Motorola Case Study

In the 1930s, it commercialized car radios under ‘Motorola’ as a brand name. During the period, it established police radio and home radio departments, began national advertising, and instituted the pioneering personnel programs. This resulted in the name of the company being changed to Motorola Inc. in 1947. Currently, the firm is organized into six business units which are the personal communications sector, the broadband communications sector, the government and industrial solutions sector, the semiconductor products sector, and the global telecom solutions sector. One of them is that the procurement system used has resulted in a disparity between the pay rates of contingent workers and those of full-time employees. The contingent workers end up finding out the disparities because they work side by side with the full time employees.

Secondly, the budgeting practices of the firm are ineffective in the sense that the compensation for the contingent workers is not logged as expenses for particular project. These salaries seem to be part of annual departmental budget. Furthermore, contingent workers are usually employed as a way of assessing their ability to deliver before they are granted permanent employment. The team was carefully selected to ensure that the program was highly effective. The integrated services model was then designed with the objective of obtaining candidates of high quality on a timely manner to ensure that Motorola can adjust its workforce to meet the business needs at hand. Another objective was to develop an infrastructure for the management of a population of contingent workers.

The final objective was to keep costs in control. The need for this model was created by Motorola’s well-understanding of the cycles of its industry of operation. The system required managers to send requisitions to MSP. Once the MSP receives the requisitions, recruiters would be contracted to find candidates that would be taken to take the tests. The recruiters would use their individualized methods to find the candidates who they send to Motorola for the tests. Once a contingent worker was selected, he or she would be taken through orientation and the completion of paper works needed for the workers to begin working. The advantages of this design included increased competition among the staffing companies that would lead to responsiveness.

Once a requisition for the required skill set was received, the MSP manager would conduct the database to find suitable matches. Motorola would then have round table meetings with select suppliers to ensure that there is a complete understanding of the skills. Contingent workers were also allowed to apply for full-time positions but they were not frequently hired due to works being driven on a shift to project basis and contingent workers preferring to maintain flexible work status. All these models were put in place with the belief that it would solve the SPS staffing problems. However, the outcomes were unexpected. Even though the tasks were standardized, Anybe had to spend hours on telephone explaining to recruiters the sets of skills that were needed and the effective mechanisms for screening candidates using their resumes.

After doing this, Anybe was forced to enter a process of negotiating terms of employment with recruiters. She was reluctant to move to a new model because she would lose connections with the recruiters representing the employees. However, she explained the process as costly in terms of the time she spent collecting information and negotiating with recruiters. Other than these factors, the twenty first century has come with a shift in workforce paradigm that has continuously affected how Motorola procures and manages its talent. When working with the temporary agencies, Motorola should take efforts to ensure that a win-win business agreement is reached just like any other form of business partnership. To avoid extra costs, it is important for invoicing to be done in a transparent manner and based on the agreement between the two parties.

Time sheets should be used all the time to prevent Motorola from finding itself in a situation where it has to pay extra hour costs (Alkula, 2016). This form of agreement with an agency ensures that whenever Motorola gets a committed worker, the procedure for getting the employee to be employed on a full-time basis is negotiated based on clear terms to avoid circumstances which Motorola has found itself in while trying to turn contingent workers to full-time employees. In addition, there is a need for firms like Motorola to find the right mix between contingent workers and full-time workers. The combination of these measures with the use of temporary agencies of suppliers can eliminate the costs incurred by Motorola while easing the process of turning contingent workers to permanent employees.