MHRM 6701 Week 11 Strategy and Social Change Paper Example

Extending County-Referred Hiring to Both Plants With a Funded Path Into Maintenance: A Strategy Paper That Builds the Staffing Argument and the Social Argument to the Same Standard, Each Able to Fail

Student Name

Walden University

MHRM 6701: Strategic Positioning and Social Change

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Extending County-Referred Hiring to Both Plants With a Funded Path Into Maintenance: A Strategy Paper That Builds the Staffing Argument and the Social Argument to the Same Standard, Each Able to Fail

Recommendation

Allerton Linen Services, the family-owned hospital laundry examined throughout this course, should extend its county-referred hiring pilot from the Cheektowaga plant to its Henrietta plant in 2027 and fund four maintenance apprenticeships each year for overnight operators with good attendance, referred or not. The extension would hire up to twenty referred residents a year across both plants. The added cost is about $95,000 a year: $60,000 for the two plants' onboarding and coaching time and $35,000 for four apprenticeship places. This paper builds the staffing argument and the social argument to the same standard, each with evidence, each with a cost and each able to fail.

Where the Pilot Stands

Over its first twelve months, the Cheektowaga pilot took on twelve referred residents. Nine were still on the overnight crew at the end of the year and one had left for a better-paid day job elsewhere; two were dismissed, one for attendance and one for a safety violation. Overnight direct-hire turnover for other hires over the same period was about 70 percent a year. Agency staffing on nights fell from about 25 workers a night to 9, partly because of the pilot and partly because of direct hiring. On-time cart delivery rose from 94 to 98 percent of hospital floors.

These results are encouraging but small. With twelve hires, the difference in retention could narrow with another year's data, and the delivery gain cannot be credited to the pilot alone, since direct hiring of other overnight operators rose over the same months. The pilot has not yet reached its twelve-month social measure for most hires.

The Staffing Argument

The staffing argument is that referred hires, supported by a job coach and onboarded by experienced operators, stay longer than other overnight hires and replace agency workers who cost about $6 an hour more. Hausknecht et al. (2009) found that service quality falls when turnover is high and newcomers concentrate, which is consistent with the delivery improvement as the crew stabilized. Lundquist et al. (2018) found no performance penalty for people with felony records in a very large employer, which is consistent with the pilot's performance results.

Across the two plants, this argument costs roughly $60,000 annually. The benefit, if referred hires replace agency workers at the rate Cheektowaga saw, is about $12,000 per replaced position per year in agency markup alone, not counting lower turnover costs. Ten replaced positions would return about $120,000.

The staffing argument fails if, across both plants, referred hires' one-year retention is no better than other overnight hires' or agency hours do not fall. Henrietta's labor market is different from Cheektowaga's, with lower agency use, so the argument there rests more on turnover than on agency savings.

The Social Argument

The social argument is that referred residents hired into steady overnight work are more likely to remain in paid work and less likely to be rearrested at twelve months than qualified referred residents who could not be hired. The evidence is mixed: Valentine and Redcross (2015) found reduced recidivism in one transitional jobs program but not another, and in the national work experiment Uggen (2000) analyzed, the crime-reducing effect of a job appeared among older participants but not among those in their teens and early twenties. The pilot's lottery among equally qualified candidates provides a fair comparison, but with twelve hires the first year cannot settle the question. Twenty hires a year across two plants would give a clearer answer by the end of 2028.

The cost of the social argument is mostly borne by the reentry office, which funds the job coach and the follow-up. Allerton's cost is the time its supervisors and operators spend onboarding and the risk of a placement that fails publicly.

The social argument fails on either of two results: under 60 percent of hires working a year on, or a rearrest rate that matches or exceeds the lottery group's.

Why the Maintenance Path

The maintenance path answers a problem the two arguments share. The one referred hire who left for a better job was a loss on the staffing ledger and a gain on the social one. A path inside Allerton lets ambitious operators advance without leaving. The plant has had two maintenance technician openings unfilled since spring; four apprenticeship places, open to all overnight operators, not only referred hires, address that shortage while giving the overnight crew a visible reason to stay. Porter and Kramer (2011) describe this kind of overlap, where solving a social problem also addresses a constraint on the business, as the core of shared value.

Opening the path to all operators matters. A path reserved for referred hires would create resentment among the crew whose cooperation the pilot depends on, and it would mark referred hires as different on the floor, the opposite of what the onboarding is designed to do.

Risks

The largest risk remains a serious incident involving a referred hire, which would test hospital clients' confidence. The plant-only limit, the reentry office's screening standard and advance notice to clients remain in place. A second risk is that Henrietta's managers adopt the program reluctantly; the extension should begin only after Henrietta's plant manager and two of its experienced operators have visited Cheektowaga and agreed to lead it.

Measures for 2027 and 2028

Report to the board every six months, separately for each argument and each plant: one-year retention of referred and other overnight hires, agency hours, on-time delivery, employment status of referred hires a year after hire, rearrest against the lottery group and apprentices enrolled and completing. If either argument fails at both plants by the end of 2028, the board should decide whether to continue the program on the strength of the other argument alone.

Conclusion

The pilot's first year justifies extending it, not declaring it a success. Both arguments are promising, neither is proven, and the extension is designed to test both with more cases while adding a path that serves the business and the residents at once.

References

Hausknecht, J. P., Trevor, C. O., & Howard, M. J. (2009). Unit-level voluntary turnover rates and customer service quality: Implications of group cohesiveness, newcomer concentration, and size. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(4), 1068-1075. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015898

Lundquist, J. H., Pager, D., & Strader, E. (2018). Does a criminal past predict worker performance? Evidence from one of America's largest employers. Social Forces, 96(3), 1039-1068. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sox092

Porter, M. E., & Kramer, M. R. (2011). Creating shared value. Harvard Business Review, 89(1/2), 62-77.

Uggen, C. (2000). Work as a turning point in the life course of criminals: A duration model of age, employment, and recidivism. American Sociological Review, 65(4), 529-546. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657381

Valentine, E. J., & Redcross, C. (2015). Transitional jobs after release from prison: Effects on employment and recidivism. IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 4, Article 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40173-015-0043-8