Introduction to Almarai Co

Discuss about the Case Study of Middle Eastern Organization.

The report is a discussion of a case study related to a Middle Eastern organization. The organization chosen for the report is Almarai Co (almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai, 2018). The company had its establishment in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian Kingdom in the year 1977. Almarai Co is one of the leading food and beverage manufacturer as well as distributor in the Middle East. The company represents a partnership between Agri food pioneer of Ireland, his brother Paddy and the Prince Sultan bin Mohammed bin Saud Al Kabeer. The report will discuss about the vision, mission and strategy of the company. There will also be discussion on reviewing the performance management system and the performance appraisal process. There report would also provide an insight into the organizational approach in dealing with the Raters Bias. The report would also show the degree to which the strategy for Raters Bias coincides with performance management of human resource. There are also recommendations on enhancing the alignment.

In present times, Almarai Co represents one of the largest diary firms in the world that has a vertical integration. The brand of the company has been synonymous with the quality.  The company believes in maintaining a quality culture throughout (almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/profile, 2018). It is the strategic decision making undertaken by the senior management and the board of directors that extends across the manufacturing, farming and the distribution of the operations that acts integral for the development of the professional skills of the employees. The company has high expectations from the vendors and the suppliers and exercises a thorough quality control measures across their procurement activities. The vision, mission and strategy of the company are as follows:

Vision

The vision of Almarai Co remains in being the preferred choice amongst the customers and lead the market with its beverage products and superior food (almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/mission-vision-values, 2018).

Mission:

The mission of Middle Eastern firm lies in providing nutritious and quality food and beverages that enriches the lives of the consumers on a daily basis (almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/mission-vision-values, 2018).

Strategy:

The strategy includes (almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/strategy, 2018):

1. Being Adaptable: Almarai Co is not only flexible and agile but is also quite confident in undertaking bold decisions for the benefit of the stakeholders
2. Act of Sharing: The Company shares and collaborate knowledge and skills for enabling people to be their best.
3. Being Passionate: Almarai C is proud of the work they do and strives for an exceptional result.
4. Being Innovative: The Middle Eastern company strives for improving the business on a day-to-day basis and ensures maximizing creative potential of the people
5. Being Respectful: The Company believes in earning respect through embracing trust, fairness and integrity in all the relationships.
6. Striving for Excellence: Almarai Co not only shows diligence in work but also consistently delivers excellent quality in almost everything they do

The Performance Management System (PMS) represents a continuing cycle of the development process between the line manager (LM) and an individual employee (Pollitt, 2013). This occurs round the year, supports the accomplishment of the strategic objectives of an organization, and is applicable to all the employees. The organizational training and development unit if a firm is responsible for ensuring smoother implementation of PMS.

Vision, Mission and Strategy of Almarai Co

The general guidelines for PMS put forward by Almarai Co include (Keong, 2013):

1. The manual for performance management system should focus on various areas like:
2. Plans for career development
3. Determination of career paths

Ensuring Succession Planning

1. Ensuring Talent Management
2. Effective Communication Process for Determination of the Success of PMS includes:
3. Clarification of the expectations of the company
4. Setting of the objectives

Identification of the goals

1. Providing necessary feedback
2. Evaluation of the results
3. Evaluation of the results
4. The alignment of the training and development program with the objectives mentioned in Employee Performance Management and the development Plan
5. The employee as well as the line manager holds the responsibility for the developmental needs. The organizational training and development unit facilitates the procedure and helps in providing opportunities for the meeting the growth and developmental needs of the employees. However, the degree of grasping these opportunities lies in the responsibility of the individual.
6. The ownership of the employee remains crucial for the process of development. The constant support of the company will however not be enough for ensuring the process of development.

There are Bands designed by Almarai Co for the Performance Appraisal System of the supervisor level (SL) and the general workers (GW) (Shaout & Trivedi, 2013). The Bands ensures natural differentiation and fairness amongst the employees depending upon their performance through the entire process. The company has however decided implementing a forced ranking system for marking the final ratings for performance appraisal for the SL and GW Bands for a specific year. Since the supervisor level (SL) bands and the general workers (GW) bands represents majority of the population of Almarai Co therefore the application of the Forced Ranking System ensures the fair distribution of the ratings amongst the non management employees and across all the departments of  the company. Therefore, it is essential for ensuring that each of the employees in the SL and GW bands has at least one of the ratings by the year-end thereby representing the performance appraisal based on a system of forced ranking. It is however essential to understand as some of the employees might think mistakenly that have two unusual ratings. However, the system remains applicable to almost all the employees belonging to the different bands. The application is however different for different categories of the employees (Aggarwal & Thakur, 2013).

Almarai Co tries and selects the key performance indicators and uses them effectively in improving the business performance and in addressing the Raters Bias (Street & Richardson, 2015). The company has thus implemented setting of key performance indicators (KPI), known as the SMART objectives, for the employees to pursue.  It is necessary for each of the employees for appointing various objectives and ensures their approval by the line manager. These objectives should fall under the SMART framework that implies:

Specific: List of the tasks or the actions undertaken for accomplishing the smart objective

Measurable: This assets a criteria of success for each of the action of the task and ensure indicating their measurement

Achievable: This implies the availability of required resources

Relevant: This implies showing the relation between the corporate strategy and the division strategy

Timely: This indicates the time of achieving the objective and implementation of the review method.

Almarai Co also puts forward a competency framework in addressing the Raters Bias. The competency framework refers to the skills, knowledge and the attributes necessary for the people within organization (Tajeddin & Alemi, 2014). As per the competency framework each individual role will have desired competencies necessary for effectively performing a job. Therefore, a well framed competency framework will include:

1. Ensuring that people are able to demonstrate adequate expertise.
2. Evaluation of the performance in a more effective manner
3. Efficient identification of competency and skill gap
4. Ensure sufficient planning for succession
5. Efficient working of the change management process

Almarai Co aligns its strategy of addressing Raters Bias to the performance management of human resource in a manner that helps in leading the business based on the deeper understanding of industrial economic, market and technological trends (Cascio, 2018). This also helps in providing long term direction and clarity. These steps however include:

1. Excellence in Orientation: This ensures exemplification of passion, provides a proof for commitment and demonstrating persistence for improving not only the performance but also overcome barriers
2. Management of Talent: This steps act as a magnet for the development. It also helps in attracting, developing, retaining and mobilizing the employees with higher caliber.
3. Driving the Change: This involves initiating, sponsoring and driving the organizational change for improving the performance and addressing the changing conditions of the business. This involves motivating and supporting others in successfully adapting to or managing such changes.
4. Ensuring Interpersonal Fluency: This implies the ability of adapting the personal behavior in building effective relationships with the people of all cultures, personalities and races
5. Undertaking Influencing and Negotiating: This ensures leveraging the higher impact negotiating and influencing skill for serving the shared objectives and reaching agreement on the course of the action that helps in delivering outcomes that results in win-win situation.
6. Ensure Decision Making: This helps in demonstrating the power for balancing the decisive action along with the research, thoughtful listening and analysis. This also ensures building the confidence of the others and proactively driving implementation and execution.
7. Resulting in Entrepreneurial Leadership: these results in driving the growth and improving the business thereby creating value and outperforming the competitors.
8. Resulting in Strategic Execution: This helps in translation of the strategies, plans and policies into action. This also results in demonstrating the power of carrying out and accomplishing that thing.

The alignment of strategy for dealing with the Raters Bias to the performance management of the human resource can be enhanced by the following means:

1. Awareness Building and Training: Before the permanence of each of the evaluation cycle managers needs to be undergo a short course on eLearning course or in person discussion in smaller groups. This resulted in the covering the importance of the process related to performance management, the suitable way for evaluating the performance and in avoiding biases.
2. Enhancement of Performance Appraisal Tool: This results in both the managers and the employees in maintaining an online journal of the key events all through the year. This would be useful while undertaking evaluation of the performance.
3. Evaluation of a Questionnaire: This result in development of an evaluation questionnaire for ensuring that there enough information delivered through responses that help the managers in the identification of the biased judgment.
4. Ensuring a 360 Degree Feedback Session: Necessary feedback from the superiors and the peers helps in providing necessary insights into the performance which is ignored by the managers as a result of his biases.

Conclusion:

The report ends in the note by providing recommendations on the enhancement of a strategy addressing Raters Bias to the performance management of the human resource. The report also provides an insight into performance management system and the personal appraisal process of Almarai Co. Thus, it can be said that the performance management represents a subjective process based on the subjective judgment of the manager.

References:

Aggarwal, A., & Thakur, G. S. M. (2013). Techniques of performance appraisal-a review. International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology (IJEAT), 2(3), 617-621.

almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/ (2018). Retrieved 26 March 2018, from https://www.almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/strategy/

almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/mission-vision-values/ (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/mission-vision-values/ [Accessed 26 Mar. 2018].

almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/profile/. (2018). Retrieved 26 March 2018, from https://www.almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/strategy/

almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/strategy/ (2018). Retrieved 26 March 2018, from https://www.almarai.com/en/corporate/almarai/strategy/

Armstrong, M., & Taylor, S. (2014). Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers.

Cascio, W. (2018). Managing human resources. McGraw-Hill Education.

Keong Choong, K. (2013). Understanding the features of performance measurement system: a literature review. Measuring Business Excellence, 17(4), 102-121.

Pollitt, C. (2013). The logics of performance management. Evaluation, 19(4), 346-363.

Shaout, A., & Trivedi, J. (2013). Performance Appraisal System–Using a Multistage Fuzzy Architecture. International Journal of Computer and Information Technology (ISSN: 2279–0764) Volume.

Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P., … & Plimmer, G. (2015). Managing Employee Performance & Reward: Concepts, Practices, Strategies. Cambridge University Press.

Street, C. N., & Richardson, D. C. (2015). Descartes versus Spinoza: Truth, uncertainty, and bias. Social Cognition, 33(3), 227-239.

Tajeddin, Z., & Alemi, M. (2014). Pragmatic rater training: Does it affect non-native L2 teachers’ rating accuracy and bias. Iranian Journal of Language Testing, 4(1), 66-83.