“Written Questions & Answer”

Answer 1

The legislation that is current requirements for the organization in their strategic plan is as follows-

1. Work Health and Safety Regulation: – The work and safety regulation act 2011 consider as an important act that explains how to prevent or minimize a risk at the workplace (Dollard & Bakker, 2010). It states that it is the duty of the management to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the employees at the workplace. Therefore, the organisation should include the work health and safety regulation in their policies, so that employees can be protected from the dangerous substances. Thus, this regulation also encourages employees to perform every activity without developing any feeling of fear, hesitation.
2. Environmental/ Sustainable regulation: – The strategic plan needs to include the regulation of sustainability in order to converse the maximum resources and energy. It is because sustainability not only assists to focus on energy efficiency but it also encourages environmental friendliness by ensuring the environmental quality. This regulation supports the “go green” concept and allows the company to embrace the recycle, reuse practices in their business operation (Haddock‐Fraser & Tourelle, 2010). Therefore, this legislation contributes largely towards the environment issues.
3. Industrial Relation legislation: -The industrial relation legislation acts support the relation between the employer and employees, and it also contributes towards the settlement of the disputes and conflicts among them (Baccaro & Howell, 2011). Therefore, this legislation deals with the trade disputes matters that arise in the workplace. It is estimated that the incorporation of trade disputes legislation is the current requirements as people come up into the workplace from different background and cultural diversity that often creates the differences. So this reflects that the industrial relation legislation will prove to be beneficial for the organization in terms to reduce the conflict and enhance the productivity. These compliances and the guidelines are considered as an efficient and effective way to help a large number of diversified employees and hold the interest of each diversified persons.
4. Anti-discrimination legislation: – The legislation of anti-discrimination acts prohibits the employment that is done by color, sex, race, origin and ethnic, etc. (Meer, 2010). This law supports the rights in terms to treat every individual fairly whether it is disabled or mentally ill. Therefore, by adoption, this regulation in the strategic plan helps the business to increase their productivity through satisfying all the employees’ needs and wants without making any type of discrimination or biases.
5. Privacy: – The privacy act deals with the regulation of storage, use of personal information about the individual. It is collected by the government and other public as well as private organizations. So in that case, the company should ager this regulation and collect the information about the people as per the rules and regulation of this act. Thus, through incorporating this legislation into the strategic plan of the company, then it helps the company to the systemic flow of information and able to reduce the high chances of frauds and the misleading issue of information (Enck et al., 2014).

Answer 2

The strategic risks are that risk which is associated with the strategic planning. It includes risks that arise from the following:-

• Merger & Acquisition
• Change in the customer’s attitude, perception, and demands
• Research and Development.

Merger & acquisitions can be considered as the biggest risk for the companies. For instances, the US company purchase the Canadian competitors company. Thus in such case, company employees suffer due to the difference in policy and existences of little biases among the acquisition. In addition to this, the change in customer demands is also considered as a risk for the firms as increasing competition will raise the chances of customer switching of substituent products (Bryson, 2011). Therefore to loosing the competitive position in the particular market is the main risk that company has with their strategic planning.

In addition to this, there is one more risk that arises on the strategic planning at the time of the merger that whether the other company could invest in the research and development. Because many companies do not want to make more investment in the research department due to such practices raise the cost/ budget of the company. In that case, these influence the company in a negative manner.

Thus, these are the risk that may occur with the strategic planning of the company.

Answer 3

The risk management strategy consider as a structured and a systematic approach that helps in identifying, assessing and managing risk. The risk management strategy also helps the company to take the appropriate actions through assessing and reviewing the risk. At the same time, the risk management strategy has been developed for even small projects to order to avoid any risk in advances only (Martincorena et al., 2012). Risk management strategy will prove to be a necessity for the organization due to increasing competition and forces of external factors. Thus these practices create the need to adopt the risk management’s strategy.  In case to the development and implementing of the strategic plan, then the risk management strategy plays a significant role. Likewise, the risk management strategy helps the company to identify, quantify and mitigate the risk that could influence the company strategic plan. The risks that associate with the strategic plans are the shift of consumer demands, increasing competition pressure, merger integration and stakeholder pressure, etc. Thus, to handle such risk, the risk managements strategy are crucial to measure the scope or effects of risk on the company and on the basis of estimation of risk, company take the decision for their future action plan, therefore, the risk managements strategy prove to be profitably for the company to successfully develop and implement the strategic plan.

Answer 4

PEST analysis is considered as the framework that describes the external factors and their affects on the performances of the company. It includes various factors like political, economic, social and technological factors. This analysis helps the company to take an appropriate business decision by determining the influences of these factors on the companies operation. Moreover, this analysis also proves to be important for estimating the risk that is associated with external factors (Ho, 2014). Therefore, the studying about the PEST analysis is the current necessity of the company to reduce the impact of external factors.

PEST analysis stands of political, economical, social and technological

Political: Government regulation and legal considerations tend to be considered as a factor that could influence the business environment and trade market.

Economical: Inflation, interest rates, economic growth are considered as an economic factor that is bound to have effects on the business cycle and its functions.

Social: Changing demographic lifestyle, attitude and culture are the strong factors that are used by the company while shaping the products (MA et al., 2010).

Technological: Technological advancement, the lifecycle of technologies also consider as an important factors in the current scenario where people prefer more on advanced technological product offerings. In that case, these factors have a deep impact on the business environment.

SWOT Analysis, is the important tool that is useful to determine the organization strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats. It includes two internal as well as external analyses. The internal analysis indicates company capability and limitation while external analysis discovers about the opportunities that company needs to grab in future while focusing on threats (Amin et al., 2011). It assists the company to accomplish its objective in the present competition market by estimating their strength and weakness. At the same time, it also allows the company to minimize the threats and achieve high opportunity that is available in the market. Therefore, it is considered as the crucial concept for the companies.

It is presented in this form:-

Answer 5

Internal and external are the biggest sources of information that helps the company to estimate about their customer base, competitor, vision and mission of company (Fotopoulos & Psomas, 2010). Organisation uses various methods in the internal sources such as annual reports, sales trends, internal documentations that include order forms, invoices, credit notes and procedural manuals, etc. These help in identifying the company key competitors, company market and its customer base (Grimpe & Kaiser 2010). Besides that with the analyzing the sales trends of the company, the management can also estimate its customer base.

In addition to this, externals sources of information are more concerned about what is occurring beyond the boundaries of the organization. To collect the information related to the organization market, competitors and their key customer base, for that opinion polls, census figures, judgments, expertise/ professional advice, trade journals, professionals publications are the best way to collect information about the particular company customer, competitors (Du et al., 2010). Therefore, both internal, as well as external, consider as relevant sources to gather the detail information about the company’s product strategy and its important stakeholders. Hence, both the sources prove to be useful for the investor or shareholders to make the future investment decision. At the same time, these sources guide the company to find out the areas where the improvements are required and encourage to bringing the innovation.

Answer 6

There are various techniques which need to use to develop the organizational values. These can be the TQM method, customer-focused approach, ethical and sustainable methods. Hence, these all assist the organization to create the value in their business operations (Hoang & Rothaermel, 2010).

TQM methods allow the organization to make an improvement in the quality of their offering. While customer focused approach contributes towards largely towards the serving its clients’ needs through developing the products as per their changing needs. On the other side, the ethical and sustainable practices also help the company to reduce the environmental issues by practicing the go green concept (Hoang & Rothaermel, 2010). In addition to this, CSR is also considered as vital methods for the organization as this technique allows the company to directly interact with the customers and CSR activity also help to identify the needs of the untapped market. Therefore, CSR proves to be beneficial for the business for enhancing their goodwill. Thus, all these practices assist the organization to add the value in their offerings (Parguel et al., 2011).

 References

Amin, S. H., Razmi, J., & Zhang, G. (2011) Supplier selection and order allocation based on fuzzy SWOT analysis and fuzzy linear programming. Expert Systems with Applications, 38(1), pp. 334-342.

Baccaro, L., & Howell, C. (2011) A common neoliberal trajectory: The transformation of industrial relations in advanced capitalism. Politics & Society, 39(4), pp. 521-563.

Bryson, J. M. (2011) Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: A guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement (Vol. 1). USA: John Wiley & Sons.

Dollard, M. F., & Bakker, A. B. (2010) Psychosocial safety climate as a precursor to conducive work environments, psychological health problems, and employee engagement. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 83(3), pp. 579-599.

Du, S., Bhattacharya, C. B., & Sen, S. (2010) Maximizing business returns to corporate social responsibility (CSR): The role of CSR communication. International Journal of Management Reviews, 12(1), pp. 8-19.

Enck, W., Gilbert, P., Han, S., Tendulkar, V., Chun, B. G., Cox, L. P., … & Sheth, A. N. (2014) TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 32(2), pp. 5.

Fotopoulos, C. V., & Psomas, E. L. (2010) The structural relationships between TQM factors and organizational performance. The TQM Journal, 22(5), pp. 539-552.

Grimpe, C., & Kaiser, U. (2010) Balancing internal and external knowledge acquisition: the gains and pains from R&D outsourcing. Journal of management studies, 47(8), pp. 1483-1509.

Haddock‐Fraser, J. E., & Tourelle, M. (2010) Corporate motivations for environmental sustainable development: exploring the role of consumers in stakeholder engagement. Business Strategy and the Environment, 19(8), pp. 527-542.

Ho, J. K. K. (2014) Formulation of a systemic PEST analysis for strategic analysis. European academic research, 2(5), pp. 6478-6492.

Hoang, H. A., & Rothaermel, F. T. (2010) Leveraging internal and external experience: exploration, exploitation, and R&D project performance. Strategic Management Journal, 31(7), pp. 734-758.

MA, J. H., ZHANG, Q., & YUAN, J. (2010) The strategic analysis of the development of the logistics industry in Shandong Province based on the SWOT-PEST matrix. Technology and Innovation Management, 3, pp. 022.

Martincorena, I., Seshasayee, A. S., & Luscombe, N. M. (2012) Evidence of non-random mutation rates suggests an evolutionary risk management strategy. Nature, 485(7396), pp. 95.

Meer, N. (2010) The implications of EC Race Equality and Employment Directives for British anti-discrimination legislation. Policy & politics, 38(2), pp. 197-215.

Parguel, B., Benoît-Moreau, F., & Larceneux, F. (2011) How sustainability ratings might deter ‘greenwashing’: A closer look at ethical corporate communication. Journal of business ethics, 102(1), pp. 15.