Organizational Intervention

Posted: September 5th, 2013

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Organizational Intervention

Introduction

NA is an Information Technology company that engages in providing its customers with various products and services for their information management as well as storage amongst other IT services as desired by customers. Some of their products and services include innovative products, hardware systems of data storage and solutions, and software designed to help its customers across the world mange their data systems. The software is designed for helping the customers with storage, managing, protecting, and retaining their data in best conditions and with ease of accessing and handling as well as maintenance. Currently, the company has a revenue generation of $6.2 on an annual basis. The company has a labor force of 10,000 employees within its different outlets across the world. The company has 150 offices worldwide, making it a multinational company, and is listed among the fortune 500 companies. Recently, there has been a change within the organization, which is aimed at creating one service team globally. The team was created through combining both the professional service and the customer services to form a global services team. The goals have been partially achieved, demanding that an intervention for achieving the goals is needed if the company is to maximize the efficiency of serving the customers using the newly formed global services team.

The main goal of combining the two services group has been to maximize the efficiency of the IT infrastructure, which had been the goal of the company. Thus, the change was aimed at achieving the goals of the company through a combined effort of the two services groups (Berwick 11). With the two services groups separated as they were, achieving the corporate goal of the company was hard since each group had different goals and serving the customers was not easy. With the two services groups combined, serving addressing the needs of the customers becomes easy to achieve since both are focused towards the same goal, which is serving the customer.

Assessment of the Challenges of the Organization

In order to know what intervention would be best for the company, an assessment of the challenges causing underachievement of the goals completely would be in order to facilitate knowledge of the problems needing intervention. The assessment was done through a satisfaction questionnaire that sought to analyze a number of elements within the work practices. These elements included communication effectiveness, goal alignment, material resources, organization vision, career progression, feedback, team vision, effective decision-making, and fairness. Each of the elements was analyzed in regard to the ideal score that had been set in the company’s goal (Palepu and Healy).

These challenges include communication effectiveness that has scored 4.1 out of eight while the ideal score is 6.9. Communication in such an industry is one of the crucial operations that need to be effective to achieve success. Assessment on this element was based on the effectiveness of sharing of information within the 150 offices across the world and the global services.

Goal alignment has scored 2.6 /8 while the ideal score is 5.1, meaning there is a long way to go in order to minimize this challenge. The assessment was based on how the company handled its conflicting demands and freedom of each of the demands.

Adequate use of material and technical resources has scored 4.4 /8 while the ideal score is set at 6.9. To ensure that customers get services efficiently, having a good management of resources within the organization is necessary. The assessment within this challenge aimed at fining out whether the materials are used effectively with a focus to achieve the daily activities aimed at achieving the goal of the company.

Achieving the vision and mission of the organizational through goals that are clearly communicated to the staff is 4/3 /8 with the ideal score being 6.7. The organizational vision is very important for giving a direction of goals and objectives of the company. Thus, when the score is low, it could be an indication of lack of alignment of the goals to the mission and vision of the company or the staff may not be aware of the company vision and mission statement. Assessment was based on the communication of goals of the organization to the whole organization.

Career progression of the staff has scored 3.9 while the ideal score is 6.2 /9. This was concerned with assessing the challenges within the work place concerned with the workplace promotions among other elements such as job empowerment, and description.

Receiving of feedback and responding to it score is 4.4 /8 with the ideal score being 6.2 out of 8. In this element, the assessment was concerned with receiving performance feedback from customers and the manner in which it was handled in cases where feedback suggested an action.

Sharing of team goals within team vision score is 4.9 while the ideal score would be 6.8 /8. This involved assessing the sharing of goals within the global services, which is important for achieving the bigger goal of the whole organization.

Effectiveness of decision-making for problems realized scored 5.1 /8 while the ideal score is 7.0 /8. The assessment was based on the appropriateness of the decisions made concerning the problems challenges that arose within the organization and globally amongst the customers about the services provided.

Fairness provision of opportunities without favoring some score stands at 4.7 with the ideal score being 6.6 /8. This assessment was based on assessing the organizations in terms of providing opportunities as well as taking up opportunities that arose without favoring favoritism on any section of the organization. Evidently, it is obvious that there is still need of more work and intervention to achieve the desired goal by ensuring such challenges are handled properly to achieve the ideal score.

Intervention

The assessment was carried out to find out the challenges facing he achievement of the goal of the company. After the assessment and review of the challenges realized from the satisfaction survey, it was important to find out the goals and objectives of the managers at an individual level before having them together. Individual goals are complicated but play an important role in the achievement of the organizational goal. Some individual goals include their friends, money, intellectual interests among others. This was achieved through having the managers think and reflect on some questions and the answers they give (Borwick 13). The intervention involved bringing managers and other leaders within the company together and having others participate online in order to have an inclusion of the whole labor force.

The first thing that the intervention did was assessing the elements in the organization that are crucial to its success as mentioned. This was important in identifying the intervention that would be ideal for solving the problems. As it was realized from the satisfaction survey, most of the problems were concerned with goals of the organization and the other elements identified in the survey. The intervention sought to solve these through having a team that would be involved in restructuring of the goals and ensuring their conformity with the organizational mission and sectional goals.

Intervention goals and objectives

The overall objective of the intervention is building commitment, engagement, and ownership of individuals and teams. The other objective is identifying the key success factors and measures and assigning accountabilities with an aim of

1. Agreeing on one vision and mission statement
2. Establishing key strategic goals and defining the critical success factors for each goal.
3. Defining of the key leadership capabilities that are required for achieving the set goals
4. Benchmarking the leadership team with the defined capabilities is yet another crucial objective.
5. Development of good leadership practices in terms of communication, management of people, team development, decision-making, and development of people.
6. Agree on actions accountabilities and steps to be undertaken in achievement of the goals.

With identification of these goals, the intervention seeks to achieve them in having workshops of leadership teams where they discuss on the goals the company should adopt and share with all employees and sections of the organization. The whole intervention involves the satisfaction survey questionnaires, 360s sent online, and the workshops where the main work of creating the goals was done by the teams.

The selection of the intervention was based on the challenges facing the company, as well as its structure and also considering there were many leaders in various countries, and online involvement was crucial. The challenges considered in selecting the intervention were the ones presented in the satisfaction survey, since they presented the biggest work challenges in the workplace. This is because the intervention was aimed at solving these challenges. The other consideration was the changes taking place in the organization after the two services groups were merged to form the global services team. With these in mind, the intervention was best suited to the structure and challenges of the organization. Involving the team in realizing the problems they face poses a challenge for them to solve them considering they know the capabilities of the organization more, as well as the nature of their business. Other intervention methods that were considered focused more on the structure of the organization alone, while others focused on culture of the organization. Thus, they were not sufficient to deal with both culture and structure of the organization (Schein, Corporate Culture. 70).

The intervention method used links to clinical theories and concepts of intervention, considering it is designed to help the leadership within the organization realize the problems they are facing. The intervention observes the organizational observable facts, as the consultant, I view these facts as a byproduct of my services that make the intervention clinical, (Schein 110). The intervention makes use of the leaders to come up with a solution for the intervention. The intervention as mentioned earlier seeks to build individual and team commitment, engagement as well as ownership of the organizational goals. The intervention brings together teams with an aim of creating objectives that agree with all sections of the organization. Including the leaders and management in the formulation of these key goals and objectives is important and links the intervention to clinical theories, where I am just a consultant to the teams meant to help in coming up with a better solution.

In order to present this intervention to the teams, it required having to talk to the leaders in advance and preparing them by going through the intervention together. This was aimed at giving them a general overview of the whole process, the part they shall play and what shall be expected from each of them as well as each team. In order to introduce this intervention of the managers, before starting I had to give them an overview of what to expect from the intervention and their participation as well as roles to play. This involved some pre-work of issuing managers with questions to answer in order to create a rapport that would introduce them into the intervention. I expected that managers would be expecting a different kind of intervention, where they are least involved until implementation stage. However, the managers of NA were quite welcoming, with some inviting me for one to one meetings after the feedback questions and meetings with the leaders.

After the intervention, it would not be worth without having an assessment criterion for assessing the effectiveness of the integration. This will require establishing a monitoring and review process that would be used in order to find out the effectiveness of the integration. Some of the monitoring would be use of another satisfaction survey to find out whether there is any improvement after implementation of the intervention (Schein, Corporate Culture. 74). Defining some performance measures during the intervention that would be used would be ideal to make sure that progress can always be assessed when there is need. In addition, assigning of specific responsibilities to specific teams would ensure ease of monitoring in addition, to assess the impact of the intervention on the organization, requesting for feedback would be ideal. This would ensure to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. To access my intervention effectiveness in the integration, it would require reflecting on the reception that my services received, in NA, my services and present was felt, with the leaders asking to hold on-on-one meetings even before the intervention. After interviews with the managers and leaders, I received positive feedback from them the next day of the intervention. This was a clear indication of my role in the intervention.

Work cited

Borwick Irving. Organizational Role Analysis: Managing Strategic Change in Business Settings. Karnac New York, N.D. PDF

Schein H. Edgar. Organizational Culture. American Psychologist 2003. PDF.

Schein H. Edgar. The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. Hoboken, N.J: John Willey and Sons, 2009. Print.