Ancol Ltd

Background Facts Paul Simard has accepted the position as the plant manager of Jonquiere plant in Ancol Ltd. In order to strengthen relations between management and employees, Paul decided to remove all time clocks from the plant. Instead, the plant would assume that employees had put in their full shift. Two months later, however, the absenteeism started to appear.
Problems
All of problems resulted from the removal of the time clocks were that the increased absenteeism levels were beginning to have the negative affect to plant productivity and relations between supervisors and employees lead to be strained. Without time clocks, payroll department could not actually calculate the deduction pay for the amount of time employees were late.
Symptoms of the Problems
• Employees showing up late, leaving early, and taking extended lunch breaks
• Other employees feeling unfairness
• Reduction in plant productivity
• Supervisors having to do additional duties which they had no previous experience on
• Deteriorated relationships amongst employees and supervisors
• Payroll department wasn’t able to calculate payroll properly
• Employees filing complaints to the labour union
• Increased workload by labour unions and supervisors to handle disputes
Analysis
The main reason of these problems was the quick decision to remove the time clocks from the plant with the lack of planning by management. Paul’s decision was based on something that he heard at a seminar “building trust in the workplace” rather than doing an internal analysis of the plants existing problems to come up with a proper solution. Management before removing the time clocks should systemically research and evaluate the result in other similar plants and divisions assuming the implementation of new strategies or policy had been recorded in the corporate level. In addition to lack of planning, inexperienced and lacked the necessary interpersonal skills supervisors deteriorated relations between