37. The CEO just took a three-week executive management seminar at a local unive

Question

37. The CEO just took a three-week executive management seminar at a local university. Upon returning to work, she went straight to your office as VP of Human Resources. She wants you to examine the organization's culture. She now knows that a core requirement to being an effective HR professional is to understand the business in the broadest, most comprehensive sense, and be able to identify potential opportunities or threats to its growth and sustainability. This means understanding strategic issues such as vision, mission, and strategy (including products, target customers, infrastructure mechanisms). It also means understanding how work is performed, the technology tools used, the labor force dynamics, and the communication mechanisms. Taken together, the array of these organizational "levers" either support or detract from the espoused culture. She wants to know how you would investigate the culture of your company Specifically, she wants to know: How would you go about learning and assessing your company? What organizational model or models would you use as your interpretive framework for understanding how the different parts of the company are operating? What steps would you take to identify potential opportunities and threats/constraints to the company? (Note: think both external and internal) a. b. c.

Explanation / Answer

a. The best way to learn and assess the company would be to organize an online internal and external survey with multiple choice questions for employees, suppliers and customers. For employees, the questions would relate to their experience within the organization with regards to working environment, company culture, facilities availed, areas of improvement and overall assessment. While for suppliers and customers the questions would relate to their experience while dealing with the company. The specific questions would refer to ease of business with the company, the responsiveness of various departments and comments about product quality.

The survey thus conducted will give an overall assessment of what people think about the company.

b) The organizational model to help understand the workings of different parts of the company would be to assess different departments step by step as per the flow of the organizational framework. i.e. human resources, sales and marketing, production, supply chain, finance, accounts and so on. Each department will be assessed on the specific characteristics of its routine work by way of a scaling tool to assess their performance. The scaling tool will be developed for each department with inputs from respective department heads.

c) Potential threats and opportunities will be identified and assessed by way of SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. This will be done by a brain storming session involving all department heads.

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