Famous With Their Mille Crepes Management Essay

Nadeje Patisserie Cafe is famous with their Mille Crepes and it is also known as the Japan’s Thousand Layer Cake. The meaning of the company’s name Nadeje means “HOPE” in language of Czech Republic. The reason that their cake is being called Mille Crepe is because Mille means “a thousand / many layers” in French and it is similar with Japan’s thousand layer cake. Nadeje prides itself on its quality of fresh ingredients and also the finest handmade Mille Crepe and other special cake, desserts that flavorful and satisfying all on its own.

Nadeje Patisserie Cafe is a well know cake house which is located in Melaka. Although it is located at Melaka, they are also well known by others which are from other states and even tourists from Singapore. This is because it is simply delicious and heavenly crepes that you will not get it in any part of Malaysia except Melaka.

The initial origin shop of Nadeje Patisserie Cafe is located at Plaza Mahkota and it was only 1 shop lot at the time when it was established and currently they manage to expand it into 2 shop lots. Due to its growth in popularity in recent years, Nadeje Patisserie currently opened 2 more branches on Melaka and both of it are located at Jaya 99 Building and another 1 is located at Mahkota Parade Shopping Mall. Nadeje is not associated with any other companies, businesses or outlets selling mille crepe.

Nadeje Patisserie has very comfortable environment and space. The shop’s design has a very thick French style. The chair, sofa, dinner table, counter, closet, portrait, decoration good’s arrangement ornaments, lighting effects and graceful melody’s music attempt lets the customers feel really arrives in France’s cafe. Nadeje Patisserie is the good place for family member, friend and couple to full fill the stomach or chatting.

Nadeje Patisserie Cafe is founded at July of year 2006. There were two co-owners for Nadeje Patisserie Cafe and they are Ms Nozomi Nishimura and Mr. Amos Chong. Later on, Mr. Ng Kien Shin also joined Nadeje and became one of the owner of Nadeje Patisserie Cafe but sadly Mr. Amos Chong resigned and left Nadeje at third quarter of year 2007 due to some reasons.

Mission and Vision statement

Mission

To ensure that each guest receives prompt, professional, friendly and courteous service.

To maintain a clean, comfortable and well maintained premises for our guests and staff.

To provide at a fair price – nutritional, well-prepared meals – using only quality ingredients.

To ensure that all guests and staff are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.

To thank each guest for the opportunity to serve them.

By maintaining these objectives we shall be assured of a fair profit that will allow us to contribute to the community we serve.

Vision

Great taste

Economic pricing

Scalable supply

Sustainable supply

Customer satisfaction

Nadeje prides itself on its quality fresh ingredients and finest handmade Mille Crepe & other special cakes/desserts that taste flavorful and satisfying all on its own

Company History

Nadeje Patisserie Cafe is founded at July of year 2006. There were two co-owners for Nadeje Patisserie Cafe and they are Ms Nozomi Nishimura and Mr. Amos Chong. Nozomi was the sole financial contributor while Amos was the one who would do the baking and marketing. When Amos first started out, he worked from home. In other words, he would be baking the cakes in the kitchen and then get them delivered to numerous cafes in Malacca town. After quite some time, Amos has made enough profits and with more money injected into the business by Nozomi, they bought a shop lot in Plaza Mahkota. Amos then had a proper place to bake and sell his cakes, no more no name bakery, no more delivery and no more come-to-the-house-and-collect method. After running the business for a year, Mr. Amos Chong resigned due to some reasons and roughly that period of time, Mr. Ng Kien Shin joined Nadeje Patisserie.

After 3 years in this industry, finally Nadeje opened its very first 2nd outlet/branch which was located at Dataran Pahlawan shopping mall which is at year 2009. They had a very warm welcome by their loyal customers and also new potential loyal customers as this is how Nadeje manage to sustain its business and expand.

At year 2012, Nadeje shifted its 2nd branch from Dataran Pahlawan shopping mall to Mahkota Parade shopping mall and Nadeje also opened another branch at Jaya 99 building which is their 3rd branch up till current. Nadeje was one of the lucky restaurants get to be featured twice in the newspaper and they were featured twice in the STAR newspaper.

Problem Identification and Discussion

A- Assess the extent to which the current human resource policies and practices are aligned with the strategy of the firm, the degree of internal consistency and consistency with the strategy

Human resources policies provide an organization with a mechanism to manage risk by staying up to date with current trends in employment standards and legislation. The policies must be framed in a manner that the companies vision and the human resource help the company to achieve it or work towards it are at all levels benefited and at the same time not deviated from their main objective.

Human Resource Policy Integration

The establishment of policies can help an organization demonstrate, both internally and externally, that it meets requirements for diversity, ethics and training as well as its commitments in relation to regulation and corporate governance. For example, in order to dismiss an employee in accordance with employment law requirements, amongst other considerations, it will normally be necessary to meet provisions within employment contracts and collective bargaining agreements. The establishment of the human resource policy which sets out obligations, standards of behavior and document disciplinary procedures, is now the standard approach to meeting these obligations.

Recruitment and Selection

On the recruitment and selection of Nadeje, they use online recruitment, local newspaper and walk-in interview. After interview, they will provide trainings for the trainees and they will select candidates that are suitable for the specific job. Besides that, Nadeje also recruit its employees mostly from Myanmar and also some other countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh to decrease operation cost so that they can divert and concentrate more on other aspects. Nadeje insists to serve their customer with the freshest food so that their customers are satisfied with what they consume. That is the reason why Nadeje did not include a website for their customers to order online.

Strategy, Performance Management and Training

Nadeje management is maintaining their business in higher ethical standards by using competitive strategy, which is using superior guest service to differentiate the Nadeje properties, and thereby to increase the length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus boost revenues and profitability. Nadeje have high expectations of their employees to keep in mind about ethical behavior during work. Nadeje wants their staff to begin with moral awareness because customer’s satisfaction comes first. When the customers are satisfied with how they are being served and enjoy their meal, they will be back again. Nadeje provided proper training for their employees to ensure they can work well and serve the customers properly and correctly with quality. During the training, they increase their motivations and confidence level by providing full training on how to serve their customer and maintain the quality and cleanliness of their food which will show their professionalism indirectly. Due to the factor that Nadeje’s staffs consist of foreign worker, so they provide them English classes so that they can communicate well with the local customers, listen to the customers and how to serve them.

Job Analysis and Talent Management

Besides that, the human resources management observes the performance of their trainees to place them into the right position of the job. Nadeje set an objective in training and transfer new skills and behaviors from training site to job site so that every staff will have the same objective and this will avoid miscommunication among employees. In addition, they are reinforcing the training by giving the employees plenty of feedbacks so that the trainees will learn about their mistake and improve. They also provide follow-up assignments at the end of training, so that the trainers can monitor and reinforce what the trainees have learnt. They will also set up some real-life scenarios for the trainees to comprehend so that the trainees can react calmly on what is happening and solve the problem promptly.

B- Identify and describe ONE specific function of various key activities in human resource management, which include job analysis, human resource planning, recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, compensation management, and employee retention.

Training and Developing Employees

The training and development process in Nadeje is not good enough as we still can find out that customers complain about waiter’s attitude after we survey with 10 customers who visited Nadeje before. This means that their training and development process is not efficient enough to solve the problems caused by their employees.

This problem arises when one branch manager have to supervise more than 50 employees in training and development process. It is quite hard for one person to monitor 50 people at the same time and this will definitely slow down the training process and lead to poor customer service to the customers and also decreases customers satisfactory level.

Besides that, Nadeje’s employees are really lack of training. Nadeje is taking lightly about training and development as they only gave the employees training when they feel that employee need it. They did not set the learning objective of the training program nicely based on what problems they have to solve. At the same time, they also did not follow up the entire employee’s learning progress after they conducted the training. As a result, most of the employees do not practice what they learned from the training and waste the resource of the company to provide them with training.

In addition, some experienced workers do not feel that it is their responsibility to guide the new workers as it will not benefits them. Therefore, the passive attitude of trainers will cause the experienced employees unwilling to share their experiences to the newcomers. Consequently, good practices and skills will just disappear if the experienced employees leave the company.

Identified Problems

No matter a firm is a multinational company (MNC) or small and medium enterprise (SME), there will always have problems existing in the business operating process, especially the internal departmental management problem. This is the most common problem that every firm will face while running their business. Nadeje Patisserie is also a firm that faces such problem in their operation of business.

According to our primarily research, Nadeje has hired a marketing manager as an operational manager as well to operate their branches that they have. Therefore, interviewees will only interview with the only manager in their organization no matter it is a job vacancy interview or a newsletter interview. This means that there is no a human resource department in this company. Base on the research, Nadeje hired approximate 50 employees in the organization. The only 1 manager to supervise 50 employees definitely will create a poor management in training and developing employees. Therefore, the setup of a human resource department for Nadeje is required. Based on the research and questionnaire that we have done, most of problem that we found is related to the human resource management.

According to the cases that we found initially, Nadeje is lack of worker in their outlet. This is due to the vacancy of new employees is available in the newspaper advertisement and also in all the outlets that we found. As we can see, there is the only one marketing manager to operate the daily business of 3 branches. Besides, based on the questionnaire that we done with a waiter in Nadeje, we received the complaint of his job has exceed the post that a waiter should do. Based on Dick Grote, performance management defined as different things to different people and performance management is done by going through a performance appraisal process. Dick explains that the reason performance appraisal programs fail is typically not because of shoddy forms, bad data and clumsy discussions. The real problem is that most people involved with the performance management process believe a set of myths that actually prevent their performance management procedures from operating successfully – no matter how well the managers have been trained and how expertly the forms have been designed. For example a waiter is not qualified to do a job of a chef and this will totally decrease the performance of employee. Moreover, the matter of lack of employees will increase the job for staff and lower their satisfaction with the manager. A conflict may occur among the staff with manager and some of them may leave the company unfortunately.

Secondly, this company faces poor attitude problem from workers. After our survey with 10 customers who visited Nadeje before, we found that customer complaint waiters sometime serving customer rudely and they are lack of patient while noting down order from customer. As we have stated early, the lack of worker is the factor that affect the operation of Nadeje. The carry of heavy burden among staff will cause their emotional intelligence out of control. They will start show their anger when under stress. In this situation, they will increase their voice to customers and cause conflict between customers. From here we know that their organization is lack of talent management. According to Garry Dessler, a talent management is a human resource process consists of planning, recruiting, training, managing and compensating employees to achieve strategic goals. An important step is to identify the staff or employees (people and positions) that are critical to the organization. They do not necessarily have to be senior staff members. Many organizations lost a lot of “organizational knowledge” in the downsizing exercises of a few years ago. The impact of the loss was not immediately apparent. However, it did not take long for many companies to realize their mistake when they did not have people with the knowledge and skills to either anticipate or solve problems that arose. Furthermore, according to “International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management” by Julia Christensen Hughes, a talent management is a strategy for improving employee recruitment, retention and engagement within hospitality organization. During the employment process, the lack of talent management may cause the staff could not perform efficiently. Most of the advice by manager does not listen by the staff. One of the reason is most of them work without any training courses. Based, on the research, manager complaints to the upper management regarding to some the staffs are not willing to learn new skills to improve their performance.

As stated above, the lack of human resource management is the main issue of this firm. When we look further into this problem, we found out that Nadeje is taking lightly about the training and developing of new employees during the recruiting process. Based on the current human resource policy, training and developing is a purpose of employee orientation which is a procedure for providing new employees with basic background information about the firm. Employee orientation provides newcomers feel welcome at home and be part of the team and help those newcomers understand the organization in a broad of sense (its past, present, culture and strategies and vision of the future.). Besides, orientation also starts a person on becoming socialized into the firm’s culture, values and way of doing things.

Furthermore, an employee handbook is also another important appliance than makes the employee come to an agreement with the employer. It refers to any problems that involved into both parties rights and authorities. The employee handbook’s contents represent legally binding employment commitments and employers often include disclaimers. These make it clear that statements of company policies, benefits and regulation do not constitute the terms and conditions of an employment contract, either expressed or implied. According to the manager, some to the workers in the firm are foreigner and they do not understand the legal HR policy in Malaysia. They deregulate the terms and conditions of the employment contract. In this situation, some of them fired by the company and send back to their country.

On the other hands, language barrier also a matter happened in this firm. One of the reasons is the firm hired foreign staffs as a waiter and assistant for the chef. Foreign staff will only speak their mother language and some simple English. Tis may be a difficult to communicate among local staff and customers. Based on the manager, the reason they hired foreign staff is because a cheaper salary paid. In this scenario, we can conclude that the firm management is lack of experience on employee testing and selection process.

Why careful selection is important? According to Gary Dessler, selection is a process that chose the best candidates for the job. To whittling down the applicant pool by using the screening tools (tests, assessment centers and background and reference checks). Then the manager can interview likely candidates and decide whom to hire. Gary says that “nothing you do at work is more important than hiring the right employees. It is important for three main reasons: performance, costs and legal obligations”. For testing, it is basically a sample of a person’s behavior. A test is a tool consider as reliable and valid. Few things illustrate evidence-based HR-the deliberate use of the best-available evidence in making decisions about the human resource management practices you are focusing on-as do checking for reliability and validity. Therefore, a test of personal capability is important for manager before making the decision of selecting an employee.

Based on our observation, we noticed that Nadeje did not conduct a job analysis when they are recruiting employees. Based on Parbudyal Singh, job analysis may be viewed as the hub of virtually all human resource management activities necessary for the successful functioning of organizations. At the heart of almost every human resources management program or activity is the need for accurate and thorough job information. Job analysis is thus a prerequisite activity for the effective management of human resources. However, many important assumptions that underlie such fundamental uses of job analysis in management are becoming questionable in today’s business environment. Job analysis is focussed on the collection of work-related information for the job as it currently exists and/or has existed in the past. Furthermore, the procedures are related more to the situation of a one person-one job situation. Yet, as competition and technological innovations increase and product life cycles get shorter, jobs are becoming not only less static, but also less individually-based. Consequently, the tasks to be performed, and the knowledge, skills and abilities required for effective job performance are also becoming more volatile, and sometimes more team-based. Furthermore, and in all likelihood, organizations may perceive the creation of jobs that do not currently exist, the analysis of which is beyond the scope of traditional job analysis. This is the reason why Nadeje always chose the person who does not meet the requirement of the job.

As we can see, organizations such as Mc Donalds and KFC will select a best crew of the month / year as a good example to motivate the employees to perform better but in Nadeje there is no such thing. In this case, the employees in Nadeje are lack of motivation to perform well so that they can obtain the ”Best crew of the month” title. Besides that, miscommunication between employees always happens because Nadeje lack of performance management and appraisals. According to Nathalie Abi Saleh Dargham, the term “performance appraisal” refers to the process by which an individual’s work performance is assessed. Performance appraisal has been defined as the process of identifying, evaluating and developing the work performance of employees in the organization, so that the organizational goals and objectives are more effectively achieved, while at the same time benefiting employees in terms of recognition, receiving feedback, catering for work needs and offering career guidance. Performance appraisal is the formal process of observing and evaluating an employe’s performance. According to Angelo S. Denisi and Robert D. Pritchard “Performance appraisal” is a discrete, formal, organizationally sanctioned event, usually not occurring more frequently than once or twice a year, which has clearly stated performance dimensions and/or criteria that are used in the evaluation process. Furthermore, it is an evaluation process, in that quantitative scores are often assigned based on the judged level of the employee’s job performance on the dimensions or criteria used, and the scores are shared with the employee being evaluated.

Other than that, employee’s goals and performance standards are not set and results in poor performance. Benefits and rewards is a good way to motivate employees to work hard and achieve goals. As we all know, reward plays an important role in motivating employees to work and perform better or be loyal to the company. Everyone hopes for reward after working hard and if they do not get any benefits they will feel disappointed and this makes them unmotivated to work. According to Reena Ali and M.Shakil Ahmed, in order for an organization to meet its obligations to shareholders, employees and society, its top management must develop a relationship between the organization and employees that will fulfill the continually changing needs of both parties. At a minimum the organization expects employees to perform reliably the tasks assigned to them and at the standards set for them, and to follow the rules that have been established to govern the workplace. Management often expects more: that employees take initiative, supervise themselves, continue to learn new skills, and be responsive to business needs. At a minimum, employees expect their organization to provide fair pay, safe working conditions, and fair treatment. Nadeje only reward their employees with year-end company trip and other than that they are no any compensation and benefits for their employees. It shows that Nadeje are not having a good plan on how to reward their employees to keep them motivated, they should come up with a better plan to make sure that their employees are satisfied with their pays and benefits so that they are loyal to the company. In this case, it will overcome Nadeje’s lack of employee’s problem.

Proposed Solutions

We strongly believe that every single problem will have a solution. As we discuss earlier in the assignment, we categorized the problems into the main 4 points. There are lack of worker, employee’s attitude problem, less of training among employee and language barrier.

Firstly, the best solution to solve the problem of lack of worker is by hiring more workers in the organization. The number of workers does not represent the effectiveness of an organization. Therefore, it is very vital for a manager to increase the number of workers with high level of work rate and can serve more customers at one time. This can be done via the careful recruitment process. Manager should place the right person on the right place. Besides, Nadeje manager will also have a high workload as he have to do multiple tasks at one time. To solve this problem, we suggest that Nadeje should hire an assistant manager for him to reduce his workload and increase the efficiency. Sometimes, situation like “Too many cooks will spoil the food” will occur as the number of manager increases. If one assistant is able to help him up to cover all the three branches of Nadeje, then it will be good enough. Nadeje no need to allocate every single branch with a manager.

Secondly, attitude problem is also another threatening problem to Nadeje. In fact, this problem can be avoided as Nadeje should be more careful during employee’s recruitment as attitude is hard to change. It is better to know someone’s background first before hiring them. Perhaps manager can call his or her previous employer first to find out more details before hiring them.Next, Nadeje can provide some benefits to employee who can serve customer with a better attitude. Benefits can be in term of promotion or increase of holiday. This will definitely enhance the level of service in long-term purpose. Besides, this also can be done via Employee’s Evaluation Program. Each worker must be monitored very strictly by a supervisor. Any action of employee during work hour must be taken concern by the supervisor. In addition, Nadeje should practice every single mistake should be fixed on the moment as we think that this is the best way to solve the problems. Once the supervisor realize there is an attitude problem of a worker, he or she must immediately told and advise their workers. They should not be linear and put the problems aside as supervisor may forget to advise them later. Sometimes, good worker may perform badly during peak hour. This may due to tricky customers, workforce’s stress or they are too tire to serve too much of people at one time. Therefore, it is necessary for Nadeje to increase their worker during peak hour, so that everyone can be served in a better way. As a result, workers will not be too tired and customers are satisfied with the services. As we said, it is a “win-win situation” for both sides.

Language barrier or communication problem cause a lot of trouble to Nadeje all the time. This situation arises as Nadeje have around 50 foreign full-time workers from Myanmar and Vietnam. Some of their chefs are even from Japan. Communication will delay the operational process, so Nadeje should try to send their workers to learn simple Malay and English for communication with local workers and customers. Supervisor and local employees should be more patient when dealing with foreign workers. Besides, Nadeje also can request some employees or supervisor to act as “language teacher” for foreign workers. If foreign employees fail to communicate with local customers, they should immediately request assistance from local employees in order to avoid further misunderstanding.

Less of training is another issue that is highlighted by the manager of Nadeje. Training and development is very important to every employee as it will affect the level of service of a worker. Nadeje should provide effective training to their workers to increase worker effectiveness and efficiency. As a manager, he should know that number of training cannot be used to measure the efficiency of worker. Manager or supervisor has to ensure that all the employees learned something at the end of training. They should ensure the learning’s objective is achieved after the training. This is done to avoid the training will be wasted and the company pays for nothing. Besides, a good mentor or a good instructor is very essential for a worker. Therefore, Nadeje should hire an experience trainer who can lead the employee’s to another level of service.

Nadeje did not provide their employees with proper training courses which results in failure to perform what is expected from them. Besides that they also choose wrong person for the job, with regard to choose the person that is not suitable for the human behaviors that the job requires because they are weak in sensing and poor in communicating. Moreover to this problem, they did not conduct a job analysis on recruiting workers which did not inform about what duties the job entails and what human characteristic are required to perform-less verify that all major human resources practices.

To handle this problem, they should conduct a job analysis information when hiring a person for the job, they must analyze the job by collecting data on job activities, working condition, and human traits and abilities needed to recruit a worker. Nadeje can collect data by interviewing the employees and sort out those which is good in communicating and meet the human behaviors that the job requires. Job analysis is crucial for validating all major human resources practices. The employees will learn about the job functions through a job analysis. Managers can use job analysis to see a performance appraisal and compares every single employee’s actual performance with his or her duties and performance standards. They also need to know the candidate’s educational level, skills and requirements. Besides, Nadeje want to comprehend the candidates’ emotional, mental, physical condition and having any hazards or unusual working condition before they recruit someone for this job. Therefore, Nadeje should conduct an interview to gain the information of candidates learning skills, communication skills and technical skills. In addition, Nadeje need to conduct trainings for the candidates who have pass the interview to let them know about the job specifications and function. Job analysis is important in helping employees to execute their overall strategic plans and help human resource department to recruit a right person for a right job.

Nadeje is lack of performance management and appraisals. They did not choose the best crew of month or year. Therefore employees in Nadeje have no motivation to perform better and miscommunications happen between others employees. They have no motivation to compete and provide the best service for the customers, because there are no benefits for them. Moreover, they do not waste their energy and spirit. Furthermore, employee’s goal and performance standards are not set and they will feel numb to work.

Nadeje need to solve this problem by conducting a peer appraisal which appraisals of an employee by his or her peers. Research indicates that peer appraisals can be effective. Peer appraisals had “an immediate positive impact on perception of open communication, task motivation, social loafing, group viability, cohesion and satisfaction”. Besides, Nadeje should provide a rating committees composed of the employee’s immediate supervisor or manager. It can provide a way to include the appraisal the different facets of an employee’s performance observed by different appraisers. Good rating from the supervisor can encourage the worker who did well in past time. Besides rating committees, in the other hand, Nadeje can give chances for the employees to obtain self-rating, employees usually rate themselves higher than do their supervisors or peers. In another study, self-rating can correlated negatively with their subsequent performance in an assessment center- the higher they appraised themselves, the worse they did in center. Therefore, self-rating can give them to know what his specialty and weaknesses. Lastly, Nadeje can investigate this problem with 360-degree feedback; the employees collect performance information on all employees from his supervisor, subordinates, peers and customers. Improvement was most likely to occur hence the feedback the person received indicated that change was necessary, and when the recipients believed that change was necessary an