Labor Requirements

According to the forecast of labor requirements found in Table 1.1, next year we will need 4,845 store associates, 42 shift leaders, 105 department managers, 21 assistant managers, and 5 store managers. As a result of both these figures and our hiring policy of hiring internally and thus starting every employee at the lowest position, we will need to hire a large amount of store associates. We will keep most of them at the associate position and promote some of the more experienced associates into the managerial positions. We also must keep in mind our other hiring policies of developing talent and having exceptional workforce quality. In order to fulfill all of our hiring practices, we propose the following plan.

We will hire at least 4,845 store associates to meet our projected needs for the next year. We will do this by attempting to dispel negative perceptions of retail store employment by providing higher pay and store discounts as well as offering flextime. We will also strive to have and to build exceptional workforce quality in a number of ways. We will work to improve job satisfaction by providing employees with task variety. We will allow store associates to work in different departments and to do different things from working the cash registers to designing and assembling in-store displays. We will also encourage teamwork by having contests between store departments and have parties to celebrate everyone's hard work and to honor the winning team. Tanglewood's comment system will also be stressed to show that although store associates are the lowest level position at Tanglewood, these people are one of the company's most important assets and that their comments and suggestions are encouraged. We must keep in mind that associates are often the face of the company because they directly interact with customers. We must show them how important they are to Tanglewood.

We may want to focus much of our efforts to recruiting