Sonoco HR
HR Policy Transformation at Sonoco
Describe how the HR department was organized and its effectiveness before the re-organization.
During its 100-year history, the industrial and commercial packaging company Sonoco has experienced myriad organizational and philosophical shifts. Among them, its HR orientation has been in a constant state of evolution since its inception in the 1970s. During its first two decades of operation, the HR department at Sonoco was chiefly an administrative arm of the company which operated at the corporate level and offered very little direct or meaningful support at the operational level of the firm. This would prompt a shift toward the organizational orientation that Hartley would find upon her arrival in the 1990s. From the mid-80s onward, Sonoco had begun to embrace a more decentralized approach to HR policies and priorities. This was done in order to improve the ability of divisions and their management personnel to properly compensate and reward performance quality as well as to provide meaningful support and mediation to personnel conflicts or grievances.
However, this method of organization would ultimately prove only partially effective, sacrificing central control over HR policies in favor of more positive employee experiences and end-user results. According to the case history provided on Sonoco, "decentralization of the HR function became so entrenched tat by the mid-1990s each of the big divisions, specifically paper, industrial, and consumer, had its own HR function with separate HR systems, budgets, performance management processes (used largely to determine compensation), development, and leadership and training programs. The smaller divisions often shared HR services with the bigger divisions. As one corporate HR executive recalled, 'The divisions were left to create whatever type of HR function they wanted.'" (p. 5-6)
What prompted the change to HR?
The primary force driving change in Sonoco's HR Department would be the cost imperative created by the company's leadership core. In a meeting with HR director Cindy Hartley, senior personnel at the firm requested that she find ways to cut HR operating costs by roughly...
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