Background (2.1&2.2)
This article aims at a manufacturing industrial company called Huawei that is located in central China. This medium-sized company has 50 workers and 4 production lines working day and night. It is quite a young company which was established in 2008, but the annual output value accounts for 200 million RMB that stands out in central China. The most attractive point is the extensive trainings for employees which is one of the best practices. This perspective highlights the efficiency of labour forces that directly promote productivity. The employees in the manufacturing department can get 2 opportunities to be sent to training institutions every year, and the longest training lasts for 3 months. The new individuals can also have the training courses from the beginning. All the training fees are covered by the company and it offers the salary for employees when they are in the training period. However, the turnover of employees is quite high and the leaving people caused much loss for the company. The aim of this article is to investigate in Huawei’s turnover problem and give a proposal based on data collections that attract major stakeholders’ attention to make some changes. The highly turnover of employees will have bad influence of the strategic management and thus affect the company’s long-term good performance.
Research methods and data sources (1.1&1.2)
It is necessary to make a research which showing the valid and reliable information before make the suggestions showing to the stakeholders. When conducting a research project, HR officers have to experience a data collection process. The data types can be categorised as follows: primary or secondary and qualitative or quantitative.
Horn (2009) describes the definitions of primary data as new collected information which has never been used in the previous research. The secondary data are already exists and discovered by published sources. The primary data can be questionnaires, focus groups and brainstorms. But actually getting access to primary data is often not easy. For example, in order to get a company’s private data, researchers have to apply for the company and ask for allowance and also do the questionnaires are the same. Brainstorming sometimes can be difficult because the successful outcome depends on the individual’s capabilities and a little luck as well. As for the secondary data, we can have a look at governmental reports, market research and journal articles. However, collecting secondary data could be easier relatively than primary data. Online facilities such as electronic media, blogs, Wikipedia can always perform as secondary data sources. Gaining information and data from Internet can be convenient. Researchers can just insert the key words and then come out a lot and they can just read the first few articles. As for the research project related to the high turnover in Huawei although employees are provided extensive training, I decide to use the method of focus groups in order to hear more from the employees from manufacturing department. Moreover I benefited from the CIPD factsheet about the measurement of turnover which can be easily get accessed from CIPD website.
Bryman and Bell (2007) describe the quantitative data as statistical information analysed, and qualitative data are detailed responses that are based on meanings and words. Commonly, quantitative data is often analysed through spread sheets in computer statistical software while qualitative data is often analysed through visual comparison and database programmes. As for my proposal of Huawei, I will use the quantitative data to show how the leaving people impact the company’s performance.
Overall the information sources vary in many different main bodies. They are academic (books and journals), professional (Trade Union’s survey and CIPD information), marketing data (massive figures come from market) and company data (figures provided by the company). The CIPD (2005) conducts the survey to find the mahor reasons why the turnover rates occurs in the company. The insititution cites the reasons as pay issues (37%); promotion issues (53%); change careers (41%); and the company does not have future develop space or opportunities (42%). Since we have to hand in reliable and valid data and information, the comparisons of sources qualities are required. Above the listed ones, academic and professional data sources deserve trust because they are more accurate. Both of them contain details of year, writer, publishing information, pages and so on. In contrast, marketing data is quite informal and obsolete. With time passing, many figures would change year by year. The old one would be replaced by the new one. It is hard to say the figures come from company is reliable or not. Sometimes the company would exaggerate the profit in order to attract investment while sometimes company would decrease the nominal value for unwillingness to keep it secret.
Measurement of different data types and research study (2.3&2.4)
Since we have discussed two types of data, now we will critically analyse their advantages and disadvantages. Primary data enables the observers find potential problems or first chance but it depends on personal credibility, and the selective data may lead to affect accuracy. And also the first hand data might be difficult to get which I have discussed before. Secondary data can help to save time by drawing others conclusions and benchmarking but with the time passing some of the data may be obsolete and too much information from previous views result in confusing minds. Online facilities are fast-speeding and most people just choose the first several articles to read and insert key words to search but this method is unreliable sometimes and cannot be accurately reflect the situation, so they are quite unreliable when compared with books and journals.
Qualitative data can be illustrated by words and this helps HR officers know the reason of problems occur. They can be interviews and case studies which are covered by words. They provide deeper insights but difficult to be analysed because they are words rather than numbers. Quantitative data can be easier to analyse while it cannot work out why such a sequence happening. They can be surveys and questionnaires. Qualitative and quantitative data should work together for the purpose of supplement.
In a data collection process, these methods are not come alone. These factors may be mixed together, that is to say they can be all used to state a situation. It is not necessary to judge which is better because which of them to be used really depends on the specific circumstances. The research study implies the HR officers to be careful with the data collected and make sure the reliability and validity. As for the reliability perspective, they have to think about the time and size of research and estimate whether the souces is known and respected. In terms of validaity, they have to consider transferability and think of whether the data are related to outcomes. My proposal reseach aims at finding the reasons of high turnover rates and giving suggestions of Huawei. All the figures and data drawn came through communication and the conclusion came from brainstoming, so the barriers could be as follows: Some workers doubted my purpose of the asking and unwilling to share me their views; the manager just gave me the opportunity to interview 5 workers who were not working in workforce at that time. These lead to the disadvantages of my proposal because it cost me more time to persuade their participation and the information may not representative enough. On the other hand, the advantages could be the interviews qustions and surveys asked the key points which reflect the fact that the high turnover rates come out due to they are do not have flexible working time and they are always asked to work over time and even on holidays.
Interests and needs of main stakeholders (4.1, 4.2)
Overall, the business decisions are impacted by the key stakeholders because they can make contributions to the company. Stakeholders are key individuals or groups of people, that are highly impacted by the project, or who are crtical to the success of the project. Stakeholders can be company owners, employees, government, and product suppliers and each of them have different funcions as well. Each company has to meet stakeholder’s needs because the influence of stakeholder orientation on performance will be continud on market variables such as turbulence and growth (Clarkson, 1995, p.23). However, in this proposeal, the key stakeholders are manager, workers, accountants, and main clent companies. The funcions of them varied as follows:
The manager often makes plans and decisions for the project and what he cares more is profit generated out. The plan for the product outcome for the next year and furture number of employees are included in manager’s mind, and he also decides how much money spent on the training fees, and employees’ salaries. Obviously, the manager is standing at the top of pyramid in Huawei because he is the only decision maker in this hierarchical organisation. The decision made by the manager has to contain a clear objective and mission, also the specific steps to tell what exactly employees has to do. These all for the purose of the understanding of employees.
Workers are the major power of a company because they constitite for the large proportion. They follow the instructions from the manager and make their commitment to produce. In Huawei, workers are sent into training courses to learn new techniques in order to inhance efficiency and decline the failing products. If the trained workers leave, the company would be confronted with losing training fees and skilled people.
Accountants are responsible for figuring out balance sheet of the company and offering the figures for the manager once every month. All the training fees are the cost in the banlance sheet which to be shown as long as it occurs because they are large proportion for Huawei as much as buying some huge machine and renting a planet. Accountants also point out how much money the company gained or loss for a month. They are the key stakeholders because what they have shown to the manager can influence manager’s decision making.
Major guest companies are very imprtant for a company’s sales because they often spend a large amount of money buying products from another one. Huawei has its own strategic method to keep long-term relationship with major guest companies via maintaining high quality while keeping lower and cheaper price of large-scale products sold to them. Basically, the high turnover rate of skilled workers more or less impacts the customers’ trust of the products as well as the whole management of company.
The ways to present data are significant because they lead to the result whether the proposal would be accepted and implemented. Normally we hope to make sense by providing in a direct and clear way. Lists, tables, diagrams and charts are basic ways of illustrating. As for HR officers, they often use several steps to present data and information. Firstly, they consider what should be shown in the workshop, meeting , report or email. Secondly, he/she makes decisions in which ways the data and information to be giving. The ways vary in narrative format and diagramatic format. In fact, the ways shown are dependent on stakeholder’s impact and the common cummunication method in the company.
The descriptive tools are often indentified as charts, Gantt charts, fishbone diagramms and force field analysis. These two charts summarise and compare the data proporation and trend respectively. Charts are more easier to grasp so they are quite common in the presentation and report.

Gantt chart is a more common tool used in creating a project network. This method establish a time-phased network because it links activities with a schedule baseline. Also it is often used as a tracking tool distinguish between actual performance and planned performance (Jeffrey, 2010, p. 313).

Fishbone diagram is also known as causes and problems factors that contribute into the result achieved. It is a very broadly method since the HR officers can list as many as facors as they like.

Force field analysis is characterised by the pushing driving forces and pulling restraining forces which represent change forces and restainer respectively. Through the distance between arrows to the present state line in the middle, people can easily recognise which is more severe problem and restrainer. As for Huawei’s project proposal I decide to show stakeholders data collection in the way of bar chart to describe the number of old employees and new employees. The blue part represents the old employees and the red part means the new comings. The old employees in Huawei keep declining and the new workers fluctuate.
In conclusion (3.1 &3.2)
In order to draw a meaningful conclusion, reseachers need to make sure the reliable and valid information and data shown in a clear way to stakeholders. Spcifically, whether the sources are respected and informed should be considered. Moreover researchers have to balance the opinions gained from others. Also the data and information should be in the current time. In other words, the content needs to up tp date. Another thing that deserves our attempt is to forecast future risk and risk that may happen so that we could do something effectively in advance. Let’s go back to the project Huawei, this company may in the future face the severe unbalance of training fees expenditure and the loss caused byleaving people. However, my suggestion is that Huawei should give the new comings the short-time basic trainings and just offer the senior and loyal employees with sotisphicated tranings. In addition, Huawei should care more about flexible working conditions for workers and reward those who are working on holidays and extra time.
(2335 words totally).

References:
Bryman, A. and Bell, E. (2007) Business research methods. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2005) Recruitment, Retention and Labour Turnover Survey. London: CIPD.
Clarkson, M. B. E. (1995) A stakeholder framework for analysing and evaluating corporate social performance. Academy of management review, 20, 92-117.
Horn, R. (2009) Reseaching and writing dissertations. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.