SNA PROJECT PROPOSAL: Pablo Caamaño

Background:

The sales department of the company X is currently facing a very high staff turnover for the new hires. The new salesmen are leaving the company during their first year and the underlying reason is unknown for the management at the moment.

Even though they are not aware of the nature of this situation they claim that the compensation policies as well as the promotion opportunities were never a source of complaints from the employees´ viewpoint.

The objective:

The executive board would like to see if the SNA could give them some insights into the problem. If so they might be able to fix it.

The hypothesis:

The career perspectives in this big multinational are great so as social analysts, we think that the root of the problem might be based on the staff´s relationships.

The methodology:

We would start by handing in a survey to all workers with several questions:

The main one, which will drive our analysis, would be:

·         “With whom do you spend more time within your department?” (They could name up to three people)

This question would allow us to draw the map which shows all the professional relationships among salesmen, regional managers, country managers, etc. in the sales department.

We would be interested in getting to know some attributes of them as well like:

• Some demographics (gender, age…)
• Years of previous experience
• Sector of previous experience
• Years in the company (in sales)
• Position in the hierarchy
• What do they invest more time in: Paperwork, clients, employees (if they have some people underneath them), reporting to their bosses, etc.

     Conclusion:

With all this information through SNA we could find out that the regional managers, who are supposed to take care of the new hires and train them, don’t spend time enough with them but instead they invest it in reporting their own bosses, doing paperwork, or with their own clients.

Hence, maybe the fact they don’t have time enough to dedicate to their own new employees combined with other factors (such as lack of previous experience of these new hires), might cause that they are lost in their daily work and get really stressed. This could be the ultimate reason why they quit the job if they don’t feel able to manage alone during the first year.

Once we know that, we could think of some solutions like changing the profiles the company is looking for to one more independent or experienced, diminishing the level of bureaucracy, or changing the priorities of the regional managers´ time for instance.