MINI-CASE: The EEA Water Department

A number of years ago, the European Environmental Agency (EEA) based in Copenhagen, Denmark created the Subsidy Management Program (SMP) within the Water Department. The main functions of the program are to review requests for government financial support for community projects and engineering design reports. Also, they need to perform operation and maintenance inspections of waste-water treatment facilities. Paul Wagner, head of the SMP, supervised four engineers, one technician, and one secretary. Three of the engineers were quite new to the agency within the last four months and had arrived from a variety of European cities. The senior engineer, Winona Burrell, had approximately three years' experience in the SMP. She had gone through a robust selection process lasting a couple of weeks to ensure that as a leader of a team of engineers she had the qualities required of her role. The rest of the SMP were recruited and selected in a less rigorous manner but this had served the department well over the last few years and the department had managed to remain within their yearly budget for hiring and training. Winona Burrell’s experience meant that Paul Wagner assigned her the areas with the most complicated projects within the department. The other three engineers were assigned areas with less complex projects but worked closely with Burrell to learn all they could about the program from her over the next two months. These sessions varied between simple, routine tasks that all the engineers needed to know to specific, specialists tasks that required in-depth, individual learning. Despite being an engineer, Winona had spent time within the human resources department of another European agency, whilst doing job rotation during a one-year internship. Here she learned to appreciate the value of developing people and was able to transfer her methods and ideas on training to the engineers on her team at the SMP. At the beginning of 2020, Paul Wagner decided the new engineers had enough experience to do more difficult tasks; therefore, the SMP work could be shared on a more equal basis with each new engineer having responsibility for two or three geographical areas. This arrangement seemed to work well as the whole Water Department succeeded in reaching its objectives at the end of the first quarter. This was an excellent outcome as the whole team of SMP engineers had only been fully together for about six months. However, at the same time as these results appeared, Paul Wagner was offered a job with a consulting engineering company and he decided to leave the EEA. He gave two months' notice to top management. During those two months top management did not advertise for a new SMP head. However, on the Monday of Wagner's final week, senior management of the EEA met with staff of the Water Department. They announced that, until a permanent SMP head could be found, they had appointed a temporary head of the SMP Samuel Kutzman, a senior engineer from another EEA department – the whole SMP team were very surprised. Q1. Compare and contrast the most likely differences in the recruitment and selection strategies (R&S) SMP might use in hiring Winona compared to that of employees in the department. Justify your response using the case, theories and concepts studied during the course. Moreover, evaluate the R&S actions of senior management of the EEA in their appointment of a new SMP head. Q2. Winona appears to have been able to develop her team of engineers quite successfully giving them the training required and achieving department objectives. Discuss to what extent the EEA organisation might be responsible for the success of this training? What training techniques might she have employed to address the requirements of her team of engineers and the department.