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AVON PRODUCTS CASE STUDY

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In 2006, Avon Products success story turned ugly. After five straights years of ten percent plus growth and twenty-five percent operating profit growth under CEO Andrea Jung, the company suddenly began losing profits. One of the main reasons of this lost was the fast growth of Avon that couldn’t be supported by its employees. As with many growing organizations the structure, people and processes that were right for a $5 billion company were not necessarily a good fit for a ten billion dollar company (Goldsmith & Carter, 2010, p.2). There were weaknesses that hurt the effectiveness of the employees at the talent management practices.

Decisions on talent movement, promotions, and other key talent activities were often influenced as …show more content…

In designing the engagement process, management applied the same three questions: the business benefit, the simple path, to adding additional value. Management accepted the substantial research that showed a correlation, and some causation between increasing engagement and increasing various business metrics. There were two goals established around simplicity. One goal was to understand as much of what drove engagement as possible, while asking the least number of questions. The second goals were to write the questions as simple as possible, so that if managers needed to improve the score on a question, their options for action would be relatively obvious.

Management was confident that if managers took the right actions to improve their engagement results, not only would the next year’s scores increase, but the business would benefit from the incremental improvement. The challenge was to determine and imply communicate to the managers what the right actions were. Management with the assistance of a research team developed a statistical equation model that would become the engine to produce the answers. The statistical equation model allowed them to understand the power of each engagement dimension, for example, immediate manager, empowerment, senior management, to increase engagement, and to express that power in an easy to understand statement

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