriminated against, harassed, or denied a promotion based on their gender or sex discrimination. Further, all the workers will be paid equal rates irrespective of their gender or that of individuals close to them. In most parts of the world non-heterosexual individuals faces obstacles at work subject to their sexual orientation (Birau, 2017). The HR will ensure that the employees have access to the correct information about what entails discrimination founded on sexual orientation, what encompasses harassment, and how sexual orientation discrimination can be linked with other prohibited types of bias including gender identity, marital status, disability, and sex. In fact, Romania enacted legislation in 2000, which outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation in various sectors of the economy including employment, access to and the provision of education, housing, the justice system, health care, goods and services, and other public utilities (Birau, 2017). Therefore, Blue Line will not discriminate any group of people during hiring and promotion processes and will comply with Romania’s principles of equal treatment, equal opportunities, and non-discrimination for all its workers creating an organisational culture that promote diversity and respect.

Child Labour Policy

Since the company is committed to non-discriminatory practices it will hire employees with respect to the Romanian Constitution that states that children under the age of 15 should not be employed in paid labour, while young individuals between 15 and 16 years old may be employed with their parents’ consent. Also, those that are below 18 years of age should not be hired for some specific tasks such as loading and offloading and should not be placed in a hazardous working setting (Selejan-Gutan, 2016). In this light, the Blue Line Hockey Sticks will employ persons over the age of 18 to combat child labour which is detrimental to them since most children who work do not go to school, low wages, high unemployment among the adults, while they end up being paid jobs later perpetuating their families’ vicious cycle of poverty.

A gap exists between the recommended policy and the values of the host country. First, the constitution suggests that children between the age of 15 and 18 can be employed for pay. Nonetheless, Blue Line Hockey Sticks will not employ this group of teenagers; this is because the company strongly do not support the employment of children below the age of 12. The company will gain acceptance by supporting local community schools and encouraging students and local leaders to ensure that the students stay at school. Besides, the company can sponsor bright students to local and international universities.

Working Conditions

Worker Pay

Blue Line Hockey Sticks employees will be paid above Romania's minimum wage, which is the country’s lowest remuneration an employer should pay to the worker (Plank et al., 2012). If an employee's normal working schedule is below the daily working hours, the minimum gross hourly basic pay for a worker is calculated by dividing the national minimum gross basic pay to the average number of monthly hours under the approved legal work scheduled (Plank et al., 2012). Therefore, the company workers’ wages will be set through an employment contract given that it is not less than Romania’s minimum wage or through a collective bargaining agreement. According to the country’s article of Labour Code of Romania, minimum wage regulations may be applied by imposing penalties and other fines. Thus, setting wages below these levels through an individual labour contract will be regarded as an offence and sanction with a fine. Romania labour inspectors are mandated to deal with complaints about salaries Plank et al., 2012).

The company will be paying workers monthly on a predetermined date as agreed in an individual employment agreement or the collective contract. Workers will be remunerated in monetary form and the funds will be transferred into their bank accounts. Further, the salaries will be directly paid to the employees. In the event of an employee demise, their wage rights due until their demise are paid to their surviving spouse, children, and parents in order. According to the Labour Code of Romania article 277 failure to enforce a final judgment regarding the payment of the salaries within 15 days from the date of enforcement request the employer by the interested party is a criminal activity (Plank et al., 2012). HR will be submitting the employees’ social security contributions after withholding it from their gross salary.

Hours of Work

Fulltime workers in the company will be working for 40 hours a week, that is, 8hours a day. Also, the workers will report to the workplace at 9 am and work till 11 am and break for 30 minutes. From 11:30 am the worker will work until 1.pm and then break for lunch. Work will be resuming at 2.pm and close at 5 p.m. therefore since daily working hours exceed 6 hours, all the employees will be provided with unpaid lunch and other breaks. Workers will be entitled to an annual leave of 21 working days, which is legal and falls within Romania's range of 15days to 30 days. They may also work overtime provided they do not exceed the legal maximum working hours in the country which is 48 hours per week including overtime (Plank et al., 2012). Employees will take annual leave with respect to employer needs and personal negotiation. In terms of hours of work, the country compares with Anglo countries such as Canada, the USA, and Britain.

Healthy and Safety

The human resource vice president will hire the health and safety of the employees representative. This is because Romania has a structure of specifically chosen health and safety representatives who are present in all organisations with at least 10 workers (Rusu-Zagar, 2015). In a large organisation with more than 50 workers, there should be a joint health and safety committee, which has a broad range of duties and responsibilities even though the employer is not coerced to accept its decisions (Rusu-Zagar, 2015). The Blue Line Hockey Sticks is obligated to make sure that the safety and health of the employees in all facets of their job and any responsibilities inflicted on them do not impact the basic principle. Health and safety joint committees are supposed to include both the employer and employee members but should be chaired by the employer representative (Rusu-Zagar, 2015). The main obligation of this committee on the management is to consult and inform the employees and their representatives on health and safety problems. Thus, the country is high on collectivism, which is different from Canada’s low collectivism according to Hofstede’s cultural theory (Hofstede, 1994).

Further, the health and safety representatives should work with the companies to enhance health and safety conditions at the workplace. The employer and the workers should implement the proposals on health and safety policy made by the committee. The HR vice president will annually present an annual report to the health and safety committee setting out the overall health and safety situation along with a detailed plan of protection and prevention in the subsequent year. Thus, the Blue Line will ensure that it observes all mandatory measures for health and safety at work, including to give workers written instructions to closely observe such practices.

Organizational Structure and Leadership Style

An organisation structure is a system that determines the hierarchy within an entity; defining each job, functions, and where it reports within the company.

Functional Organisation

The company will adopt a functional structure that is founded on an entity being divided up into smaller groups with certain tasks or functions. For instance, a company is divided into finance, sales and marketing, human resource, and information technology. Every department of the subsidiary will have a manager who is answerable to an executive a level up the hierarchy and oversees the entire subsidiary this is because the countries power distance is low, high masculinity, low uncertainty avoidance, and high masculinity similar to the case of Canada. One merit of this structure is that workers are grouped by their function and skill set permitting them to focus their energies on executing their job as...