assignment

DATE:​​November 11th, 2021

 

TO:​ ​Lebron James, CEO at Estee Lauder Companies

 

FROM:​Shaobo Li, communication specialist at Estee Lauder Companies

 

SUBJECT: ​Addressing the economic and social challenges we have been experiencing

 

In the last few months, our company have been experiencing three major economic and social challenges that my team and I identified: covid spreading within the organization, investors pulling away from the company, and mass layoffs cause distrust from the employees. We were all worried about the time and efforts that are required to fight the challenges. We are going to address all of them patiently. 

 

INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND:

 

If we do not have some proper solutions as soon as possible, they will not only affect our company’s reputation socially, but also will defer us financially. So, before we talk about our solutions, let’s all focus on the challenges together. Hopefully we can come up with some considerable changes. 

 

To review the three challenges:

 

• Covid spreading within the organization: The world experiences social and economic changes just about every day and people find ways to adapt and fight these changes. The spread of covid cases has been increasing every hour, every day, and is affecting many people and businesses. Our priority and responsibility are to put safety and the health of our employees in front of everything else. In the last three months, we had over forty employees test positive, almost half of them were sent to the hospital. This is a serious situation, and it should be handled cautiously. The company of Estee Lauder have come up with some ideas and different ways we can fight and prevent covid on spreading at Estee Lauder and keeping our employees byhaving a clean and safe environment, mask and vaccine mandating, and practice social distancing. 

 

 

• Investors pulling away from the company: Due to the covid spread, our company had faced a financial crisis due to investors pulling away. Covid has caused us to lack on reliability to our investors due to the shutdown that had us away for a while. Investors were not satisfied with us and some of them decided to pull away from our organization.We had to work from home, which we did not adapt to well on and our customer service was poor. This shows that investors are very upset and have lost trust from us. 

 

• Mass layoffs cause distrust from the employees: Two big issues that are at risk of happening at Estee Lauder Companies is a result of the social and economic challenges. Some adjustments our company can make to our organization is still sustainable in these difficult times and combat all these issues is with one single solution. Due to these difficult times, we have had to let go severalemployees. We have developed bonds with all our employees, we’ve met families, went to marriages, and welcomed new lives into the world with a lot of the staff here at Estee’s. Due to the massive cut in our sales due to the pandemic we have had an increase in the number of jobs lost. This has resulted in a distrust within the company, employees have voiced out over social media and to management about how they are angry about the weakened job security. Laying employees off has never been a problem here at Estee’s, but due to the challenging times. Management has had to let go of a great amount of our best employees. 

 

As I am writing through these challenges, there is one thing I would like to discuss. That is trust. It seems very easy to lose trust. We all know it is super hard to rebuild trust. Once we lose trust from our employees, the sales number will majorly decline. Investors will regret about their decisions on putting money in us at the first place. The negative reputations will soon spread around the business that will damage our company in every way. Therefore, for our company’s future, effective solutions are our priority at this moment.

 

SOLUTIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS: 

 

Although our challenges seem very overwhelming, I do hope that we can fight through them together with effective changes. 

 

To review our solutions: 

 

• Improve our policies for covid: The covid situation in our society is inevitable. Doing regular covid tests and always putting our mask on, is the least we can do in the work environment. We are not only doing that for the company, but also for the other people around, including people at home. Another thing we want to address is making vaccines mandatory. Nowadays, vaccination is the most effective solution to stop covid from spreading. If all the employees stick with the following policies, our companywill be back on track again shortly. 

1. Clean and Safe Environment: a clean and safe environment not only protects one but protects all. As simple as cleaning up after yourself and disposing of anything you have used such as gloves, pens, pencils, paper, etc., can be helpful. Giving each employee a bottle of hand sanitizer and constantly using it can kill the bacteria and stop it from spreading within the facility. After every workday, we will have a cleaning crew to go through and make sure they can have everything clean for the following day.

 

2. Mask and Vaccine Mandating: studies have shown that the most effective way to stop and protect yourself covid is by wearing a mask and vaccine. The reason for the mask mandate is to prevent you from spreading covid and spreading bacteria when you speak to others or when sneezing or coughing. Vaccine mandate is one of the best ways to prevent getting covid. While others may disagree about the covid vaccine, studies do show the survival rate has increased and death rate has decreased when vaccinated

 

3. Practice Social Distancing: we can help lower the chances of spreading the virus from one employee to another. If employees can stay as far away from others, then this will help significantly on spreading a virus around. If you need to contact a certain individual, we will use phone calls or zoom calls that way we do not need to come close in contact to speak. Also, meetings will now be via zoom so that way we won't have a packed crowd in one room and have everyone in danger. Avoid joining large groups of crowds inside and outside of the facility.

 

            

 

• Rebuild our trust with the investors: When it comes to rebuilding trust, changes are very much needed. The first thing we need to do is to strengthen our organization. There will be no organization with employees. We will offer better layoff benefits which will be further discussed on the next point. We must show our competitors and the investors who were pulled away from us that we have better solutions towards what we are facing. Our changes for the employees will surely let them feel safe putting their money into us. 

 

1. Reliability: when it comes to business organizations, reliability is a very important key towards investors. This lets them know they can count on us no matter what happens. We will start reaching out to our investors and see what they need so we can assist them.

      

        

 

• Employee Retention & Fundraising: The bad news is as we can all see we have some challenges on our hands. The good news is we have the solutions to combat these issues. We can focus on employee retention and fundraising to resolve the issues we may face in our organization. Her is a brief explanation on the steps we can implement to eradicate the issues from ever arising in our organization.

 

1. Employee Retention: Estee Lauder Company has always been strong on building bonds with our employees. We look at every employee as a branch of our family. Distrust has been growing within the company due to massive layoffs, this has changed the energy and atmosphere within the company. To combat this, we have decided to focus on retaining every single employee. With our new No Employee Left Behind Rule we will stop layoffs permanently, especially within this pandemic. This will help us grow as an organization and for our employees, maintain positive spirits. 

 

2. Fundraising: In order to implement our new No Employee Left Behind Rule we must get necessary funding. Due to these challenging times, sales have dropped tremendously which has caused the backbone of the company to be weakened to a degree. We don’t want to lose any of our precious employees due to lack of funding. In this case, we will be conducting afundraising program. We will be reaching out to investors as well to give us support. In order to keep them supplied with the services they must keep everybody here at Estee’s happy. Without their support we can’t support them.

 

These steps are necessary to combat the previously listed issues. This is more than a workplace; this is a family!