Sunshine State Building Society was one of the major players in the mortgage market in Australia since the early 1990s. They had the ambition to become an important player in the banking market also. From a human resource considerations point of view this was a huge task. Human resources are that part of a company that should manage the forces internal and external to that organization (DeCenzo & Robbins, 2010).
In our case, the task needed careful management of the relationship with their existing customers/members along with the proper treatment with their staff. They also had to consider the relationship with the regulatory bodies. They had to deal with the Building Societies Commission regarding their merging with Tropic of Capricorn and to the Reserve Bank of Australia for their banking license. The process of conversion was complex and each part was inter-related. If one would not be ready until the deadline, the entire process could fail.
The case
Customer files clean-up
The two mortgage companies had separate database accounts for their customers. The first task was to form a joint database and the second was to systemize the data. Each member should match only one account. This was needed in order to assess the number and weight of each shareholder as the new company was a public corporation. It was the duty of human resources to coordinate the process of joining of the two databases and regulation of accounts without that forming a negative perception from customers. Here IT technology can be determining since it can speed up the process and reduce customer dissatisfaction.
Share dealing
Another point is the share dealing process. There are about five and a half million members who will become shareholders and almost two million of them are expected to sell their shares the first day. This large volume share dealing can negatively impact company’s image in the market if they do not manage to conduct them as customer’s desire. Human resources had to find a way to conduct all these transactions the smoothest way possible. That is why Sunshine decided to have its own executable system of share dealing. SSSDL was born with the task to take care of all the systems and software development that were needed to support these processes.
Work force managing
In other words human resources had to design the process, recruit all the necessary staff, regulate the company as it should and prepare all documents needed by customers in order to carry with their transactions. Not only customers are important, but proper staff treatment also. Without a professional and motivated work force it will be difficult for every company to conduct operations as it should (Luftman, 2004).
Customer treatment
In our case the company was required paper work to give each of the members a share certificate, which is the legal document that proves their ownership of the share (Mullins et al, 2008). The company invented the ‘nominee account’ where members had the possibility to conduct their dealings electronically. This would significantly cut the paper work and bureaucracy and thus make the company more efficient (DeCenzo & Robbins, 2010).
Fair share pricing strategy
A final point was the share price on which shareholders had to base their transactions. In a stock market, the price of the share changes quite often, even within minutes (Kinicki & Kreitner, 2003). Thus, then people buy or sell their shares the transaction price might not be the quoted one since few minutes are required to complete the transaction. In order not to create a bad feeling and perception among their customers and cut the administrative work that might have been created by complaints, Sunshine decided to freeze the share price.
References
DeCenzo, D.A. & Robbins, S.P. (2010). Fundamentals of Human Resource Management, 10th edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Luftman J (2004) Managing the Information Technology Resource, N. Y.: Pearson.
Mullins, J. W., Walker, Jr., O. C., & Boyd, H. W. (2008). Marketing management: A strategic decision making approach (6h ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin.