Management Assignment
The textbook for this course is
BATEMAN. (2013). M: Management, 3rd Edition.
The chapter for this Unit is Chapter 12: “Teamwork”
Read the article below: “The evolution of work: One company’s story” by Roxane Divol
and Thomas Fleming. After reading the article, respond to the following:
Considering the differences between traditional work environments and the New Team
Environment, describe important factors in building a virtual team that provide benefits to
the organizations and to the individual team members.
(Cite any outside sources.)
Minimum words 400 words.
The Article: One company’s story” by Roxane Divol and Thomas Fleming
Section:
Executive perspective
The evolution of work: One company's story
Symantec's chief human-resources officer, Rebecca Ranninger, describes the security
software company's transition to a virtual workplace while reflecting on the promise -and perils -- of new ways of working.
The physical part of work -- where and how it's done -- is shifting in big ways. We all
recognize the signs: you'll schedule a meeting and you're the only person sitting in the
conference room, with 20 people on the phone. You'll hear dogs barking in the
background, babies crying. Yet all of these people have, in their heads, what they need
for the meeting.
It seems as if it was just a few years ago that we were taking people out of offices and
putting them into cubicles. From there, the trend went to open work spaces, then
hoteling, and then shared hoteling "cubes" -- all driven by the need to keep real-estate
costs low in a very acquisitions-oriented industry that's always streamlining. Now, more
and more of our employees are working remotely.
In many ways, that's a good thing. It gives people a lot more flexibility and freedom, and
makes them happier about the job because they're able to put their lives together in
ways that matter to them. This is true for men and women both. 1 think the additional
flexibility makes Symantec more attractive to all employees and helps us get better
people. I remember having discussions, eight or nine years ago, with my boss at the
time about somebody who was just the perfect candidate but didn't want to move to our
headquarters, in Mountain View, California. The answer was, "Nope, we need him
here." That is much less likely to happen today.
But today's more virtual workplace also raises interesting psychological questions. I
think it makes all of us less able to compartmentalize and separate the different
elements of our lives as we used to. It's less linear -- much more of a jumble -- because
we're always multitasking, we're always on. The technology enables that by taking away
the limitations of time and space. I have seen people who stay up all night working with
Europe, Australia, and India and then work the whole day in the United States. They
burn themselves out because they're always available. It's a huge worry.
The new workplace also creates a very different ethos. Those 20 people in your phone
meeting aren't sitting around a table together seeing the same presentation in front of
them. The communal-experience piece of it -- the camaraderie -- is lost. These are
concerns for us. How do we ensure that people have the same kind of experience they
used to get sitting in a room when they're no longer even in the same hemisphere?
We've got virtual teams all over the world, and I'm willing to bet there are many in which
no team member has ever even met another team member. It's really easy to turn
everybody into a voice on the phone and a line on a screen, and we don't want to do
that.
Similarly, how do we make sure people learn from one another in a virtualized
workplace? How do we make sure we're maintaining our company culture and values?
A new way
These are the kinds of questions we've grappled with as we implemented a homebased work program called Ways 2 Work, which we initially launched in parts of the
United States and are now rolling out more broadly. The program's goal is to focus on
employees' contributions and results rather than when -- or where -- work is done.
There's a big technological component, of course: things like VoIP phones, socialnetworking tools, and other technologies can help people work efficiently from wherever
they happen to be. But the program also relies heavily on the ability of managers to
make sure their colleagues stay connected to work in a human way. A good example of
success is our sales support unit in Shannon, Ireland, where our managers and
employees are significantly changing how they work (see sidebar, "Close-up: Shannon,
Ireland").
Here in the United States, an important aspect of the program involves moving away
from paid time off. We started about a year and a half ago at the top of the company
and have been working our way down, expanding the change to more and more groups.
It's a big jump.
Basically, we're saying, you don't have a set amount of time off. Take your time off
when you can -- we're not going to record it but you need to get the job done.
The program is certainly a positive for the company because it takes a lot of money off
the balance sheet, but it's had a really interesting effect on how people think of work
time as well. I think it causes most people to look at time in the same way they did when
they were students. Nobody cared if you studied five minutes or ten hours for the quiz.
All they cared about was that you did well on it. The new policy has been a challenge for
some employees, and we obviously have to beware of the extremes -- say, people
watching soap operas all afternoon, at one end, and completely burning themselves out
with overwork, at the other. But it's been very successful overall, and I think our people
appreciate the move. Our employee satisfaction scores did go up after the change,
though I'm always leery of confusing correlation with causation when it comes to any
single measure.
What the program means for managers
Ultimately, our managers have a lot of discretion in how they implement home-based
work programs and define how work gets done in their own units. This is by necessity.
Our products are so differentiated, and the types of work that our people do is so
differentiated -- and dispersed -- that there can't be a "one size fits all" solution. We can
tell our people what we want and what the outcome has to be, but the businesses need
to have the autonomy to get that result in their own way.
This approach puts a lot of responsibility on our managers because it's really up to them
to help their people determine the right balance. We spend a lot of time working with our
managers on "remote management": training them in a whole gamut of skills and
techniques to help bring together people from different cultures as a team. Those skills
cover everything from the tactical, like clear and concise communication and follow-up
skills, to those more in the realm of management philosophy, like the ability to base the
evaluation of an employee on the fulfillment of a set of measurable deliverables, as
opposed to putting in a certain number of hours a week. Remote management is now a
core skill for managers -- one reflected in our performance-management processes.
Yet even as these newer management skills grow in importance, I think it's more
challenging than ever to ensure that our people have the general-management skills
they need. In today's more specialized work environment, you have to know a whole lot
more about a whole lot less to do a good job. This is certainly true at Symantec, where,
for example, in recent years we've disaggregated all the various human-resources
activities into specialist and generalist roles. Similarly, recruiting used to be handled by
one or two people; now there might be ten people contributing, but each of them
handles specific tasks. I think that nearly all jobs are amenable to this trend, given the
right talent and management skills.
Developing solid general-management skills requires helping people to think hard about
what they want the map of their careers to look like. We also rotate people to give them
more varied management opportunities. This is important because in a specialized
world, people aren't as likely to get general-management skills the way they used to: by
having responsibility for a whole bunch of things at once.
A more virtual and disaggregated workplace puts a lot of pressure on our senior
leadership to connect the dots. The act of redefining jobs in a global company, for
example, tends to highlight some of the age-old frictions about regional versus
corporate-level control -- and what you think about these issues often depends on
where you sit. If you're in the corporate office, the push is always for more consistency,
but if you're the head of Asia-Pacific, you're saying, "Wait a minute, what about India?
We can't do it that way or we'll lose people." Talk of redefining jobs has sparked some
big debates and serves as a great reminder to us that we have to be able to see
multiple points of view simultaneously.
At the most basic level, working through these kinds of challenges comes down to
building and strengthening trust. Ironically, perhaps, the act of building this kind of trust
among senior managers is something I don't think we could have done virtually. There's
a limit to virtualization in that respect. At some point, you have to get people together
and sit around those tables and have those discussions. The meetings' content is
important, but just as important is physically connecting in one place now and then, so
you can work things out with each other. At the end of the day, we're still human beings.
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