The structure of The Night Owl Answering Services

Employees don’t have a lot procedures and rules that they must abide by while doing their Jobs. In fact the initial company policy required employees to stay with the customer they were serving from the time they walked Into the store until the sale was made Also, there was not a great deal of standardization in that there was not a set procedure on how employees did their work, rather it was a freer organization because there were very few employees and this resulted in greater flexibility. These facts all changed once the new computer system was implemented.

This system presented employees with some degree of formalization and standardization In their Jobs because now there were precise rules Ana procedures on now to deal Walt customers.

I Nils Includes entering an ID number every time a sale was made and closing the store with the system. Also, because this bookstore was not use to high levels of formalization in the past, the implementation of the training program was affected. There were no instructions on how to close at the end of the day in training. The manager had to come in and prepare a hand-written set of instructions about this routine.

This is a sign of bad design and implementation. Also, because the company is more centralized than decentralized, the management must follow head office’s requests.

This is the exact same thing with employees who must listen to the manager even though the employees were apprehensive, particularly the older staff, about new system. Again, the design of the training program, which was quoted as pretty skimpy and patronizing, was another sign of poor design. However, because the structure of the company was somewhat centralized they had to the training according to the way head office and management wanted.

The structure of The Night Owl Answering Services was that it was between mechanistic and organic. This call center was more mechanistic because it was more centralized and more specialization where each individual had a specific role. Bob was responsible for technology, sales and marketing.

Mary was responsible for training. This type of structure affected the training because of specialization. Nobody else was responsible for training, so when Mary passed away, everyone else specialized in a different area which left training to be an open mess.

Only Mary knew the system the best because she specialized in his. This left the company scrambling to recover and in turn designed a training program that proved to be ineffective and poorly implemented. There was only one lacy responsible Tort trailing.

In ten case AT Automation In ten BOOK store Ana I n Night Owl Answering Service it is important to look at the organizations environment. In these two cases, the organizations both faced environmental uncertainty. Every organization has the potential for environmental uncertainty.

This uncertainty created a poor design for training. This was one of the major similarities in both of these cases.

This is when management or people of the organization can’t really predict what is going to happen. The cases with Automation in the Book Store and The Night Owl Answering Services had faced environmental uncertainty that prove to be frustrating and challenging. However, because both of these companies had static environments, that is a company that remain fairly stable over time and had the least amount of uncertainty, they were sensitive to change.

In The Night Owl Answering Service the head of training, Mary, passed away. This was an unpredictable event. It was clearly evident that there was no back up to Mary.

Because this company was so used to certainty, it caught them off guard, particularly Bob. In the medium size bookstore the company had followed the same procedures to ring up sales until it introduced its new system. It took one month for the company to adapt. Again, both companies trained employees in such a way that proved to be ineffective. This means these two organizations ability to adapt to environmental change was poor.

It’s also important to discuss external environmental factors or outside factors that have a direct effect on the company, which in turn affected raining. The answering services company had a good reputation for customer service out when ten senior operators started leaving teeny anneal new people Ana trainer very quickly to get people on the phone and take calls. Therefore, the external factor here would be the customer. In The Night Owl Answering Services the customer was always the number one priority because they had a prestige reputation on customer service they wanted to continue providing services in a timely manner.

This directly affected the training design and implementation because trainers wanted the trainees n the phone as soon as possible to serve the clients of the company because they were short staffed. As a result of this, the trainers wanted to get trainees on the phone quickly which resulted in an implementation and design that proved to be ineffective.

Trainees were expected to learn through trial and error style of training. Senior operators were forced to take calls and train at the same time.

This resulted in slower operators and higher errors and more complaints to the call center, which lead to clients (external factor) leaving the call center and find business elsewhere. This many was so focused on getting trainees on the phone, they ignored the fact they lacked the basic phone etiquette and computer skills. Senior Management was continuously on the phone, with out breaks. In The Automation in the Book Store the external environment component that should be discussed is technology.

Like every other company, it must keep up with technology and accept current business practices.

They were entering an era where technology was becoming widespread and they needed a system to calculate the SST. This is a reason why the bookstore called to take on ten new computer system. I nee organizations employees were elucidate to have it but didn’t have a choice and had to keep up with external technological factors. The company was highly sensitive to this environmental change, which was external, but when the system was implemented, it became an internal factor. There was systematic turbulence in this organization.

There ability to adapt to systematic change, the new computer system would be considered systematic turbulence.

Systematic turbulence looks at how a company deals with a change in the environment change. This is evident is the case with Automation in the Bookstore.. Part 2) Motivational effects are very important aspects of an organization.

People have to be motivated to Join and remain in organizations. They also have to carry out their basic work reliability in terms of productivity, quality, and services, requirements and should always interact to accomplish their goal. These are some examples that if were missing in an organization, employees and members of the company began to lose interest and be less motivated.

This was the case with these two organizations. One of the major similarities was that both companies faced poor training design and implementation. In Automation in the Bookstore the training was boring and ineffective, which had motivational effects.

Lisa was an employee who worked in a medium sized bookstore and was completely dissatisfied with the design of the training. Unfortunately, the training was a mandatory requirement to understand the new system. The first two days started off by having to watch two half an hour videos wanly Lisa Tuna to De During Ana Insulting. N ten Tanta cay AT trailing It went downhill. The computer system was not on training mode the way it was suppose to be.

Also, there were no instructions on how close at the end of the day. The manager had to come in and prepare handwritten set of instructions. This caused a lot of robbers and created frustration for all members of the organization including management and head office, who wanted to assign blame to someone. The operation of the system was not going according to plan and this got the trainees upset and confused about the policies of the system.

Some parts of the training were vague and the continuous frustration had negative motivational effects. Similarly, The Night Owl Answering Services faced great training problems when Mary died, that evidently created negative motivational problems.

Bob was forced to take over training without much knowledge of how to do so, which was also a big problem. Senior operators were forced to work extra hard with no breaks, while at the same time train a new person. New operators were poorly trained and did not know how to handle calls. All these factors started showing in the office environment.