Blockbuster Inc. is an American-based chain of VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and video game rental stores currently under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At its peak in 2009, Blockbuster had up to 60,000 employees.[1] As of January 3, 2010, there were over 5,000 Blockbuster stores in the U.S. and 17 countries worldwide. It is headquartered in the Renaissance Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas.[2] Because of competition from other video rental companies such as Netflix, Blockbuster has seen significant revenue losses. The company filed for bankruptcy on September 23, 2010
The first Blockbuster store opened October 1985 in Dallas, Texas at the corner of Skillman and Northwest Highway.[4][5] The founder of the company was David Cook, who grew the business and brought it public. The innovation was derived from Cook's experience with managing huge databases. After the first few stores opened, he built a $6 million warehouse in Garland, TX, that could pull and package multiple stores in a day. Key to the early success of Blockbuster was their ability to customize a store to its neighborhood, loading it up with films geared specifically to demographic profiles in addition to the popular new releases, and a sizable collection of catalog titles.[6] The logo was created by Lee Dean, working for the now defunct Rominger Advertising agency.[citation needed]
In 1987, the company won a court case against Nintendo of America, Inc, which paved the way for the rental of videogames.[7]
Scott Beck, a young businessman in Dallas, approached John Melk, prior executive with Waste Management, about buying a franchise. Melk brought the idea to his friend and business associate, Wayne Huizenga, who agreed to buy the company after overcoming initial concerns about the video industry.[citation needed]
Huizenga and Melk used similar techniques in growing Waste Management, and soon, they were opening one store every seventeen hours.[citation needed] They also bought every Blockbuster franchise they could get their hands on (removing pornographic movies). At the helm, Huizenga spent the late 80s acquiring several of Blockbuster's key rivals—most notably Major Video. The company became a multi-billion dollar company and was sold to Viacom for a price of $8.4 billion
The task of managing employees can be understood as a three stage process:
1. Identify the cost of employee turnover
2. Understand why employee leave
3. Implement retention strategies
Identify the cost of employee turnover:
The organizations should start with identifying the employee turnover rates within a particular time period and benchmark it with the competitor organizations. This will help in assessing the whether the employee retention rates
are healthy in the company. Secondly, the cost of employee turnover can be calculated. According to a survey, on an average, attrition costs companies 18 months’ salary for each manager or professional who leaves, and 6 months’ pay for each hourly employee who leaves. This amounts to major organizational and financial stress, considering that one out of every three employees plans to leave his or her job in the next two years.
Understand why employees leave:
Why employees leave often puzzles top management. Exit interviews are an ideal way of recording and analyzing the factors that have led employees to leave the organization. They allow an organization to understand the reasons for leaving and underlying issues. However employees never provide appropriate response to the asked questions. So an impartial person should be appointed with whom the employees feel comfortable in expressing their opinions.
Implement retention strategy:
Once the causes of attrition are found, a strategy is to be implemented so as to reduce employee turnover. The most effective strategy is to adopt a holistic approach to dealing with attrition. An effective retention strategy will seek to ensure:
Attraction and recruitment strategies enable selection of the ‘right’ candidate for each role/organization
New employees’ initial experiences of the organization are positive
Appropriate development opportunities are available to employees, and that they are kept aware of their likely career path with the organization
The organization’s reward strategy reflects the employee drivers
The leaving process is managed effectively
Retaining Employee Programs have never been kept in place traditionally. However, things have changed in the job scenario in recent years and now, especially in the prominent metros, employees are basking in new found market value. There is no dearth of employment opportunities and when it comes to keeping and holding back the best, employers are stretching way beyond in the effort. It is very important for small, medium and large scale employers to retain key employees and treat attrition troubles. The current job scenario has major HR Department hawks, intensely competitive and poaching from each other, if need be. The entrepreneur can choose to either hold on to productive employees or lose them to competition. Now, with their worth well known and bargained, employees too refuse to stick to an employer for years, if there is a better choice beckoning out there.
The amount of opportunities that abound for every sphere of excellence is amazing. The management gurus and extensive organizational study reveals the fact that retention of key employees is very essential and critical to the realizing of long-term company goals, company health and success. The direct link between the performances of employees and the quality of work submitted is undeniable. This again ripples out within the industry and enhances business growth via higher customer satisfaction and increased product sales and company image. The employee performance level also indirectly has an effect on a congenial work space, satisfied reporting staff and efficient succession planning. The thus enhanced and deeply embedded organizational knowledge helps the whole effort towards employee retention.
Employee retention plays a very vital role in any organization. Issues such as training duration and time and money investment and effective candidate search are factors that directly affect the output of the exercise. Research reveals that in event of the absence of an employee retention program, the inability of an organization to retain key employees proves a costly proposition eventually. Organizational statistics and various estimates suggest that losing a middle hand results in a loss as much as five times his salary, in the long run! Imagine this kind of a loss in the case of a BPO company, where fresh talent is consistently and intensively trained and inducted, only to be groomed yet again to progress further!
The first Blockbuster store opened October 1985 in Dallas, Texas at the corner of Skillman and Northwest Highway.[4][5] The founder of the company was David Cook, who grew the business and brought it public. The innovation was derived from Cook's experience with managing huge databases. After the first few stores opened, he built a $6 million warehouse in Garland, TX, that could pull and package multiple stores in a day. Key to the early success of Blockbuster was their ability to customize a store to its neighborhood, loading it up with films geared specifically to demographic profiles in addition to the popular new releases, and a sizable collection of catalog titles.[6] The logo was created by Lee Dean, working for the now defunct Rominger Advertising agency.[citation needed]
In 1987, the company won a court case against Nintendo of America, Inc, which paved the way for the rental of videogames.[7]
Scott Beck, a young businessman in Dallas, approached John Melk, prior executive with Waste Management, about buying a franchise. Melk brought the idea to his friend and business associate, Wayne Huizenga, who agreed to buy the company after overcoming initial concerns about the video industry.[citation needed]
Huizenga and Melk used similar techniques in growing Waste Management, and soon, they were opening one store every seventeen hours.[citation needed] They also bought every Blockbuster franchise they could get their hands on (removing pornographic movies). At the helm, Huizenga spent the late 80s acquiring several of Blockbuster's key rivals—most notably Major Video. The company became a multi-billion dollar company and was sold to Viacom for a price of $8.4 billion
The task of managing employees can be understood as a three stage process:
1. Identify the cost of employee turnover
2. Understand why employee leave
3. Implement retention strategies
Identify the cost of employee turnover:
The organizations should start with identifying the employee turnover rates within a particular time period and benchmark it with the competitor organizations. This will help in assessing the whether the employee retention rates
are healthy in the company. Secondly, the cost of employee turnover can be calculated. According to a survey, on an average, attrition costs companies 18 months’ salary for each manager or professional who leaves, and 6 months’ pay for each hourly employee who leaves. This amounts to major organizational and financial stress, considering that one out of every three employees plans to leave his or her job in the next two years.
Understand why employees leave:
Why employees leave often puzzles top management. Exit interviews are an ideal way of recording and analyzing the factors that have led employees to leave the organization. They allow an organization to understand the reasons for leaving and underlying issues. However employees never provide appropriate response to the asked questions. So an impartial person should be appointed with whom the employees feel comfortable in expressing their opinions.
Implement retention strategy:
Once the causes of attrition are found, a strategy is to be implemented so as to reduce employee turnover. The most effective strategy is to adopt a holistic approach to dealing with attrition. An effective retention strategy will seek to ensure:
Attraction and recruitment strategies enable selection of the ‘right’ candidate for each role/organization
New employees’ initial experiences of the organization are positive
Appropriate development opportunities are available to employees, and that they are kept aware of their likely career path with the organization
The organization’s reward strategy reflects the employee drivers
The leaving process is managed effectively
Retaining Employee Programs have never been kept in place traditionally. However, things have changed in the job scenario in recent years and now, especially in the prominent metros, employees are basking in new found market value. There is no dearth of employment opportunities and when it comes to keeping and holding back the best, employers are stretching way beyond in the effort. It is very important for small, medium and large scale employers to retain key employees and treat attrition troubles. The current job scenario has major HR Department hawks, intensely competitive and poaching from each other, if need be. The entrepreneur can choose to either hold on to productive employees or lose them to competition. Now, with their worth well known and bargained, employees too refuse to stick to an employer for years, if there is a better choice beckoning out there.
The amount of opportunities that abound for every sphere of excellence is amazing. The management gurus and extensive organizational study reveals the fact that retention of key employees is very essential and critical to the realizing of long-term company goals, company health and success. The direct link between the performances of employees and the quality of work submitted is undeniable. This again ripples out within the industry and enhances business growth via higher customer satisfaction and increased product sales and company image. The employee performance level also indirectly has an effect on a congenial work space, satisfied reporting staff and efficient succession planning. The thus enhanced and deeply embedded organizational knowledge helps the whole effort towards employee retention.
Employee retention plays a very vital role in any organization. Issues such as training duration and time and money investment and effective candidate search are factors that directly affect the output of the exercise. Research reveals that in event of the absence of an employee retention program, the inability of an organization to retain key employees proves a costly proposition eventually. Organizational statistics and various estimates suggest that losing a middle hand results in a loss as much as five times his salary, in the long run! Imagine this kind of a loss in the case of a BPO company, where fresh talent is consistently and intensively trained and inducted, only to be groomed yet again to progress further!
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