MGT4000 - Session 5

Reading notes:

Measures of success as customer (feedback) orientated, perhaps?
What's up with the delay example (with the $100 and $500)? Isn't this more of a problem of permanency within a company?
Quarterly rewards vs present-day analyst opinions?

Wahl's case study

Service - focus on customer service: key to org culture
Quality - understanding and questioning the entire process
Employee entrepreneurship
Income from routes is customer feedback 30%, retention 60% - empowering for both employee and customer?

"Process Experts" "Guild of Artisans"
Hiring - employees integrated "invested" into the process: they work with the hired and also know more about the process
Team interviews look for "cultural fit" - looking for not just regular stuff, but also intangibles
Participation leads to commitment - "Does the company care?"
Training and Development - "investment" comes into play again, hiring within ranks (CEO was driver)
Quality Standards and Innovation (this is the entrepreneurship part, find better ways to do things)

Diversity: effective but sometimes conflictual (I don't think this is a word)
System vs culture of company? (coffee pot as a symbol of good service)

Why rewards fail:

Discrepancy between recognition value between supervisors and employees
Generic rewards - "Jeans day"
Rewards "cool" in certain cultures?
Questions of losing effectiveness - bad implementation, cultural fit, move on to another reward system? - implying being in-tune to the system is good, I guess

Five Star Case Study

Punishment as a motivator? (Does this work? Only in China? Not even in China?)
Transparency in China's workforce
The actual workforce - something about problems hiring people (college students esp?) into hard labor
Theory X vs Theory Y