Background:
This regional airline built their reputation on quality, low cost, and no frills (only essential) service is provided. They have been in business for 11 years. The business has been run like a small family owned/run business, even though they have over 300 employees. The current President retired from the military to take this position with no commercial airline experience. His leadership style is very different from the current culture of the company.
The company was very successful in the early years. In those years, business was booming with little or no competition for their routes. It grew rapidly in the first 7-8 years. In recent years, a subsidiary from a major airline has entered the market and stolen some of their business, although their fares are competitive. With the slowdown in the market, their business is losing money. In the last several years things have slowed down considerably.
Current Situation:
Over the last couple of years turnover in the company has been extremely high at mid-management and below. The HR Manager reports that employees leave the company because a lack of direction and their managers do not deal with issues. New employees come to work because of competitive salaries/wages, but do not stay. There are few if any, procedures, policies, or training in place for managers and workers, except for those mandated by the FAA. New employees are trained on the job, with little or no direction.
Ticket agents, gate personnel, baggage handlers, and operations people at each location report to a Manager of Operations at each of their 5 locations/airports. The Field Operations Managers have a great deal of autonomy to run their site the way they see fit. They report to the VP of Field Operations. The Pilots and Flight Attendants all report up through the VP of Flight Operations. There seems be conflict between Fields Ops and Flight Ops as a result of different policies and procedures at each airport.

They are not sure what is wrong and how to fix the problem. They don’t have the technology in place to determine the changes in the market, customer demands, or competitive challenges.
1- Identify 3 (three) Human Resources functions impacted by the issues at Freedom?
2- Develop a SWOT analysis for Freedom. (2 points for each category i.e. S.W.O.T)
3- Propose 2 (two) two HR related recommendations to help resolve the identified issues.