Dear Mr. Ken Winston,
First, thank you for hiring Miracle Consulting to assist you in the next few months to improve Campbell and Bailyn’s. The changes that your company has implemented have both positive and negative aspects to them. The establishment of the Key Accounts Team and the New Performance Management System are great ideas. We feel that your KAT team was implemented much better than your performance management system since the KAT team followed most of Kotter’s eight-step plan for implementing change, while the Performance Management System didn’t. It’s obvious that the Performance Management System is a good idea because the results were positive based on annual sales. However, the ideas could’ve been implemented better since there are several key issues. Even though we believe that the issues are detrimental to your company’s well-being, they aren’t impossible to resolve.
Issues and Analysis
Issue 1: Fears of Job Specializations
It has been expressed by your team members that they’re worried about the new team structure limiting their future career prospects. Managers often neglect to further develop skills of employees that are in a specialized role since the managers are satisfied with their employee’s current role and performance of their employees(Tucker). However, if your team members start to believe that their current role has no advancement opportunities, they may leave your company to find a career that provides better opportunities to learn transferable skills and the possibility to advance further in their career. Therefore, this may lead to your company seeing a higher turnover rate.
Issue 2: An increase in customer dissatisfaction
It’s obvious that, because of specialization, trades have become more complicated for your clients since they would have to communicate with several different departments rather than dealing with just one generalist. This made trading more complicated and tedious for your clients and about half of them didn’t believe the change was necessary. Also, by forcing your clients to deal with more than one person, the personal connection between client and generalist is lost.
Issue 3: Resistance of Performance Management System
Currently, there’s tension and resentment within your sales staff due to the rash implementation of this system. Unlike the introduction of the KAT team, we noticed there’s little communication during the transition period. Employees are less likely to accept change when there is a lack of communication and they feel excluded from the process (Langton 551). According to the cognitive evaluation theory, the increase in working pressure to make higher profits has also shown to be an ineffective method of encouraging employees in the long run. If your employees continue to be dissatisfied with the new management system this may lead to a continuance commitment or an increased turnover rate.
Alternatives
Alternative #1: Resign of Evaluation System. With the new system, the bonuses are solely based on feedback; however, we don’t think this is the best solution to judge a person’s efforts. We advise you to redesign your effectiveness evaluation system by considering both sales volume and feedback in the evaluation. Financial incentives are still necessary, so that employees are rewarded both intrinsically and extrinsically. It’s common that people may focus too much on getting the compensation. However, the new performance management system may destroy the work environment and cause them to lose their target while they’re chasing the sales figures.
Alternative #2: Unlimited Vacation Days
We initially thought of offering your employees unlimited vacation days. Not only will your employees feel recharged from the extra time off, they may also enjoy the feeling trust that’s bestowed upon them since they’re asked to take time off at their own discretion. However, this policy can be both underutilized by employees, when they’re too scared to take time off and abused by employees who don’t care about the company. Therefore, we believe our recommendation of communication and setting team goals would be more beneficial.
Recommendations and Solutions:
Recommendation 1: Problem-Solving Team and Job Rotation
We recommend that your company should develop a problem-solving group consisting of members from the Key Accounts Team and hold weekly meetings. We believe that this would provide your employees with more opportunities to develop their personal soft skills. The purpose of each meeting would be to increase communication within the company, so all members are well informed of any major decisions.It also allows group members to express any dissatisfation with the company and therefore, would be in the “Voice” quadrent of the Job Dissatisfation Response Chart. Also, a job rotation system should be implemented with quarterly rotations. We believe that your organization should still have specialized roles since it increases productivity (Tucker). Not only will job rotation increase motivation, it’ll reduce the fear of future job prospects since employees can learn a wider range of skills (Langton 189).
Recommendation 2: Conference Calls
Due to specialization, the process for in-house traders to receive information is now more complicated. Therefore, your company should utilize conference calls that would include the client and all the members of the KAT team. This would allow the client to receive all the information they’re looking for at one time, rather than having to make three different phone calls. This could also please the clients since they’re now receiving more facetime with the employee that they’d initially worked solely with.
Recommendation 3: Team Goals and Increasing Communication
Currently, the biggest concern is the loss of customers due to specialization. In order for the performance management system to resolve this we suggest increasing lunch visits, dividing the customers amongst the specialists, and integrating customer satisfaction into the performance evaluation. Through this, close working relationships will be maintained and your company will be able to keep their personal connection with clients which can build trust and loyalty. Another crucial change needs to be an increase in communication.By allowing your employees to provide feedback, it gives your employees a voice and is a good indication of how well the new system is working. Furthermore, just as you had shared sales figures from a competitor you should continuously share valuable information regarding your company’s position compared to competitors to motivate employees. The feeling of purpose and meaningfulness to the company are high intrinsic motivators for employees (Langton 190). Not only will this improve the overall satisfaction of the employees but studies show this will increase customer contentment and loyalty (Langton 101). Lastly, by creating small goals for the team and rewarding these short-term “wins”, this will increase both teamwork and the likelihood of the new system being accepted by employees.
Conclusion
After a careful analysis, we strongly believe that our recommendations will be highly beneficial for your company. Not only will they decrease the fears about job specialization, they will also increase communication between employees. We also believe that they will solve the problems that your clients face, especially having to make several calls to receive the information that they need. Attached to our analysis, we have included an implementation plan that will give you the initial steps of using our recommendations.
The image above is our suggested implementation timeline. We believe that, immediately, you should implement conference calls since it takes very little effort to implement it. Also, by using conference calls, you are also increasing communication immediately. After one month, we believe you should have set goals for your team and extrinsically reward them for being able to work as a team. By month 3, we suggest that the problem solving team is implemented and that you begin the quarterly job rotation. We wanted to introduce the problem solving 3 months in rather than immediately so that you are given an opportunity to communicate the idea to your team members.
Work’s Cited
Langton, Nancy, Stephen P. Robbins, and Timothy A. Judge, eds. Organizational
Behaviour: Concepts, Controversies, Applications. Fifth Canadian Edition.
Toronto, Ontario: Pearson, 2010.
Rouse, Margaret. “Soft Skills.” Search CIO. TechTarget, n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.
Tucker, Kristine. “Job Specialization Pros & Cons.” Globalpost. Demand Media, n.d. Web. 27
Feb. 2015.