Managing Employee Relations in Multinational Firms

Employee relations management has become an important intangible asset for the firm in today's employee-centered business environment. The multinational firm (MNCs) operating in various countries or institutional contexts face a unique form of employee relationship management challenges. This chapter focuses on the various employee relation issue in MNCs and provides a conceptual understanding. The chapter identifies language differences in various cultural contexts, staffing mix in various foreign subsidiaries, employee turnover in the global labor market, work-life balance, power conflict between parent firm and subsidiary, and virtual teams management as major employee-relation challenges for MNCs. The chapter explores strategic management of these challenges to have competitive advantages and practical recommendations for the MNCs managers based on the existing literature. Finally, the chapter also provides various gaps in the literature to be explored by future researchers.

Service planning

This chapter aims to guide practitioners and managers in setting up and reviewing community outreach services for people with severe mental illness from a non-technical service planning perspective. Examples of different service configurations within a comprehensive local system are given, with some observations on their relative merits and drawbacks from evaluations. Service models and structures are important for providing a framework for delivering quality care, yet from the perspective of the service user, many of these service details—integrated care, specialization, caseload size, staffing mix, ownership of beds, and degree of shared caseload—are invisible. For people with severe mental health problems, patients and carers value the principles of good community-based care, such as access, responsiveness, consistency, and continuity.

Medical readiness: evaluating the robustness of medical clinic staffing solutions

Medical readiness requires Department of Defense medical clinics to be robust to changes in patient demand. Minor fluctuations in patient demand occur on a regular basis, but major increases can also occur. Major demand increases can result from a number of occurrences, including mass military deployments, medical incidents, outbreaks, and overflow from Veterans’ Affairs clinics. This research evaluates a system of clinics at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in order to determine its ability to handle a 200% surge in patient demand. In addition, this study evaluates the relative effectiveness of six different staffing mix options to minimize patient wait times, also under the surge demand conditions. This evaluation is conducted using discrete-event simulation to estimate patient wait times and includes a sensitivity analysis of the increased patient demand, as well as a cost–benefit analysis to determine the most cost-effective alternative scenario. The study finds that adjustments to staffing mix enable cost savings while meeting current demands. In addition, the study finds that adjusting the staffing mix will not have a negative impact on patient wait time in the surge conditions, relative to the current staffing mix.