Sonoco HR Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Sonoco HR - Essay Example The packaging industry as a whole have began to alter the landscape of the industry, a change towards â€Å"packaging end-to-end solutions† instead of individual packaging services have become the norm (Sand, 2009). Sonoco’s leadership for its part have at the onset implemented strategies to control cost that is in-line with its target of generating growth by stimulating sales and its capacity (Gase, 2007). The plan involved modernizing its commercial packaging division to enable it to respond to the demands of clients with dynamic requirements due to these clients’ need to respond to consumer tastes. However, the changes only granted autonomy to the General Manager of each division in managing his own personnel contrary to the required cross functional cooperation to meet the changing customer needs (Heinecke, 2011). Sonoco has been known to encourage a family-oriented, paternalistic, collaborative, and team oriented corporate culture amongst its employees. Unde rperformance and indolence are often times overlooked if it does not affect the bottom line too much. Cindy Hartley was hired to align Sonoco with the ever changing requirements of the packaging industry. ... There is a need to ensure that the performance is reflective of the actual contribution of the employee to the company (Neal, 2009). Sonoco’s employee training should not be limited to hard skills training but also on soft skills training to ensure that employees are developed overtime that will satisfy the third focus area of Cindy which is succession planning (Brinkerhoff & Mulder, 1995). Succession planning is ensuring that any position in the company can be replaced by individuals easily to prevent down time (Sims & Gay, 2007). Sonoco’s existence has been marked with several acquisitions of small companies mainly for its customer base if not additional capacity it will bring to the organization. The strategy is not only sound but it makes more sense, since instead of acquiring new equipment and getting fresh employees to be trained at considerable cost while spending on marketing to acquire new clients, buying companies will accomplish all in a much shorter time fra me (Clemente & Greenspan, 1998). The strategy while sound similarly created specialization amongst and between the employees of the acquired company (Prof Jarillo & Straub, 2012). It should be noted that the acquisition of the different companies equally resulted to the acquisition of employees with unique skill set that is applicable to the acquired company’s operation (Stahl & Mendenhall, 2005). However, the best scenario is to have employees that are multi skilled if not ambidextrous (Kortmann, 2012). The expanding employee base and the expanding customer base did not bode well for leaders within Sonoco and the companies it integrated due to its acquisition. Leaders were not trained to