H & M Case Study

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Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M) is a well-known fashion retailing firm that sells fast-fashion clothing for women and youngsters. It is based in Stockholm, Sweden. As of 2013, H&M operates around 2,600 stores in over 55 countries and employed around 116,000 work forces. Business structure is a critical factor to determine a company 's success or failure. Generally, larger organization has a more complex organizational structure. In the case of H&M, they had adopted matrix structure, one of the traditional organizational structure, into their business. As shown in figure 1, range of functional groups is listed horizontally across the table and on the other is product/task with a manager taking control of each. The functional structure is divided …show more content…

There will be a manger who is in charge of the stores’ profitability and the overall cooperation of all functions within the region like making sure every stores sells the same collection of clothing. By using matrix, managements not only organize their work more flexible with lower costs, but also improving communication and coordination across the countries. However, the matrix structure violates the unity of command principle as each employee reports to at least two or more managers. Next, high degree of centralization is exercised in H&M. Centralization is the concentration of authority for making most decisions at the top levels of the organization. In this instance, the head office in Sweden are in charge of establishing the code of ethics, internal policies, and manuals. Important decisions that are strongly related to the company’s profits are also made by the top management. Nonetheless, H&M has a decentralized system. For example, there are 32 production teams that handle …show more content…

To achieve equilibrium, H&M encourages open communication and employee engagement within the company to satisfy both goal and needs. They came up with an “open book principle” granting every employee the right to express their thoughts on work related issues directly with management. They, too, reinforce the Human Resource Management system by having performance appraisal, a method to evaluate job performance. H&M has done it by using the method of providing feedback as they believe in learning through their own mistakes. Besides, to ensure workers’ work-life balance, the company strongly discourage overtime work and endorse flexible working hours. Everyone in the company is given the opportunity to schedule around their personal and working responsibility. The company also provide comprehensive fringe benefits for their worker which includes staff discounts, incentive bonuses, maternity leave and many more. This is because the Human Resources in H&M emphasise more on job satisfaction rather than title or pay structure. Analysis indicates that H&M has incorporated job enlargement into their business whereby they increase task variety by combining two or more task for more experience working. However, the volume of task to be done is too gruelling for employees causing their company to be listed as one of the highest employee turnover and lowest labour morale in 2008. This shows they have poor job

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