Dilemma Faced by a Manager
There are several individuals out there who you can never believe to be a part of any kind of organisation. However, you will be surprised to know that there are several people who are a part of these organisations providing the much essential labour by acting as the volunteers. In fact, even you yourself might have been a volunteer at one of these homeless shelters or maybe at a habitat built or for some other organisation which is a non-profit one. Now what if the organisation that you are volunteering for is a profit one? You are volunteering at a for-profit organisation where you are asked to spend some of your time at the computer and provide useful answers to some of the questions asked by the customers with respect to technical matters such as programming high-definition television or maybe setting up internet to the home network.
You will be providing useful answers to these customers without getting paid in any form. It has been discussed and betted by the start-up the companies, large corporations and the venture capitalists that these helpers or volunteers as they are called will provide to be quite the help transforming the entire category of the customer service. Mark Studness, the director of the e-commerce unit of Verizon has been quite familiar with the websites where volunteers offer their help at answering questions and providing tips.
He has taken it a challenge to make use of this potential resource and use it in the field of the customer service. His solution consists of those people who have given the finest answers to these techs based questions in the public forums. Now the question which has arisen is how the company managers will deal with structural kind of challenges as offered by this unique and different type of arrangement.
What do you want to do?
A hearty and warm welcome to the universe of design and organizational structure of the present twenty first century! Has it ever occurred to you that there are many work tasks which are actually done by people who are other than the very employers of the company and that too for free of cost? This is exactly what Verizon and mark studness have tried to do and with excellent result. They have done quite some experiment and have tried on some new things and ideas which has worked quite well for them as well their business. The company has also sponsored and opened a customer service site where all the volunteers answer the questions asked by several of the customers and clients of the company and it has been quite productive thus saving quite a lot of costly calls to the Verizon call centre.
The previous chapter has dealt with some of the fundamental concepts of the basic tools of organisation including the very six blocks of the organisation’s structure namely, chain of the command, departmentalisation, span of control, work specializations, formalization and decentralization. This particular chapter will deal with the contemporary part of the organizational design. This is quite important as this aspect is how the organizations adapt themselves to the current environment.
First we will go through some of the contemporary organisational designs and then we will explore and start our discussions on how these organisations are coping with the demands with the help of work efforts in collaboration, though a work force which is contingent and also through an arrangement of work which is extremely flexible. The chapter will conclude by discussing about all those challenges which are faced by the managers with respect to the organizational designs.
Links of Previous Main Topic:-
- Management and organizations a managers dilemma
- Understanding managements context constraints and challenges
- Managing in a global environment
- Managing diversity
- What is social responsibility
- Managing change and innovation
- Managers as decision makers
- Foundations of planning
- Strategic management
- Basic organizational design
Links of Next Fundamentals of Management Topics:-
- Contemporary designs of organizations
- Organizing for collaboration
- Flexible work arrangements
- Contingent force of work
- Todays organizational design challenges
- Adaptive organizational design
- Case application 1 drivers seat
- Case application 2 the virus hunters
- Chapter eleven summary by learning outcomes
- Preparing for my career adaptive organizational design
