Change is the biggest challenge on American managers' minds! Changing realities in the workplace are challenging managers, employees, and executives alike to learn new skills and to adapt themselves to new work environments. Change becomes its own challenge and it is driven by global markets, diminishing product life cycles, more intense competition, evolving customer needs, and breakthrough technological developments. Organization around "customer requirements" and "flexibility" in meeting market conditions have moved ahead of "quality" and "service leadership" as the top two capabilities according to one survey of managers. This has occasioned a shift for managers and executives from an internal focus on their organizations to an external focus on their customers, competitors, and others in their external environments.

Where change is especially rapid, organizations must be responsive and flexible. For example, Welch's has invested heavily in its employees to create a new high-performance design to quickly meet changing demands for customerization of their products.

One of the biggest forces for change comes from the competition. The retail sector of the economy is one in which the sheer intensity of competition really turns the heat on managers, employees and executives. This intensity, especially for small retailers, is driven in part through the overpowering advertising and operating efficiencies of large organizations such as Wal-Mart, Kmart, Toys 'R' Us and Home Depot.

SOURCE: E. Davis, "What's on American Managers' Minds," Management Review, April 1995, 14-20.

SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION

Job Loss and a Soft Landing

Job loss through organizational downsizing can be a difficult and painful experience, as many employees and managers found during the early 1990s. Even though job loss may be an inevitable consequence of changing organizational realities for some people at work, it may not be inevitable that employees and managers who lose their jobs end up bitter or angry; there may be a soft landing depending on how the company handles the process.

J. Brockner and his colleagues examined the attitudes and feelings of more than 200 unemployed people (i.e., layoff victims), 150 survivors in the financial services industry who had lost many coworkers to layoffs, and about 150 lame ducks (i.e., people scheduled to lose their manufacturing jobs). The research team found that companies who downsize may significantly reduce adverse, negative employee reactions by focusing on how they conduct the layoffs and whether they provide an attractive severance package.

The findings suggest that when companies use a process seen as fair and equitable to conduct the layoffs and provide an attractive severance package, employees have a much more positive attitude toward the company. In addition, they are more prone to trust the organization and be supportive in their responses. Providing a soft landing for employees can be good for the company in survivor productivity and the absence of retaliation, as well as good for the manager or employee in helping them move on in their work life with a positive attitude.

SOURCE: J. Brockner, M. Konovsky, R. Cooper-Schneider, R. Folger, C. Martin, and R. J. Bies, "Interactive Effects of Procedural Justice and Outcome Negativity on Victims and Survivors of Job Loss," Academy of Management Journal 37 (1994): 397-409.  

ORGANIZATIONAL REALITY

The Customer as Boss

In January 1996, AT&T announced that it would reduce the size of its workforce by 40,000 employees, 65 percent of whom would be managers and 85 percent of whom were in the United States, over a three-year period. Another large-scale layoff? More downsizing? More people out of work? What is going on? Who's the boss?

What is happening in the telecommunications and other industries is a fundamental change in how companies organize and do business. Dramatic technological advances, such as in information technology, are leading to breathtaking productivity improvements in how products are manufactured, sold, and delivered. Hence, more is produced with fewer people and that trend will continue in manufacturing just as it did in agriculture throughout the United States.

These changes are driven by a focus on the customer. Customers can no longer be taken for granted. In this customer revolution the customer is now the boss, not the company nor the employee. As a result of this intense customer focus, there is less employment security because companies need to be flexible and have low fixed costs so as to be able to respond to the changing demands of their customers.

Increasingly, executives link customers and employees, in a sense serving as representatives of customers. As customers become more demanding, employees are increasingly put in a position to accede to these demands. This is a fundamental change at work.

SOURCE: M. Hammer, "Manager's Journal: Who's to Blame for All the Layoffs?" Wall Street Journal, 22 January 1996, A14.  

 CHALLENGE

Are You Highly Satisfied as a Customer

Think of an organization or business with whom you have frequent contact and interaction. How satisfied are you with the products or services provided to you by this organization or business? Would the organization or business be competitive in the Customer Satisfaction category for a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award?

Complete the following eight questions to rate the quality of the organization's or business's customer satisfaction. Use a scale of 1 (definitely not), 2 (probably not), 3 (unsure), 4 (probably yes), and 5 (definitely yes).

1. Do you believe the organization knows what you expect as a customer?


2. Has the organization improved the quality of its customer relationships over a period of time?


3. Do you receive the same standard of service from different people in this organization?


4. Do you believe that each and every employee is committed to serving your needs and satisfying you as a customer?


5. Whenever you have had even the smallest complaint about the organization, has that complaint been resolved satisfactorily?


6. Have you ever completed any sort of customer satisfaction survey, card, or feedback form for the organization?


7. Have you heard that people were more satisfied with the organization's products and services in the past than today?


8. Compared with similar organizations, do you consider this organization to be superior in serving customers?

Scoring

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