Self Management Team

How members of self-management teams view changes from previous organization at the company "Alpha".

Table of Contents

A - Executive Summary 3

B - The company "Alpha" 4

1- Company Background 4

2- Reasons of the change 5

3- Self management team concept 6

C - Analysis of Primary Research 7

1- Research approach 7

2- Data Analysis 8

D - Recommendations to Management 10

E - References 1

Executive Summary:

Self management teams are nowadays popular in the business environment since the 90Ð'Ò's (Attaran & Nguyen, 2000. p.22). As many other companies, the company "Alpha" decided to implement this organizational structure on the 1st of November 2007. The company needed to act because "Alpha" was facing a critical situation. Despite good sales reports, "Alpha" was not profitable enough due to some increasing expenses from the marketing campaigns and due to a low retention rate of the customers at the early stage of the programme. In order to improve the situation, the Manager Director decided to take several actions including the system of self management team for the sales Department.

Shifting the organizational structure to another implicates a drastic change in the way of working for the management level and for the staff. The employeesÐ'Ò' attitude also needs to change due to their new responsibilities. This study will highlight the views and the feelings of the change from the employeesÐ'Ò' side. A survey filled in by half of the employees concerned by this change demonstrated a certain misunderstanding from some of the employees about the consequence of the change on the day-to-day basic. Some employees, especially the top achievers in the Sales department could see this change having negative effects on their own situation which risks influencing their participation in this project. However, the main risk comes from the lack of clarity in the communication process.

At that time, some recommendations have been offered in order to reduce the risks of conflicts within the employees but also in order to provide a better environment which will help to achieve "Alpha" goals.

The Company "Alpha":

1 - Company background:

The company "Alpha" is the business arm of the E-Learning division of the University of *********. It is part of a larger educational corporation which has its head office in Baltimore USA. The offices are based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The native language of the Netherlands is Dutch but given that "Alpha" operates on a day to day basis with English speaking students from around the world, the office working language is English. The Amsterdam office has approximately 140 employees which are in most of the case expatriates. English is the second language for 20% of them. There are only ten Dutch nationals working for "Alpha" in Amsterdam and these are mostly senior managers. The major department in the office is the Sales Department, with approximately 100 Enrolment Advisors. The Enrolment Advisors were divided into 7 teams of 10 to 15 people with a Team Manager assigned to manage each team. Because the majority of the employees are expatriates, staff retention is an ongoing issue with a large turnover of Enrolment Advisors throughout a year. The Team Managers are generally recruited through an internal channel for those who have been successful Enrolment Advisors. The skills each individual Team Manager brings to this position varies depending of the age and experience of each individual Team Manager.

Due to the nature of the expatriate workforce and also due to the fact that the employees are "in a telephone sales environment which has a high turnover of staff everywhere attrition will be high" (British CRM, n.d),the staff turnover in the Enrolment Department last year was 127%.

2 - Reasons of the change:

The yearly results demonstrated that the company would be not profitable for long because the Marketing costs increased faster than expected during the last five years. "Alpha" invests more than 50% of their budget in the Marketing in order to provide leads to the Sales department. The cost per lead was established at around 28$ per lead 5 years ago. In 2007, the cost per lead is evaluated at 42$ and will increase to 50$ in a short term period which will have a direct effect on "AlphaÐ'Ò's" profit.

Because the cost of one lead will nearly double compared to 5 years ago, the company needs better quality leads to improve the sales converting rate but also to reduce the number of leads used in order to keep positive results. For 2008, the Marketing DepartmentÐ'Ò's objective is to reduce the number of non-workable leads in order to increase the quality. The Director of Admission also decided to put in place a self management team structure for the Sales department in order to improve the effectiveness and to increase the sales converting rate.

The second objective is to increase the retention of student in order to increase the generating revenue per students. A self management team system, with a team reward based on sales result and completion rate of the programme rather than an individual reward should push the employees to be more implicated on the team result than on their own result.

3- Self management team concept:

The notion of self management team being more effective is based on reports suggesting that self managed team can increase performance, improve the quality of the services and can also create innovating ideas (Hammer & Stanton, 1995). A link between self management and team effectiveness can also be identified by some researches (De Dreu & West, 2001, p.1193). However, on practice, the efficacy of self management team can also been questioned. The relationship between self management team and effectiveness might not be present every time and some organizations could experience this situation (Wageman, 1997p.53). The progress observed after implementation of this organizational structure can be