2.6 Communication questions for IB Business Management

Coastline Dental

[1] Coastline Dental (CD) is a private limited company that owns nine dental clinics along the coast of Queensland, Australia. It employs 38 dentists, 52 dental nurses and 20 receptionists. CD’s mission statement is “gentle, affordable dental care for every family on the coast”.

[2] The population of CD’s area is changing. Many retired people have moved to the coast, while young families increasingly work long hours and cannot attend appointments during the day. Dental nurses are hard to find: several have moved to Brisbane, where pay is higher, and CD’s recruitment advertisements now take three months to fill a vacancy.

[3] Managing director Olivia Brennan wants to open every clinic from 07:00 to 20:00, six days a week, instead of 08:30 to 17:00, five days a week. She also wants to replace paper patient files with a cloud-based records system that patients can use to book online. She believes these changes will increase revenue and help CD compete with a new chain of low-cost clinics.

[4] Staff reaction has been mixed. Some younger dentists like the idea of choosing their own shifts. However, many dental nurses have children and fear being given evening shifts. The receptionists, most aged over 50, are worried that online booking will make their jobs unnecessary. At a staff meeting, one receptionist said: “We were told about this by email on a Friday afternoon. Nobody asked us what patients actually want.”

[5] Olivia is considering introducing flexi-time: staff would agree the total hours they work each week but choose, within limits, when they start and finish. The receptionists would be retrained as “patient care coordinators” who help older patients use the new booking system.

Bukit Jambul Circuits

Bukit Jambul Circuits (BJC) assembles circuit boards for electronics companies at a factory in Penang, Malaysia. It employs 1 200 production workers on three shifts, and 150 office staff. At present, each production team has a 30-minute face-to-face briefing with its supervisor every Monday, covering output targets, quality problems and company news.

Operations director Khoo Siew Peng wants to replace the briefings with a weekly 5-minute video from senior managers on the company intranet, which workers could watch on their phones or on screens in the canteen. Only 35 % of production workers currently have a login for the intranet. BJC surveyed 200 production workers about the current briefings and a two-week trial of the video.

Table 1: Ratings of the weekly face-to-face briefing by 200 production workers (1 = very poor, 5 = very good)

Table 2: Other survey results

Nokoru House (NH)

Read the resources and answer the questions that follow.

Nokoru House (NH) is a social enterprise in a mountain town in Shimane Prefecture, Japan. It was founded in 2018 by Aoi Tanabe, who returned to her home town after ten years in Tokyo. NH buys or rents akiya (empty, abandoned houses), restores them and runs them as guesthouses. It now operates nine houses with 27 guest rooms and employs 26 local people, most of them retired residents who work part-time as hosts, cooks and cleaners. NH’s mission is “to keep our town alive by opening its doors”.

Image: an old wooden farmhouse with a thatched roof and paper sliding doors, restored and lit warmly at dusk. An elderly woman in an apron kneels at a low table serving dishes of mountain vegetables to two guests. Sign at the gate: “Nokoru House – stay, and the town stays too”.

Resource 1 – News article from the *Shimane Weekly News*

Empty houses find new life – but who will run them?

Rural Japan is shrinking. In NH’s town, more than half of residents will soon be over 65, and young people leave for the cities after school. NH has attracted foreign and domestic tourists and created jobs, but its founder admits that “our best hosts are in their seventies”.

Table 1: NH’s home town

Resource 2 – Online review from a guest from Australia

The highlight of our whole trip to Japan. Mrs Hamada cooked eleven dishes from vegetables she had picked that morning, and told us (with hand signals and a lot of laughing) how the village celebrated harvest when she was a girl. ★★★★★ [1/2]

Only problem: nobody spoke English and we arrived after the office closed. It took us 40 minutes and three phone calls to find the key to our house. Fix that and this place is perfect. [2/2]

Resource 3 – Internal email from Aoi Tanabe to NH’s two other directors

From: Aoi Tanabe, Founder

To: Directors

Subject: Staffing for the next five years

Bookings rose again this year, but seven of our 26 staff plan to retire within three years, six of them hosts or cooks. We cannot grow – or even keep going – without a plan. The options I have looked at:

1. Apply for three young people from the national rural relocation programme, which pays urban young people to live and work in rural towns for up to three years. The government pays their salaries. About 60 % stay in the area after three years.

2. Recruit foreign workers on the Specified Skilled Worker visa for the accommodation sector. An agency would charge JPY 400 000 per worker and they must be paid the same as Japanese staff. They would need housing and Japanese lessons.

3. Install smart locks and tablet check-in with a multilingual guest app for JPY 6.5 million. This would save about 2 000 hours of front-desk work a year.

4. Raise our hourly wage from JPY 1 050 (just above the prefecture’s minimum wage) to JPY 1 300 to attract local parents and part-time workers. Hotels in Tokyo pay about JPY 1 450.

CONFIDENTIAL: this email and any attachments are intended only for the named recipients.

Resource 4 – NH’s staff profile, 2025

NH’s hourly-paid staff work a total of about 31 000 hours a year.

Resource 5 – Interview with Hamada Setsuko, aged 78, an NH host

“I would like to keep working, but my knees cannot manage five days a week any more. Two or three mornings would suit me. The young people from the city don’t know how to cook mountain vegetables or how to talk to our old neighbours – but I could teach them, if someone gave me the time to do it. And guests come to hear our stories, not to talk to a tablet.”

Resource 6 – NH guest survey and booking data

Jal Seva is an Indian NGO that installs and maintains village water pumps in Rajasthan. To cut administrative costs, its director, Meera Joshi, plans to merge its six district offices into two regional hubs and to replace paper reports with a mobile app that field workers use to log repairs. Field workers learnt about the plan from a local newspaper before Meera had told them. Several have since said they will look for jobs with the state water department.

Ashdown Rees LLP

Ashdown Rees LLP is a law firm in Manchester, UK, with 60 lawyers. Clients pay for lawyers’ time by the hour (“billable hours”). Since the firm introduced a policy in 2023 that every client email must be copied to the whole case team, lawyers have complained about the number of internal emails.

Table 1: Average figures per lawyer

Nkabom Savings Ltd (NS)

Read the resources and answer the questions that follow.

Nkabom Savings Ltd (NS) is a for-profit social enterprise in Kumasi, Ghana, founded in 2016 by Akosua Boateng, a former bank manager. It modernizes susu, a traditional savings system in which a collector visits market traders every day to collect small deposits. NS’s 420 agents visit about 38 000 traders, most of them women, and record each deposit on the NS app. Traders can withdraw their savings at any time and, after six months of saving, can borrow small loans to buy stock. NS’s mission is “a safe place for every cedi”. The agents are self-employed and paid commission. Six regional supervisors manage them, reporting to an operations manager at head office.

Image: a smiling agent in a green NS waistcoat holding a phone up to a market trader seated behind piles of tomatoes and onions; the phone screen shows “Deposit received: GHS 20.00 – thank you, Auntie Ama”.

Resource 1 – News article from the *Ashanti Business Mirror*

Regulator to tighten rules on susu collectors after fraud cases

Ghana’s central bank has proposed new rules for microfinance companies that use susu agents. From 2027 every agent must be registered, trained every year and supervised by a team leader responsible for no more than 20 agents. The proposals follow several cases of collectors disappearing with traders’ money. NS, one of the fastest-growing digital susu companies, says it supports the rules but admits that its own fraud losses have risen.

Table 1: NS key figures

Resource 2 – Social media posts from Ama, a trader at Kejetia market

My old susu man ran away with three months of my money in 2019. NS is different – every cedi I give shows on my phone. Last month I used my NS loan to buy two extra bags of rice. #NkabomNS [1/2]

But last week our agent did not come for nine days and his phone was off. NS paid us back after five weeks, but nobody at the office answers the phone. Who is checking these agents? [2/2]

Resource 3 – Internal email from Kwabena Yeboah, operations manager, to Akosua Boateng

From: Kwabena Yeboah, Operations Manager

To: Akosua Boateng, CEO

Subject: Restructuring our agent network

Each of our six supervisors is responsible for 70 agents. They cannot visit them, let alone check their records. We will not meet the regulator’s rule. I see three options:

Option A – employ all agents on contracts at GHS 1 400 a month (plus 13 % social security) instead of commission, organized in 30 teams under employed team leaders paid GHS 2 500 a month.

Option B – keep agents self-employed on commission, but add 30 employed team leaders (GHS 2 500 a month each), buy GPS-tracked tablets for all agents (GHS 150 000 in total) and rotate agents’ routes every six months.

Option C – move customers to depositing by mobile money themselves and reduce the network to 150 agents, who would then mainly sign up new customers and deal with loans.

CONFIDENTIAL: this email and any attachments are intended only for the named recipients.

Resource 4 – NS’s agent economics, 2025

Resource 5 – Survey of NS customers (600 replies)

Resource 6 – Interview with Yaw Owusu, an NS agent for nine years

“I know 95 traders by name and I know which ones are having a bad month. That is why they trust NS. But I am not an employee – no sick pay, no training since 2019, and I have met my supervisor twice. When an agent steals, everybody looks at all of us. If NS gave me a contract and a team leader I could talk to, I would stay for life. If NS replaces us with an app, the women at the market will go back to the old susu men.”