Challenges of the Organization: Logan - Case Study Example

Challenges and contingencies Name Institution Executive summary Challenges will always occur in organizations for as long as these organizations are in existence. Challenges may either be exogenous (brought about by factors outside the control of the organization) or the indigenous (brought about by internal clients) and when they affect the business in a negative way, they must be dealt with appropriately. In view of this, this report take a look at the challenge that lead staff quitting an organization, the effects and the outcomes of the same. Then the contingency measure applied are also discussed which include mitigation actions and identification of opportunities resulting from the same. A case study of Logan associates and solicitors, an accountancy firm has been conducted in this report. Recommendations have been offered at the end of the report. Contents Executive summary 2 Contents 3 The challenge 4 The effects from the staff quitting challenge 5 Outcomes of the challenge 7 Mitigation actions 8 Opportunities arising from the challenge 10 Recommendations 12 Conclusion 12 References 14 Barak, M, 2013, “Closing the Gap Between Attitudes and Perceptions About ICT-Enhanced 14 Learning Among Pre-service STEM Teachers”, journal of science education and 14 technology, Vol, 1, No, 1, pp. 2-9. 14 Dalgarno, B, 2013,“Australasian journal of educational technology”, Australasian journal of 14 educational technology, vol.29, no.4, pp.1-46. 14 Introduction Objectives and goals of every business or organization are achieved through a combined effort of all the ream members of the organization (Karakaya, Badur & Aytekin, 2011, p.12). In some instances however, some of the staff in various organizations may feel that they are not getting enough of out of their input into the organization (Dalgarno, 2013, p.3). Most of them quit and sometimes they carry with them very key resources of the business. This presents very many challenges to various businesses where this has occurred. A contingency plan is designed to identify the effects of a particular challenges, the mitigation factors and the opportunities that would be derived from the same. This paper investigates a challenge occurring in an organization. The paper looks at the effects of the challenge, the outcomes, the mitigation actions to take and the possible opportunities that would result from this challenge. To bring out the concept clearly, a typical case study will be used. The Case study is about Logan associates and solicitors, an accountancy firm. The challenge is lead staff quitting the firm and taking key resources with them the effects of the challenge, the outcomes as well as the contingency plans will be investigated here. The challenge In the beginning of the fiscal year, a number of lead staff of Logan associates and solicitors left the firm in pursuit of greener pastures. Two of the staff were partners in the firm and the other staff members were key resource members in the firm. The staff who left were very instrumental in running the business of the firm on a day to day basis. Logan as a services firm operates in a very competitive environment where clients look at the quality of service offered before they decide to employ their services. A number of diversified effects upon this unprecedented and unexpected move were realized. The following discussion shows these effects, the outcomes and the contingency that the firm took to ensure that its operations were not crippled. The effects from the staff quitting challenge The first immediate impact to the firm would be the recognition of the loss of various skilled and highly experienced staff. In an industry like the one Logan associates and solicitors operate in, a very huge proportion of the value of the business lies on the personnel. People will offer business to the company because they believe that the company has the necessary and duly qualified personnel to cater for their needs. In addition, considering it is a company operating in the financial world, the personnel who work in the company will need to be very qualified for their jobs. Gathering enough skilled personnel and expertise as the company has done over the years is a daunting task. This means that loss of the personnel as had happened to the company all at once is a very huge blow to the company. The employees of the company constituted the bulk of the resources that the company had. Reduced production capacities is also another immediate effect of this challenge. Certainly, business would have to go on as usual. However, sadly for the company, the bulk of the work carried in this company is basically very manual. This means that somebody has to employ his or her own intellectual capacity to ensure that work goes on well. The exit of personnel from the company creates an immediate effect of reduced work volumes. The staff who remain in the company cannot be capable of handling all the clients by themselves. They are only capable of working up to a certain capacity. As such, the levels of production will definitely decline. Decrease staff morale results immediately. The staff who remain working for the company will also begin asking themselves some hard questions pertaining to their work culture, nature, environment and remuneration. They will feel somewhat low that their colleagues left them in pursuit of better opportunities while they were left to clear the mess and fill in the vacuum created. This pushes their work morale to a low scale. Associated with this is the fact that these employees will have to be forced to work even harder if they still want to maintain the same production capacity they had when they were all in the firm. This results into these employees feeling fatigues for they have to put in more hours and demoralized. An overworked personnel (especially in high profile service environments like the accountancy field) do not deliver quality work (Varadarajan, 2010, p.120). Moreover, this is worsened if these employee feel that they are overworked and underpaid. They will start thinking of how they can also exit the firm and follow their colleagues. Declined volumes of customers is also another expected immediate effect. In a company like Logan associates and solicitors, each personnel has their own set of clientele who trusts them and who do not wish to conduct business with a secondary party because of the relationship created between the client and the personnel. For this reason, when the lead staff quit, they carried their clients along with them. The immediate implication is that business volumes go down considerably. Clients who are repeat clients especially, have a special relationship with their service providers and most of these clients do not wish to start over again creating a new relationship with new people (Lunenburg, 2010, p.12). As a result of this, they tend to follow their service providers and connect with them on a more personalized level in contrast to connecting with the umbrella firm. This makes it easy for employees to leave and carry along themselves a clientele that they used to serve while working in the big company. Outcomes of the challenge Loss of reputation could be one of the most devastating outcomes of a company of Logan nature. Service companies rely heavily on their reputation in the market. People need to be able to positively identify themselves with these companies. Companies like Logan associates and solicitors need to have extra credit inn their reputation. They need to have a flawless reputation. People will be able to give them business based on their capacity to deliver excellent services. For this to happen, the company must make sure that it employs only the best people are employed in the firm so that they can be able to deliver quality services. The act of lead staff leaving the firm does not do the reputation of the firm any justice. Matter of fact, the exact opposite is what results. Clients will start questioning the credibility of the firm and start wondering whether they are getting value for their money. The effect of employees getting overworked in the firm following the departure of others produces an outcome of lowered staff morale, low production and most of these staff will also be thinking of quitting the firm (Elbanna, 2009, p.12). Mistakes will be made when the employees are overworked and underpaid. Mistakes in such a field could be very costly and they are to be avoided at all times. However, this would be very much inevitable if the firm does not take measures to curtail the same immediately. The competition for the business will also increase. It is to be assumed that the personnel who quit the Logan firm went ahead to form a competing business. This is not a good sign for the Logan company at all. It has been noted that the employees who quit were actually the lead staff in the company. The implication in this case is that these employees will form serious competition to the firma as it is. The departed employees understand all the marketing strategies that had been utilized at the Logan firm and they will definitely use this piece of information to create a competitive advantage for themselves. Organizational restructuring is also another outcome from the challenge discussed in this paper. Due to the gaps existing in the firm following the departure of these people, the management of the firm will have to reorganize their business so they can try to cover the loopholes created. This will result into people doing jobs that were not originally designed for them or roles that were not originally in their job description. This results into organizational restructuring in the long run. Mitigation actions Having understood that challenges are imminent in business, various management personnel in the business should try their best to ensure that they find ways to mitigate the effects of their actions. There are several actions that could be taken to mitigate the effect and hence change the outcomes of the challenge described here. These actions are described in the following paragraphs. Firstly, they need to include the employees on the board when they are making their decisions. When the employees are included in the process of decision making they feel that they are part of the organization and they do all that they can in their own individual capacity to ensure that the overall goals of the company are attained (Conteh, nd, p3). Letting the employee in the process of decision making makes them own the system and they do all they can to ensure that the goals and objectives of the organization are realized. They feel that their contribution is appreciated and that their opinion is highly valued. This makes them work even harder in a bid to realize the goals of the organization. Opening up avenues of communication is another form of mitigating action. The communication channels in an organization should be enhanced. Lack of proper communication channels in an organization could result in a challenge as the one described in this case. Logan associates and solicitors could have had issues in their communication and this could maybe have been one of the reasons that led to some of the workers quitting. In a business formation, communication should be open, both along vertical lines as well as horizontally within departments. People should not feel as if there is a barrier between them and their superiors or juniors or their fellow colleagues in their specific departments (Sihab, 2012, p.2279). More so, the issue of bureaucracy should be abolished. This allows information to be passed faster between these people in the organization and emerging issues can be dealt with faster. Organizations should handle employees issues professionally and promptly. Any organization that is involved in the process of production of goods or offering of services like Logan associates and solicitors must have some issues with their internal customers, that is, the internal staff of the company. How they solve their issues and problems is what determines the course of action the organization takes. The internal customers need to be treated in the same manner as we treat the other customers. This is because these internal customers are the pillars that support and the adhesive that hold the organization together. If they are satisfied, then they will also go out of their way to ensure that the other external customers are also satisfied. In view of this, it then becomes important that companies and firms such as Logan initiate policies and contingency plans to ensure that the issues that arise within the organization are resolved amicably so that they do not disrupt the course of business. As another mitigation action, Logan associates should ensure that they pay a good salary to the staff members in the firm according to the industry standards. A well paid staff will always have the morale to work harder. Good payment also reduces issues of employee turnover in firms (Wilson et al 2008, p.9). At a time like this when staff have quit the company, the last thing that the company needs is having more employees leaving the firm for a variety of reason which include reputation preservation and production. Good payment will also attract other well qualified personnel into the firm. The concept of good pay goes hand in hand with the concept of career development. If the employees are sure of their own career growth in the firm, they will have a good reason for sticking around. Changing the firm’s strategy should also be another form of mitigation action to be taken by this firm. When organizations find that in some way a certain strategy does not work, they need to find a way to redefine or change the strategy completely. The fact that the lead staff of the company made and exit from the company implies that there could be a loophole in the strategies of the firm. It shows that there is a problem with the long run strategies. To ensure that a repetition of the same does not occur in the future, the management of the firm should create and adopt a new strategy immediately. In addition, this new strategy should be formed with the opinion of the employees taken into consideration. Opportunities arising from the challenge Rebuilding and adding quality to the customer service department could form one of the opportunities arising from this challenge. As noted severally in the preceding sections of this paper, the issue of quality in customer service can never be re-emphasized. A firm like Logan associates and solicitors thrives on its capacity to deliver quality services to their clients. If they are not in a position to do this, then they lose their clientele and consequently the business. The challenge presents a very fair opportunity for the firm to be able revamp their customer services department and provide higher quality services. Even though regular clientele may be concerned by the departure of lead employees, most of them would stay on if they can be assured of excellence in the service they demand from the firm. It is therefore the role of the firm to identify this opportunity and deliver and surpass the expectations of these clients. Change and increase of channels of delivery would also be another opportunity. The firm may take this challenge as an opportunity to increase the channels of services that they offer in the firm. The firm management may decide to explore other levels of services that fall along the financial and accounting field. This could be done as a way of cushioning the firm against future ripples brought about by a challenge of the same magnitude. Opening up new avenues for business will not only lead to more revenues resulting from increased production but even the reputation of the firm will heighten drastically. The firm may also have the chance to take this opportunity and conduct management restructuring in the company. it could be possible that poor management and poor management policies have been the cause of the challenge. Following the same, the management of the firm would now have the opportunity, and the capacity to change all this through changing the management system. The firm would have the chance to bring in new people as well as promote other people from within into posts that have managerial capacities. This could prove to be a classy move as this fresh management would come up with fresh ideas on how to deal with issues such as this in the future and more importantly, how to prevent the occurrence of the same in the future. The challenge may be the opportunity that the firm has been waiting for to be able to identify the weaknesses as well as the strengths that exist in their system. It’s important to be able to know of the business’s weaknesses and strengths so that the management of this specific business could work on the weaknesses and improve on their strengths. The firm management will also have the chance to change their management and marketing strategies. Understanding that the new competition could be more intense because these employees know of the strategy that Logan associates use, it would be important to take the chance to come up with new strategies that would ensure that the firm still retains its competitive advantage in this market. Creation of new strategies makes a firm be in a position to ward off competition (Barak, 2013, p.3). Recommendations From the analysis conducted above, a recommendation has been made here. Logan associates and solicitors should make sure that they create a strategic monitoring team that will be mandated with the task of making sure that all the objectives they have designed will come to pass and they will give information pertaining to the development and in areas where they divert from the set path. Conclusion The above discussion has provided an in-depth outlook into a challenge that occurs in an organization, the effects created by this challenge, the outcomes from these effects and eventually the opportunities that can be identified from this challenge. It has been shown here that what matters most in an organization is how the management is able to deal with the challenge that faces them. The way they deal with the challenge determines whether their continuity is maintained or not. To do so, the paper has taken a typical example of an accountancy firm, Logan associates and solicitors to explore how the effect of lead staff quit has on the firm. The effects and the outcomes of these effects have been shown to be in adverse including loss of revenue, increased competition and even loss of reputation as a competitive business. Various opportunities have been identified in this challenge as has been highlighted in the paper. References Barak, M, 2013, “Closing the Gap Between Attitudes and Perceptions About ICT-Enhanced Learning Among Pre-service STEM Teachers”, journal of science education and technology, Vol, 1, No, 1, pp. 2-9. Conteh, N, nd, “The Hypothesis Testing of Decision Making Styles in the Decision Making Process”, Journal of Technology Research, Vol, 1, pp. 1-17. Dalgarno, B, 2013,“Australasian journal of educational technology”, Australasian journal of educational technology, vol.29, no.4, pp.1-46. Elbanna, S, 2009, “Determinants of strategic planning effectiveness: extension of earlier work”, Journal of Strategy and Management, Vol, 2, No, 2, pp.175 – 187. Karakaya, C, Badur, B & Aytekin, C, 2011, “Analyzing the Effectiveness of Marketing Strategies in the Presence of Word of Mouth: Agent-Based Modeling Approach”, Journal of Marketing Research and Case Studies, Vol, 20, No,11, pp.1- 17 pages. DOI: 10.5171/2011.421059. Lunenburg, F, 2010, “The decision making process,” National forum of educational administration and supervision journal,Vol,27, No, pp.1-12. Sihab, M, 2012, “The Study on Strategic Planning and Organizational Performance in the Regional Government Owned Banks in Indonesia”, International Journal of Humanities and Applied Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 2277 – 4386. Varadarajan, R, 2010, “Strategic marketing and marketing strategy: domain, definition, fundamental issues and foundational premises”, Journal of the Academic Marketing Science, Vol, 38, pp. 119–140.DOI:10.1007/s11747-009-0176-7. Wilson et al 2008, ‘Services Marketing – Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm’, 1st Ed, McGraw Hill: London Read More