Executive Summary
Visa Inc is a multinational corporation that deals with electronic money transfer in more than two hundred countries. In spite of enormous success, Visa Inc is presently facing serious challenges threatening its reputation. First of all, Visa Inc is lacking proper facilities required while using visa cards in these new regions. Secondly, due to lack of proper facilities, the company is facing the challenge of data breach by unauthorized users in these new regions. Thirdly, Visa Inc is facing the challenge of documenting immigrant employees.
This is because they work as guest workers in the company. Finally, the company is violating workers and wages rights and policy of certain regions. It happens due to lack of harmonizing employee policies to relate with those of the regions where they are conducting business. According to the abovementioned challenges, the research concentrates at analyzing violation of workers and wages rights and policies. In this case, Visa Inc has been expanding to new territories without consideration of the region employee and wages rights resulting in violation of rights and policies.
On the other hand, the financial crisis hit Visa Inc leading to lowering employee wages as a strategy to survive. This is causing a violation of workers and wages rights and policies of certain regions. According to analysts, violation of workers and wages rights by Visa Inc, is threatening global reputation of the company. However, many solutions to the challenges exist, but the most viable solution is restructuring of the human resources department. This is because it follows the code of Business Conduct and Ethics. Secondly, restructuring promotes high quality standards of professionalism leading to a significant increase in reputation.
Thirdly, restructuring offers the management an opportunity to prevent any future challenges that might affect the corporation. Finally, restructuring will promote Visa Inc mission, vision and values. Therefore, restructuring of human resources department to form the international human resources department is the most viable solution to solve this challenge. Visa Inc Company Position Visa is an American multinational corporation situated in San Francisco, California. It deals with transfer of funds electronically across the globe. In this case, the funds are transferred using Visa branded debit and credit card.
It is necessary to note that Visa does not provide customers with the debit or credit cards. Instead, they offer “financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they then use to offer credit, debit, prepaid and cash-access programs to their customers” (Visa). Visa performs business by connecting more than two hundred countries using digital money. The core products of the company are credit, debit, prepaid and commercial. Visa made transactions for approximately US$6.
3 trillion by the financial year ending 30th September 2012 (Visa). The company has an employee base of approximately seven thousand five hundred people. Visa Inc Company History The idea of electronic transfer of funds was first coined by the Customer Service Group of Bank of America headed by Joseph Williams in 1958 (Visa). At this point, the services were called the BankAmericard. In 1970, the idea was spreading to the other states in America. In 1974, International Bankcard Ltd was formed to monitor operations of the services, and in the following year, the first electronic system was launched (Visa).
In 1976, the name of the card changes from BankAmericard to Visa. The company successfully continues to expand and become a leading global company in the provision of electronic money transfer services (Visa). Presently, Visa connects business, institutions and governments in more than two hundred countries through electronic transfer. Mission, Values and Visions “The company’s vision is for a truly connected financial services ecosystem that supports the ubiquity of mobile devices” (Visa). The mission statement is to connect people, through lending, to alleviate poverty. The core values of Visa Inc imply performing business with high quality standards in professionalism and transparency to promote ethical values as they protect their consumers (Visa).
A combination of these three means that Visa Inc aims at connecting people through the provision of ethical services that protect the society. Stakeholders Visa takes its corporate social responsibility seriously due to the nature of business the company conducts. For instance, they have the mandate to protect people personal information at all costs (Visa). For this reason, Visa commits to provide high quality standards in professional and personal conduct through openness and transparency with regard to its business, leadership and corporate governance practices. In order to comply, it follows a strict Code of Business Conduct and Ethics guided and managed by an independent board of directors (Visa).
This way Visa commands trust and respect from the existing and potential stakeholders. This is because Visa realizes its global responsibility towards the consumers. As a result, Visa is providing consumers from different societies with risk-free products. Visa Stakeholders include: Employees, their families and the management Consumers Suppliers Competitors (MasterCard, American Express Company, Discover Financial Services) Financial stakeholders, investors and shareholders. Regulation board and policy makers Government officials The public.
Sense Currently, Visa is facing a number of problems that pose a significant risk to the normal performance of its business. If these problems are not addressed and solved in time, they tend to hinder the missions, visions and values of Visa. Poor Integration of Visa Products in New Regions In a bid to expand, Visa is trying to promote its products to new regions. In this process, Visa is facing the problem of integrating its products to these new environments. In this case, the new regions Visa is venturing do not have the necessary equipment to cope with the new products. For example, these new regions do not have the equipment needed to operate the cards.
Additionally, most of these new regions do not have computer chips that help in solving the problem of computer fraud. As a result, these create a hindrance to the operation of business that goes against Visa responsibilities of protecting their consumers. Data Breach in the Usage of Visa cards One of the codes of Business Conduct and Ethics for Visa is to protect personal information (Visa). However, Visa is facing a formidable challenge of protecting the loss of personal data to unauthorized third parties. Therefore, due to lack of proper equipment, there is breach of personal data when using visa cards in this new region.
For this reason, Visa requires an immediate solution to this problem for purposes of avoiding data breach. This is because this might harm Visas reputation resulting in mistrust from the stakeholders. Undocumented Immigrant Workers As a strategic decision, many companies are opting to usethe services of immigrants due to the immense benefits they offer companies, especially in these financial difficulties (Hackett 2004). For this reason, Visa is using the services of immigrants who constitute a part of its employees. The main problem with this option is that there is a lot of undocumented information about the immigrant workers. This is because some of these workers only work as short-term guest workers in the company.
Therefore, Visa lacks proper policies for immigrant workers resulting in the absence of documentation. Workers and Wages Violation Rights When Visa is expanding to these new regions, the governments require the company to employ and follow employee policies of the society. However, Visa is not making any implementation to its approach to accommodate policies from foreign companies resulting in violation of workers and wages rights. This leads to poor motivation of employees resulting in poor performance quality. Moreover, violation of workers rights and wages by Visa results in the destruction of the company’s reputation. Therefore, an amicable solution is necessary to solve the problem immediately.
Figure 1: Mission Critical Matrix for Visa Inc Company Problem Statement In this case, due to the immense differences of countries employee rights and policies, Visa is facing a serious problem of violating these rights and policies. First of all, the financial difficulties are forcing Visa to offer employees low wages. Secondly, Visa is not taking into consideration different country policies for purposes of harmonizing and implementing employee and wages rights. As a result, Visa is globally tarnishing its reputation. Uncover Visa is facing a serious problem with its employees working in the new regions. According to Figure 1, all the challenges either urgent or not are interrelated in one way or another.
However, this research aims at uncovering the problem of workers and wages violation as a process of solving the other challenges. In the past, workers and wages violation was not an issue to Visa. This is because Visa was only offering their services to few nations in comparison to the present situation. For this fact, there were no outstanding differences to create workers and wages violation. After going global, Visa started facing the problem of workers and wages violation.
This is because Visa is delaying to implement employee policies to harmonize with those of the new regions. Secondly, Visa is also suffering from the global financial crisis. In this situation, Visa is cutting employee wages to survive the financial difficulties resulting to violation of workers and wages policies and rights in some countries. This is leading to the destruction of Visa’s reputation globally (Hackett). Stakeholders perceive the situation as if Visa were lacking respect for them. For example, if they are not able to respect the rights of their employees, how can they be able to respect the rights of their third parties? However, the following solution exists to solve this challenge.
First of all, Visa should restructure the human resources department to solve the challenge. This is because Visa follows the traditional methods. For this reason, Visa has difficulties in implementing and creating new policies that will improve its performance. In this case, human resources department should change and go international. It will change the allocation of business roles and create solutions of how Visa is going to tackle most of these problems (Briscoe, Schuler and Claus 23).
Secondly, Visa should learn employment rights and policies of all the regions where it is conducting its businesses. After this, Visa should come up with general employee rights and policies of the company together with unique employee rights and policies for different regions. This is because not every policy would have similar effects in all regions (Briscoe, Schuler and Claus 73). Thirdly, Visa should harmonize wages using financial calculations. This is because each region has a different economic rate. For instance, some of them, for example, developed countries have high economic rate while other regions such as developing countries have low economic rates (Forstater 5).
This is where Visa will utilize their financial or accounting department to calculate the economy performances of each region together with the employee wages rights. This is for purposes of coming up with excellent policies that do not violate any employee rights or wages. The final solution that can be applicable to solve this challenge is outsourcing of the human resources department. This is because the task can be complex for the company to handle and it is cheap to outsource. Moreover, the outsourcing firms possess high quality skills and experience (Lawler and Susan 23). This means that Visa might not have the necessary skills or experience to handle this challenge.
Therefore, Visa should acquire these services from a highly reputable outsourcing firm to solve the problem of violating workers and wages rights. Solve The best possible solutions should be inline with Visa’s mission, vision and values. This is because violation can lead to hurting the company’s reputation, respect and trusts. In this case, the challenge of workers and wages rights violation tends to hurt Visa’s reputation globally, resulting to low respect and mistrusts from stakeholders. Therefore, in order to come up with a perfect solution, it is vital to evaluate all the options available. The first solution entails learning employee rights and policies of all regions.
After learning all the policies, the management should create policies that do not violate workers and wages rights (Kinicki and Brian 126). In this case, the solution will be able to solve the problem arising from violation of workers and wages rights. As a result, it will help Visa regain its reputation. However, learning of the different employee rights and policies will not make it possible to cater for any futures changes (Briscoe, Schuler and Claus 123). This is because employee rights and policies are subjected to changes over time.
For this reason, this solution is not suitable for the challenge. The second solution is outsourcing. It appears to be extremely easy because Visa only needs to enact a procedure it is going to use in selecting an outsourcing firm (Lawler and Susan 45). After selecting the outsourcing firm, Visa will delegate all the duties to the new company together with the challenges. Therefore, the outsourcing company will find solutions to respond to the challenge leading to improvement of Visa’s reputation.
On the contrary, it can be a disaster because vital information might leak from the ooutsourcing company affecting Visa values. For this reason, this solution is not suitable to deal with the challenges because it can create more harm than good. The other solution is the use of financial calculations to harmonize wages. This is where the financial department is issued with the task of calculating economic rates of the different regions to establish the most suitable wages of each one of them (Forstater 24). The management should use this information to offer their employees excellent wages that do not violate their rights. The main problem with this solution is that it does not show whether the calculated wages violate the rights or not.
Secondly, this solution does not offer a clear format for future reference (Forstater 45). Therefore, this solution might not be appropriate to solve this challenge. Finally, restructuring the human resources department is the other solution. In this solution, Visa is utterly changing the entire old department to form a new department inline with the current business environment. Therefore, the new Visa human resources should be transformed into international human resources management department.
This new department will cater for the remuneration, culture change, training and protecting employee rights and policy of the company and the other regions (Briscoe, Schuler and Claus 201). For this reason, learning of employee rights of all regions and performing of economic evaluations for purposes of creating excellent workers and wages rights that do not violate laws of different regions will be conducted (Kinicki and Brian 98). This solution is perfect because it caters for the costs and employee rights. Although it might be costly, this is the most suitable version because it is going to cater for future challenges. Build Ethical Screen Visa aims at commanding respect and trust by creating an excellent reputation. In order to do so, Visa has a mission, vision and values that guide its organization culture.
Therefore, Visa upholds high quality standards of professionalism using the code of Business Conduct and Ethics(Visa). For this reason, restructuring of the human resources department to suit the current environment is ethical. This is because it does not violate any ethical policies. Instead, it promotes ethics through transparency. Moreover, restructuring is sensitive to the needs of the other parties.
Taking these facts into consideration, it appears completely ethical to restructure the human resource department. Cost/Benefit Analysis Figure 2 summarizes costs and benefits of restructuring the human resources department into international human resources. According to the summary, it is clear that the benefits outweigh the costs. Figure 2: Cost/benefit summary of restructuring the human resource department into international human resources department Feasibility Analysis It is crucial to evaluate whether it is viable to continue implementing the solution or not in order to cope with a certain challenge. In this case of workers and wages violations, the platform for evaluating the viability of the solution is the use of company’s mission, vision and values.
This is where the code of Business Conduct and Ethics together with the ability to increase reputation act as guidelines for the analysis. Therefore, restructuring the human resources department to form the international human resources department is viable. This is because international human resources would be in line with the code of Business Conduct and Ethics(Visa). Moreover, due to high quality standards in professionalism it is going to promote the company’s reputation. Achieve Restructuring Process Change in an organization can be a nightmare because it can both destroy the company and improve it. In order to achieve a perfect restructuring of the human resources department to become international human resources, Visa should follow certain key steps.
The first step is to include all the employees of Visa in the implementation process to reduce employee resistance (Briscoe, Schuler and Claus 123). Secondly, the management of Visa should hire a professional consultant to create and train all the parties affected. Thirdly, the management with the help of the consultant should evaluate challenges bound to happen during implementation of the changes and in the future. Finally, Visa should introduce a new structure in the business (Briscoe, Schuler and Claus 125). Evaluation The whole process should take approximately less than four months to achieve the desired results.
On the other hand, it should be implemented faster than in one or two months. Therefore, if restructuring takes more than four months or less than two months, it is not suitable since it contains flaws. Secondly, the use of foreign employee policies must be addressed to establish whether there is a violation of any rights (Kinicki and Brian 51). Thirdly, the management should consider evaluating employee motivation through interviews and other measures to establish the performance of the new structure. In addition, Visa should conduct a consumer survey to evaluate whether the new structure is improving Visa’s reputation. Finally, the management should analyze financial statement to verify whether there was an improvement since the introduction of a new structure (Kinicki and Brian 57).
