MANAGEMENT

Managing Under Uncertainty



Managing Under Uncertainty

My father has three brothers and one of them resides in Australia. He initiated his construction business back in the seventies. He worked extremely hard and invested in a lot of hard work and efforts to flourish in it regardless of the opposition that my grandfather had in terms of opening up such a business considering the family business was already flourishing. Today my uncle owns a huge construction business whereby he employs 300 employees working in different shifts. There are three shifts in the day. I had the pleasure of visiting his self made business when it went for a vacation. Considering I had vacation of nearly 4 months so my uncle offered me an opportunity of interning with him and work in different departments of his company. The purpose of him providing me this opportunity was the fact that he wanted me to have an idea of different careers and chose one for myself wisely.

He has his construction business in Wagga Wagga. His construction business entails 3 departments namely finance department, Human Resource Department and the workforce. My uncle himself is an architect and hence he does all the architecture himself. He ensured that I was a part of all his meetings so that the entire stay in his organization becomes enlightening for me. In one of his meetings there was a problem that was highlighted about the employee retention. There was a high turnover rate eventually resulting in higher costs. My uncle announced that a committee should be established of 3 people and it will investigate the reasons behind it and at the same time also come up with a solution. He demanded for results in a month. He looked at me in the meeting and announced that I will be a part of it and will help in the research. There were two people besides me and those were the human resource manager and the finance department manager. As soon as the meeting ended human resource manager and the finance manager asked me to follow them to their board room. They were extra courteous since they knew that I was new to the entire situation. We then started discussing about the current situation. I did not do much of the talking since I was asked to jot down the main points of the meeting. When the meeting was to be concluded the human resource manager asked me to read out the main points of the meeting. We basically spoke on the fact that there is not much offered to the employees to be retained and hence we need to work on the employee benefits considering the fact that employee benefits was not revised since 2 decades. He then said that I am to research on the internet and read some case studies which were given by them and analyze how can I make use of finance department and improve on the accounting system to come up with employee ...