Organisation analysis

INTRODUCTION

I personally feel that I already possessed some basic knowledge required in analysing and gathering information about an organisation. In the past while I was preparing myself for the campus recruitment programmes during my bachelors, I did a similar kind of research in order to get an idea beforehand about the companies and their market values that I was applying for.

What I liked the most about this module is that in the initial three weeks we were just taught about the various principles and frameworks that underlie in analysing an organisation and it’s only in the last couple of weeks that we were provided with hands on experience in implementing the learnt techniques.

LESSONS LEARNED

I really felt it new and great to interact with the employees while conducting the surveys among them. In the later part when we were not granted the permission to conduct the surveys, I founded it pretty difficult but learnt quite a lot about the issues that are faced while conducting them under the shades. Though the questionnaires were straight forward and the employees did not have much difficulty in filling them, the major setback was with the interviews that I had with some of them. I had to reframe almost all of our questions in such a way that it does not eats up much of the employees time and also to make it easy for them to come out with specific answers.

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STAGES OF ANALYSIS

Our group was assigned with the Warwick Food and Drink Department for our analysis. The Food and Drink department was found to be offering many services like the cafes, restaurants, bars and food deliveries across the university. Hence we figured out that we need to put in a lot of effort and time in order to furnish our findings. As instructed by our course coordinator we choose a member of our team as the group representative, who was responsible for interacting with the manager. The very first day we begin our analysis, we decided and made our group representative to mail and book an appointment with the manager of that department.

Luckily to our surprise, we got an early appointment for the meeting from the manager. Since time was lacking for us to analyse about each and every service offered by the department, we all brainstormed and decided on some of the major and bigger services to analyse. Initially many of my team members decided to conduct their analyses on services that catered to only to a small amount of people owing to the lack of time, but later I somehow struggled and convinced them to opt in for some of the bigger service areas. I was of the notion that by understanding the work structure in these bigger service areas, we could get a clear view of the organisation as a whole. We then framed the questions that we were to ask the manager during the interview. Many of us came up with different kind of questions and after much aberration we zeroed on some of the basic questions. Again in this phase I faced quite some difficulties in convincing my team members. Though there are many instances one of them being the question about the “Safety Measures” that are being undertaken in the department. Since our analysis was about the Food and Drinks, I felt the need to consider about the safety measures being taken in order to guarantee the quality of food that are served to the customers, whereas my team members felt that it is awkward to shoot this question to the manager of that department. Though many were not happy I somehow convinced my group representative to incorporate it to the list of other questions. But later to everyone’s surprise, it was for this question that the manager gave utmost importance and also spent quite a lot of time on answering it.

Though when compared to the other groups we got an early appointment from the manager and also had an interview with her, we could not extort as much of the needed information from it. But we figured out that motivation was ought to be an important factor that was missing in that department, which in turn led us to understand deeper into the facts that the grading system and feedback from the managers about the performance of their employees were also lacking.

Owing to our lack of time, we took motivation as the preceding factor and decided to dig out as much information we could from it. We framed some more questions based on motivation and tried to schedule another interview with the manager, but our appointment was refused. Later we prepared a questionnaire (owing to the fact that their workplaces were busy always) containing questions about the employees motivation, their job satisfaction, etc. and we decided to hand it over to just a minimal number of employees in each of the services on which we were concentrating our analysis.

Again when we tried to get permission from the manager to give out these questionnaires, she readily disagreed to it. Hence we almost felt like we were totally lost in the middle of nowhere. Later we decided to conduct the interviews and give out the questionnaires to some of the employees, whom we personally knew. Though what we did was out of the rules since the manager did not wanted and did not knew about this, we had no other options left.

Since we were mainly concentrating on the factors like the motivation, grading system, feedback and the performance evaluation, our interviews and the questionnaires were narrowed down onto these fields and I almost succeeded in extracting the required information from the 8 surveys that I conducted.

After completing the surveys our entire group sat together and brainstormed about the answers that we obtained. After much aberration we zeroed down on some of the common issues that needed to be taken care of in the department, which we made sure came up in line with those factors that we planned to consider after our initial interview with the manager. Though I planned to address the issues like leadership and teamwork persisting in the department, it could not be done owing to the lack of co-operation from the upper management.

THEORIES INVOLVED

I made use of the Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ in order to depict the various and basic needs of the employees. To my surprise it’s only the full time employees who were satisfying their whole range of needs whereas the part time employees were concerned only about their basic needs. From my analysis I figured out that it was mainly owing to the current recession that the employees were tending to ignore their higher level needs. We also made use of the Adams ‘Equity Theory’ and McClelland’s ‘Acquired Needs Theory’ in order to understand and relate the issues about the employee’s workplaces and the relationship among their co-workers, from the data we acquired from them.

After disseminating as much of the acquired information among our team members, we headed our way to prepare for the presentation and the final report. Since the report was just a one page document, it is the presentation which made us to put in some extra efforts. We decided to showcase in the presentation, the exact information or to be more specific the exact wordings which we obtained from the employees during our interview with them.

AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT

If I were to undergo the whole life cycle and come out with a much more efficient analysis strategy, then I would take care of the following issues. Firstly, I would try getting as much information as possible from my initial interview with the manager. Since in the beginning we were of the notion that we would have at least 2-3 meetings with the manager, we shelved some of the questions for our later interviews which owing to our bad luck did not happen. So it is always better to get all the required data at that instant rather than waiting for chances. Secondly, we were almost waiting about a week for a reply from the manager pertaining to our second meeting. Hence the next time instead of just waiting during that period I would straight away start conducting my surveys whenever possible. Since time is an important factor which we need to consider, I would take precise care of it.

CONCLUSION

The organisation analysis module gave me a wider view of what analysis is all about. I learnt that analysis is just about reporting our findings and not arriving at judgements for the same. It also gave me an edge on how to practically implement the models and frameworks in the real world scenarios. I personally feel that if a person is able to analyse something immense and external to him, would surely be able to analyse and learn about him to a great extent by incorporating the same techniques. Hence this module has not only aided me to grow professionally but also personally.

REFERENCES

1. Carrell, M.R., Dittrich, J.E. (1978). ‘Equity Theory: The Recent Literature, Methodological Considerations, and New Directions’.

2. Maslow A.H. (1943). ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review

3. McClelland, D. C. (1975). ‘Power: The inner experience’, New York: Irvington.