Background Facts Paul Simard has accepted the position as the plant manager of Jonquiere plant in Ancol Ltd. In order to strengthen relations between management and employees, Paul decided to remove all time clocks from the plant. Instead, the plant would assume that employees had put in their full shift. Two months later, however, the absenteeism started to appear. Problems All of problems resulted from the removal of the time clocks were that the increased absenteeism levels were beginning to have the negative affect to plant productivity and relations between supervisors and employees lead to be strained.

Without time clocks, payroll department could not actually calculate the deduction pay for the amount of time employees were late. Symptoms of the Problems •Employees showing up late, leaving early, and taking extended lunch breaks •Other employees feeling unfairness •Reduction in plant productivity •Supervisors having to do additional duties which they had no previous experience on •Deteriorated relationships amongst employees and supervisors •Payroll department wasn’t able to calculate payroll properly •Employees filing complaints to the labour union •Increased workload by labour unions and supervisors to handle disputes Analysis

The main reason of these problems was the quick decision to remove the time clocks from the plant with the lack of planning by management. Paul’s decision was based on something that he heard at a seminar “building trust in the workplace” rather than doing an internal analysis of the plants existing problems to come up with a proper solution. Management before removing the time clocks should systemically research and evaluate the result in other similar plants and divisions assuming the implementation of new strategies or policy had been recorded in the corporate level.

In addition to lack of planning, inexperienced and lacked the necessary interpersonal skills supervisors deteriorated relations between management and employees through implementing improperly communicational and managerial methods. Paul Simard as the manager of the plant should take the management’s responsibility to solve the problem. In the other hand, employees have obligation to maintain work attendance since organizations need everyone to show up for work at scheduled times.

Conclusion These problems caused from the Simard’s decision to remove the time clocks resulted in the poor relations between management and employees. Simard needs to come up with a new strategy to solve the above problems and rebuild trust with his employees. Recommendation We recommended that Paul Simard needs to implement an internal analysis of the plant’s existing problems and conduct interviews with some employees and supervisors to further understand their concerns and needs.

He also needs to set up a meeting with all the employees and supervisors and use the questioner to achieve the best method to rebuild a better relation between the management and employees. Meanwhile, training supervisors to improve their team’s problem-solving skills and interpersonal skills will help the team build the identification-based trust relations. Management also could consider awarding the bonus to the employees with good work ethics and level of their contribution to increase the productivity.