This is Organiztional behavior class disscussion board help me please. What Mess

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This is Organiztional behavior class disscussion board help me please.

What Message Is Yahoo Really Relaying?

In the late 1990s, almost every browser had Yahoo as its home page, and Yahoo was a market leader. But by the early 2000s, Yahoo lost its leadership position in content aggregation, web searches, and ad placement. In the early days of the Internet, Yahoo was a popular search engine, news site, and social forum that received decent revenues from online display advertising. While it did each of these acceptably, competitors entered the market and developed greater competencies and have now taken over. Google now leads the search engine industry, while Facebook cornered the social networking market. Currently, Yahoo has no technology advantage, no product advantage, and no market advantage. While the company is hanging in there, revenues are flat and there is no clear strategic direction forward.

Yahoo’s board has been aware of these problems and has been trying to find the right CEO to turn things around. In 2012, Marissa Mayer was selected as the CEO of Yahoo in hopes that the former Google executive could bring new life to the struggling company. This is the fourth CEO within a year, and the company is in dire need of a new strategy and visionary leadership. During her first year, she reduced costs, got all employees new smartphones to be better in touch with what customers are using, and started pushing the app development market. However, there is still much to do to make Yahoo competitive again.

Mayer’s bet is that employees will be inspired by “spontaneous interactions” to create new products and services that will enhance Yahoo’s bottom line. She’s had some success resulting from such interactions before. The new mobile app called Yahoo Weather came to be when someone from the Weather team and someone from the Flickr team encountered one another serendipitously on the Yahoo campus. After sharing projects, new ideas started flowing and led to the creation of the app. To inspire and capture more of these ideas, Mayer rolled out a policy that eliminated telecommuting at Yahoo. In the memo sent to all its employees, Yahoo executives wrote the following:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together.

Thousands of Yahoo’s employees telecommute at least once a week. Telecommuting allows employees greater flexibility in doing their jobs; managing their personal lives; and facilitating meetings between employees, customers, or suppliers. Previously, Yahoo used teleconferencing and videoconferencing to allow telecommuters to be part of meetings, and other work could be completed via e-mail, over the phone, or by using the company’s virtual private network. The removal of the policy is leaving a number of its employees with families in a lurch and may force some employees to leave Yahoo. Further, telecommuting can reduce costs, as companies need less office space and less technology as well as spend less on electricity and employee benefits.

With the new policy, all employees will be forced to complete the normal 9 to 5 at the offices, though they are allowed to telecommute on weekends and after hours. Will the time in the office be as productive as Mayer hopes, or will the policy lead to different kinds of inefficiency? Only time will tell.

Discussion Questions

The memo stated this: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.” How might Yahoo executives have come to this conclusion?

What type of message did such a decision send to Yahoo employees? To the rest of the world? How might the medium (an internal memo) have affected the employees’ interpretation? What would have been a better way to communicate this change to employees?

How do you think this policy change affected employee attitudes and employee motivation? Do you think that this change positively or negatively affect communication within the organization in the short and long term? How could the situation influence organizational effectiveness?

Do you think that Yahoo really needed to remove telecommuting to enhance communication and collaboration? To enhance speed and quality? What else could Mayer and Yahoo managers done to motivate employees to be more accurate, swifter, more creative, more talkative, and more collaborative?

It seems that Mayer is counting on her employees to come up with the answer that will revitalize the company. What kinds of communication channels will be required? What changes do you think should be made to Yahoo’s other policies and culture in order to facilitate the needed communication for new ideas?

Explanation / Answer

Yahoo Ceo Ms. Marissa Mayer has felt this due to stagnation in the growth of Yahoo which has lost its edge as a search engine, social networking site, placement and was getting a lot of ads. They have lost their leadership and the new ideas are not coming fast enough.

Message to the employees:

This decision sends a message to all Yahoo employees to shape up or ship out as Yahoo has lost all its potential for future growth and its existence might be at stake if it does not rework, its strategy in relation to products mix, deliverables, and quick resolutions.

Message to rest of the world

The message to rest of the world is to watch out as Yahoo is coming back to shape and it will regain its leadership position. It’s like a warning to all competitors to look out for a revamped competitor. It also makes other organizations study the pros and cons of telecommuting. This will push other organizations to restructure and make their communication channels more effectively to avoid falling into a technological rut.

Employees Interpretation:

The company is heading for a big shakeout, many employees will be laid off. The organization will retain only the efficient and the performers. Further, it’s a message to employees either work from office or you are not required. It also makes employees feel they have underperformed. It gives a very negative feeling and may bring on a hostile work environment driven by fear of losing one’s jobs.

Best way to communicate:

The best way to communicate should have been by taking project heads/ leaders into confidence and discussed the need to change the organizational structure. The message for an increase in speed of decision making and need for the more efficient organization should have been assigned to them. The decision should have been passed on through conference calls to avoid any hostility and the change should have been projected as a challenge to change the organization. The employees should have been motivated to take on the challenges of changing the face of Yahoo.

Organizational Change and attitude:

The change in policy will definitely shake up the system with many employees leaving and resenting the change. This change is good for increasing employee performance and revamping the organizational behavior of complacency and stagnation. Short term it seems a retrogressive and a traditional method but long term it will get the managers to rethink their methods of operation by the following:

“Do you think that Yahoo really needed to remove telecommuting to enhance communication and collaboration? To enhance speed and quality? What else could Mayer and Yahoo managers done to motivate employees to be more accurate, swifter, more creative, more talkative, and more collaborative?”

According to me the decision to remove telecommuting might seem a bit harsh to employees and much other technology-driven companies who look at work-life balance and encourage telecommuting.

In the situation that Yahoo is currently Ms. Mayer had no option but to take such harsh measures to improve communication and motivate employees to be swift and more collaborative. This will help to get the people back on their feet to acquire new skill sets and get the organization back on its feet to become a market leader again.

The decision is more to get the people to rethink ideas and become more creative for the survival of the organization and should not be seen as a harsh measure against the employees.

What kinds of communication channels will be required? What changes do you think should be made to Yahoo’s other policies and culture in order to facilitate the needed communication for new ideas?

The communication channels are as follows:

·         Online through email marking a copy to all relevant teams, keeping them in the loop with clear assigned duties and deadlines. Regular follow up by using professional appointment diary to update on progress.

·         Regular video conferencing once a week at a common suitable time, this is compulsory and cannot be avoided, with clear agenda and deliverables.

·         Chat groups which will discuss and brainstorm new ideas and improve creativity.

·         Collaborative discussion boards and increased teamwork.

·         New ideas will be rewarded and discussed with the research team immediately

·         Motivating and encouraging the changing thought process

To sum it up all organizations have to become lean, agile and flexible. The decision taken by Mayer will help Yahoo move in that direction.

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