Doughnuts Incorporate Case Study

Course Project Paper

Introduction

Doughnuts Incorporate (Inc.) is a 5 billion dollar a year corporation with 1700 employees that makes and distributes gourmet doughnuts to high-end grocery stores across the country, with plans to expand its business to the overseas markets and restaurants. With this new vision to expand, the company will be doubling its employee base and adding more managerial positions. As the Human Resources Director, I am in charge of the largest personnel expansion for the company, since its inception in 2002. Unfortunately, I am not fully on board with this expansion until we address procedural problems such as grievances filed against management for prohibited personnel practices, violations and pending Equal Employee Opportunities (EEO) lawsuits. My intentions are to keep this company one of the most highly respected businesses known around the world.

The primary culture style from the Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) results for Doughnut Inc. was the Dependency style with 42 percentile and the backup culture style with the second highest percentile of 28 was Approval (see Appendix A for more information on OCI results). The Approval culture style at times has proven to be problematic when various employees are willing to accept whatever their superiors throw at them. Some of our management may not have their employee’s best interest in mind, when trying to achieve the bottom line. This attitude of constant acceptance by employees, I imagine has caused managers to feel that they can get away with treating the employees any type of way. If managers are not properly trained in performing as a leader of people instead of being a manager of products and services, we end up with the current result; low productivity and high complaints and grievances.

Problem Statement

Since 2010, Doughnuts Incorporated has had an increase in grievances and lawsuits filed against its managers and supervisors. One example of this behavior has been a rise in EEO complaints, many of them substantiated in each of the last 3 years. The latest incident happened eight months ago when the company settled out of court with a group of six employees who filed a lawsuit for improper hiring practices. This incident cost the company 500 thousand dollars and the manager was fired and three of the six employees have since left the company to work for one our competitors.

On the surface, Doughnuts Incorporate has a bright future to be a great company however, we were losing a lot our interns and individual contributors at a rate of two to one; for every two employees we hired, one would leave within four years after joining the company. This prompted me to take a closer look at several areas starting with the company’s demographics, where employees 22-28 years of age accounted for 50% of our overall manpower,